Active Exploits, my new goto RPG

I recently decided to try a Diceless RPG.  On acount of it being available for free I chose Active Exploits.  And I've found it to be a lot of fun and really simple to play. the big advantage of no dice is that you can play it any time any where.

I strated a game with my son Saturday night, we made up aesetting using some random tables from Instant game.  and started an adventure.  I gave him the choice of using dice , in which case we would be playing Risus.
In a sligtly ironic twist he rolled a d10 to decide that no we would not be using dice.

His charcter is a pyrokinetic circus preformer.  Who owes the Ringmaste a debt whic he I working off.

So we played until bed time. then on Sunday morning we resumed our game while walking to the shops, something that we could not have done if we where playing a normal dice based game.  And it was still a fun game.  Right now we are in the middle of a battle in which the circus that his character is part of is being attacked by frost goblins.  He just defeated their snow golem but now one of the NPC's is about to be grabbed by two of the goblins.

Either he will have to go after her, or the ringmaster will discover that the stole all the circuse gold.  Either one will lead him to follow the goblins to their lair.

Playing dicelss does present intereting GM challanges, in that I have to be careful with what obsticles I set and keep the consequnces of failure in mind.  The game part of it comes in the form of resource management. Each character having pools of luck, discipline and expirence points to draw on.  There is also the neat feature in the system that you only get a defence total if you say you are defending.  Otherwise getting hit is almost certain.  This serves to bring an element of uncertainty back in.  A character who makes no attempt to defend can be taken downe even if their opponent is less skilled. You can try to do more then one thing in a single turn but doing so requires you to split your effort in some way.

The rules as given have a surprising amount of depth to them.  Quite detailed rules on weapon damage type and armour type, and even rules on sanity for horror type games.

About the only thing I don't like are an optional rule called accented abilities.  The notes say this is new in the 2nd edition and it feels tn me like a poorly conoeived patch that tries to solve a problem I havn't encountered as yet. At the moment this corner of the system feels broken to me so I'm ignoring it.  I also have a few quibbles about the main book being a t6oo vuage in places, but this can be solved by looking throught the rules for soem of BiG's other games, quite a few of which seem to more or less the same game with different die mechanics.  So you ahve genra Diversions which is a roll high 2d6 system, and Iron Gauntlets which uses a d10 dice pool . But all of them use the same terminology, and the same core abilities.

Other than that I'm really liking this system and I expect to playe more of it.  Anytime anywhere. I just have to remember to bring water. I was quite parched after that walk.

The Lost Region

I've started a new Table top RPG campaign with my Boys (aged 8 & 10). As I predicted before we started the story involves kids who go around forcing cute little monsters to fight each other. What we have always gotten stuck on is me actually creating adventures to run. So this time we are doing something a little bit different. In that we are using the Mythic System and its Game Master Emulator.

I'm also getting the boys, well mostly the older one, who is more into Role Playing, to keep a Campaign Journal. For which we are using one of these hard bound note books. I remember buying these books for one purpose or another all the time when I was a Kid. There is just something fun about having such a serious looking book to write in. So far we Have Bio pages on the Characters, there Nemesis (played by Me) and the start of some maps of the Town of Tworocks and surrounding regions (currently a single dot on a blank page).

My Older son also designed a whole Slew of Pokemon based on the Cumberland Games Pokethulhu rule set. I've build a few more that He doesn't know about yet. I was planning on using the Pokethulhu rules alongside the Game Master Emulator but several things got in the way. Firstly after some negotiation with the party pretty well all of the Thulhu aspects got removed in favor of canonical Pokemon types and behaviors.  Secondly the Party expected to have evolutions and legendary Pokemon, just like in the cartoons. Sadly a Xd12 roll sort of under system just does not scale particularly well when you have a range of powers from mouse to deity. So What I did was take the Pokethulhu attributes and translate them into the Mythic system, at least approximately. This also completed the de Thulhufication as we changed sanity to bravery while we where at it.

After the first play session I can report that they translation has worked quite well. And after some early hiccups we got an impromptu game going. Mostly due to me realising that I want yet another book from my bookshelf, and us not being able to find my main dice box (its still missing, but fortunately I have a backup). What happened was:

It is the first day of the summer holidays and the a batch of Eager young trainers are at the Tworocks Pokemon center for their first training bouts. While Hans Granite, the Tworocks Gym leader, is explaining the rules, our heroes see their Nemesis sneaking into a staff only area. They follow with the obvious consequence of a Pokemon battle.  Which our nmemesis won in classic cartoon style.

This would be the point where in the cartoon Ash would go and lick his wounds and start training Pistachio for a rematch. Instead what did my Son do? He had his character punch his opponent.  She wasn't hurt but played it up, getting the attention of the Gym leader and forces our "heroes" to flee to avoid being caught. They did however find out that Sabrina Silver is searching for a Sapphire Pokeball.

This leaves the story our story with three thread open:

1. My Younger son's character wants to travel back to Nova City, where he used to live, but is afraid of wild Pokemon who live around Tworock.
2. Both characters want to Find out more about the Sapphire Pokeball and foil Sabrina's plans. Out of world the players know that she is trying to get into the evil Team Quake.
3. My older son's character wants to journey to the mountains to capture a particular Ice type Pokemon. He just decided that towards the end of the play session.

Since that session ended I've also being playing with PocketMods. So they each now have a PoketMod Lost Region Pokedex instead of a stack of Pokemon character cards. And I'm using a second one to record the special rules that Pokemon use to battle each other using the Injure, Frighten, Trap and Dodge abilities from Pokethulhu.