The Misadventures of Hareng Rouge

I’ll be working my through picking and customising a number of components of for the Chassis system rule-set table-top role playing. By component I mean a group of rules, mechanics, procedures, processes and game-loops that do a thing in a table-top role playing game.

So far I have the following in mind.

Characters

What makes a character a character and how do we measure and describe that in a way that is both mechanically and diegetically useful?

Attributes – the basic ability scores and other more or less permanent aspects of the character, their species or class if you are using those, size, speed, how hard to hit, how hard to injure, how many injuries they can sustain. That sort of thing.

Skills and Abilities – (already I can see that words like abilities and attributes are going to be a source of unproductive debate) – things that the character can do, or with a hat-tip to the OSR, do better than others. What have they learned? What powers have the gained? What forces can they control?

Progression – the rules and structures used to measure when and how a character gets better. How and when do the attributes and skills and abilities improve? Why do they improve?

Roleplay – how the rule-set governs how characters interact with the fictional world.

System Rules

How does the system turn intention in to resolution? How do we go from “My Character would like to do X” to “X has been attempted and the outcome for my Character was Y?”

Resolution mechanics – how the system determines which uncertain outcome has come out.

Game-loops and procedures – how the system structures cycles of decision, action, re-action, resolution.

Rules vs Rulings vs Mechanics – how the system determines how to manage or constrain ambiguity about which rule or process or tool to use in a given situation.

Pillars of Play – what are the characters and players doing as they move around the fictional world and do the different ways they move around different types of environment need different sets of game-loops and rules?

Sub-systems

How does the system deal with specific types of game situation? Which in turn tells you what the system is about but also implies something about what the system finds hard to delegate to the player.

Examples include

Combat systems – how do characters fight?

Magic systems – how does magic work in the fictional world?

Specialist systems – how do characters do a variety of specialist or niche things?

Non-combat system – what system, if any, is used to structure the resolution of non-physical conflict? Social combat systems, or reaction roles. I expect my thinking on this will change and develop as I experiment with the system toolkits on offer.