Many thanks to readers Ash and Shimrod who have taken the time to give me some great feedback on my Ten Dead Rats rules. I’ve made some edits based on their suggestions, and also updated the character sheet, which was missing a space for recording insanity points. Here are the files.
Ten Dead Rats – Third Draft
Ten Dead Rats Form Fillable PDF Character Sheet
Ten Dead Rats Printable PNG Character Sheet
Also, this afternoon kicks off Season 2 of Wandering DMs, and spoiler alert – there’s going to be some news regarding Ten Dead Rats. Some please come join us!
Looking pretty slick! I’m on the hook for trying out a few other systems already, so I’ll get to see you playtesting this on stream before I’ve got any chance to run this, but I could see myself enjoying this game.
That said, I have a few nits to pick:
(whoops, somehow hit a keyboard shortcut to submit that comment when I was trying to C&P these)
-(pg 2) Technically, the equivalent to d20 = 21 (or d20 + stat > 20), not >=20. Clearly, this 5% error will break your game 🙂
-(pg 3) This is very pedantic, but all of the examples in the saving throw table are things the character is trying to resist except for “hanging onto a ledge”. It’s easy enough to figure out what’s meant that I don’t see it being a problem, but I think it’d read slightly better to say something like “falling over a ledge” to match the presentation format of the others.
-(pg 18) Typo in the 2nd paragraph, 1st sentence: “Surgyer”, should be “Surgery” (of course I’d look at that 🙂 )
…the first point should say: “…the equivalent to d20 = 21 (or d20 + stat > 20), not >=20…”. Let’s take this string of errors is a sign of enthusiastic support 😐
“the equivalent to d20 is less or equal to stat is d20 + stat is greater or equal to 21 (or d20 + stat > 20)”
I feel marginally less bad about this mess of comments now that it seems I stumbled onto some interaction between the comment module and math symbols, but still 😐 😐
Thanks for all the great feedback Ash! Rather than dig into the pedantic details of the off-by-one error there, I’ll probably just simplify the language to something like “this is very similar to when we roll 1d20 equal to or under an ability in D&D, but is more pleasingly in line with Target 20.” My point in writing this bit at all is to relate it back to something the reader is used to, because adding the raw stat score to a roll always seems to take folks off guard when I use it at the table.
For the example of “hanging on to a ledge” I already have “falling” in the list, so I may just switch it to something even more generic like “maintaining balance”. The point is to find an example of using it to maintain the status-quo – eg. clinging to a ledge without falling while waiting for one of your friends to come rescue you, as opposed to a sudden event – eg. a huge gust of wind hits you as you stand near the ledge, save to not fall off.
Ahaha, I hadn’t meant my nit picking to be so serious. It was just…well, it was a funny thing to me, and I was thrown into a tizzy unreasonably when I kept messing up trying to make that comment. For something that’s just serving to do a trial run of putting all those rules together, it’s perfectly fine.
Yeah, I feel like “maintaining balance” fits better with the format of the other examples that you’ve got in that table.
Good luck with this!
It was good feedback. The text as written claimed they were mathematically identical, and that’s clearly not true. I just chose to sweep it under the rug rather than deal with figuring out how to be more precise. 🙂