Posts on The GUTS+ System

Official PDF Now Available!

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 09:52:00 -0600

After what feels like a full year of edits and tweaks, the GUTS+ System finally has an official PDF rule book in a nice, printable format with custom images and content throughout! Get it from Itch.io for $4.99 to support GUTS+ and its ongoing development!

The document is US Letter size (8.5"x11"), and it contains all of the same information that is on this website PLUS example characters and some extra content like example gameplay and a short letter from me at the end! I am planning to also create an A4 size version, but it will take some extra time to reformat the document. I poured a lot of time and effort into getting the PDF to be the best I could make it on a $0 budget, and I think it turned out really well! It’s by far the best version of the rules to date—all of the text has been combed through and edited at least 3 times in full to remove any typos and add extra clarity (now watch there be 3 typos in the first 5 pages).

If you like GUTS+ and want to have the added bonus of a nice, 2-column format of all of the rules, then I hope you’ll consider buying it! If you can’t afford the price or simply don’t want to pay, then you can still read all the same rules right here for free from any device even if you don’t have internet access!

Be sure to also check back in the near future for the inevitable physical release of the GUTS+ rule book through DriveThruRPG! The physical version will cost $9.99 plus shipping for a 6"x9" softcover version and $14.99 for a hardcover version. Depending on how long I take, I may also include a formatted version of a campaign that I’ve been running on Role Gate for over a year (read along here if you’re interested) that I think is pretty cool and interesting! We’ll have to wait and see, though—I don’t have experience writing campaign books, and I don’t want my magnum opus to be hampered by my first attempt to create such a work.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy GUTS+, and I hope the new PDF version helps you enjoy it even more conveniently!

SKATER+ Released

Fri, 09 Aug 2019 12:00:00 -0600

The first full “official” setting for GUTS+ play has been released in the form of a hack of the system! It’s called SKATER+, and it lets you play as a skater in the fabled Sk8r’s Paradise skate park. You can go head to head against your friends or play as a team against some pre-made skater gangs in customizable skate parks! You can grind rails and shred half pipes all day to prove you’re worthy of being called a Skater Legend!

In SKATER+, you have 6 base SKATER stats, just like how GUTS+ has the 4 base GUTS qualities, and you build your skater to be able to handle certain kinds of tricks. Instead of managing your inventory or health, you manage your Energy and Recovery points, which determines how many tricks you can do before needing to rest. It’s chock full of cliché skater lingo and the example characters are a little bit of an Easter egg reference for kids who grew up watching the same shows I did.

I had the idea for a skate park setting a month or so ago, and then the #RPGenesis 2019 game jam came to my attention. One of the options for the jam was to make a hack of an existing RPG system, so I decided I’d go ahead and hack GUTS+ to make my skate park idea a reality! As I got more into it, it just started working out and getting better and better. I was able to try it out with some friends, and the combo system feels good, the gameplay loop is enjoyable, and the theme is just plain fun. The #RPGenesis jam required a minimum of 5000 words for submitting the game, which forced me to get creative after I finished writing the game rules and resulted in adding some lore and details about opponent skaters. I had a lot of fun with this, and it’s very encouraging for me making some more GUTS+ settings in the future!

If you wanted to, it would not be hard to add SKATER+ to an existing (or new) GUTS+ campaign. Simply make a Sk8r Card for your character and ignore the + on the card in favor of your existing + quality! If you’re starting at a low level or if your characters don’t have much skating experience, distribute 5 points instead of 10 to your SKATER stats, and hit the skate park! The rest of the rules shouldn’t interfere with GUTS+ at all!

SKATER+ is free to download from Itch.io, but it gives the option to pay what you want as well. If you like the game, it’d mean a lot if you could throw a buck or two my way so I know you like it. If you don’t have the money, that’s totally fine! Leave a comment on the page and let me know what you think! I’d love to get some feedback and make the game even better. Either way, I hope you enjoy and that you’re able to become the next Skater Legend!

Inventory and Health Changes

Sat, 29 Jun 2019 14:50:00 -0600

Two big updates just a couple months apart! Don’t worry, though, these ones actually remove some complexity to streamline the whole experience a bit!

The first big change streamlines the way a character’s Inventory works. Previously, it was “Hands and Pockets” but this update removes Hands from the equation because the whole concept, while interesting to me personally, added an unnecessary level of complexity. You had to juggle what hand you might be holding an item in while moving things around, and it was ultimately just a completely unnecessary distinction in the long run. Plus it made keeping track of things on paper that much harder. You also used to have to take your clothing into consideration, for example, wearing a dress would make it so you only had 2 items lots total (your hands) unless you had a bag! That was a huge deterrent for people who wanted their characters to wear the clothes they wanted.

Now, characters always have 10 inventory slots no matter the clothing they wear, and they can use whatever items are in their inventory whenever they want. Similarly, if a character is wearing a bag of some kind, they get an additional 10 inventory slots. Previously with bags, you had to move an item from your bag to a free hand to use it, but now bags are just an expanded pool for your items to be in and can be used no matter where they are. Lastly on the Inventory side, this update removes the concept of “Bundles:” previously, items in your pockets did not stack, so if you wanted more than one of an item, you had to create a “bundle” of that item to save space in your inventory and to use an item in a bundle, you had to have a free hand/pocket slot to separate it from the bundle before you could use it. No more! You can simply add a counter of how many of an item you are holding and use it as you need it!

The second big change simplifies the Health system a bit and adds a rule for protective clothing and accessories. Before, the Injury chart had different spots to mark injuries for each part of the body plus a 10-slot bar for “Strain,” but now the spots have been removed, opting to simply mark up to 2 Injuries on the chart itself before it becomes unusable. This change comes with a general shift in how Injuries are received because they are now much more dangerous than they were before; Status Conditions (formerly Status Effects) now play a much larger role in your character’s current condition. If your character is hurt but not in a way that could lead to loss of the body part, they might gain a status of “hurt” instead of getting an Injury. I believe that this simplification will make it a little bit easier to jump in with as well as more interesting to role play.

Along with this change comes the removal of “Strain,” which was a frankly unnecessary “tiredness” mechanic originally. Now a status condition of “strained” will only matter if your character uses the Optional Magic System. If your character has strained themself through strenuous activity, they will now simply be given a status condition to indicate the exhaustion.

These changes come with updates to each of the rule books and also the character sheet itself. You can always get the character sheet here:

Download the New Character Sheet!

but if you want the previous one so you can follow the more complex old rules, you can use this link instead:

Get the Old Character Sheet

We hope the changes to the rules help make GUTS+ even more enjoyable to use!

Experience and Combat Changes

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 13:50:00 -0600

This one’s kind of a biggie that changes certain aspects of gameplay a bit, especially the change to combat. Continue reading to learn more!

I recently discovered a conflict between the rolling doubles mechanic and the learning experiences mechanic: if someone has a level higher than 1, then they have the possibility of never earning learning experiences because a majority of negative impact rolls (1) causes a character to get a learning experience point. The problem is that you can choose to roll bonus dice for each double you roll, which means that you can always modify a negative impact into a more successful roll, which prevents you from getting learning experiences. While it’s possible to skip the bonus die, I feel that the majority of players would rather not have the negative impact failure than they would like to gain learning experiences.

To remedy this, I have updated the rules to prevent double 1’s from being allowed to roll doubles. I also updated the assisting to specify that 1’s are able to create bonus dice when another player tries to help, just to ensure that if someone’s helping, you can still avoid negative impacts. I had a lot of different possibilities that I could choose between, like subtracting arbitrary values or replacing die values, but I ultimately landed on this one because it feels like the easiest option to remember.

I also realized that higher level characters have the possibility of getting significantly more experience than lower level players, so I updated the way experience points are earned. Now instead of earning 1 experience point for each failure-level die you roll in a Check, you instead get 1 experience point if you get at least 1 failure-level die in a Check roll. This way you can only gain 1 experience point from rolls, so the scale remains the same as you level up. I also added a section to the GM handbook encouraging GMs to award experience points whenever players do something difficult, which should offset the decreased rate of earning experience points.

Finally, the biggest change I made is to the combat system. Before, it worked as each player taking turns based on how well they rolled their Gumption, but this can lead to some boring stretches that don’t make much sense in the context of the story. I’ve changed this to what I’m calling a “free-for-all” system where fights take place in approximately 5-second intervals where each character can take 1 turn at any point. This way, you can introduce more tactics to your fights by choosing when two characters might attack together or deciding to attack last so you can get an immediate second hit at the start of the next round. The only time where a Gumption-based turn order goes into effect is at the very start of combat so everyone can get an idea for how the characters react to a fight breaking out. I feel that this style of combat lends itself a little bit better to the free-form feel of GUTS+ as a whole, and it also allows for a little bit more narrative intrigue.

Leave a comment to let me know what you think! I hope you enjoy these changes and that they end up making your GUTS+ games a little bit more interesting and fun!

Sample Situation Now Available

Thu, 11 Apr 2019 11:50:00 -0600

I’ve been wanting to write a sample scenario to include in the Game Master’s Handbook for a long time now. It’s always easier to get into a role-playing game when you have a sample of what a scenario might look like and see what your players should have to deal with. Well, I’ve finally taken the time to sit down and flesh out the first one-off session I ran with my friends and put it online for anyone who needs help coming up with a situation for their first game!

The situation is a science fiction setting that takes place in zero gravity. Your players are the crew of a supply ship returning with essential supplies for the asteroid colony they live on. They are awoken by an alert about pressure loss in the cargo bay, and are tasked with figuring out what’s wrong and solving the problem while still being able to make it back to their colony on schedule! It includes all information about the scenario, maps of the ship, and 5 roles for your players to choose from with pre-defined Qualities and a unique tool for the role.

The sample situation is free to use and modify under a CC-BY-NC-SA license, so check it out if you’d like an example one-off GUTS+ session! I hope it’s helpful and (if you use it) enjoyable for you and your players!

Site Changes

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 15:20:00 -0600

I recently discovered a new style framework that I fell in love with called Picnic CSS. Previously, this website used Bulma for its styling, and while I still love it, Picnic CSS has a significantly smaller file size than Bulma. My recent pet project has been to make the GUTS+ website as small and fast as possible while still looking good, so I’ve stripped out the Google Analytics script for tracking usage, I replaced the FontAwesome library with a customized font from Fontello that only contains the icons I use on the website, I learned how to deliver the site contents in a gzipped format, and now I’ve cut the CSS styling down to about one sixth of its original size! I want this website and its rules to be accessible from as many places as possible with the smallest possible footprint!

In addition to this website change, I’ve added a minimally-formatted offline page that gets downloaded to your browser and stays updated with the most recent rule changes every time you visit the home page with the offline-first power of UpUp. This only applies to web browsers that have been updated within the past couple years (i.e. it needs to support Service Workers), but if you don’t have an internet connection yet you’ve visited the GUTS+ home page since this was posted, you can still read the rules! Try it! Load up the home page, turn off your internet, and refresh the page! If your browser supports this feature, it should load up the offline page.

I hope you enjoy these changes and that they are helpful to anyone who might need to access the GUTS+ rule books on an airplane or in the Himalayas!

UPDATE: April 11, 2019 - For full disclosure, I have added Fathom Analytics to the website running via https://analytics.guts.plus. It is a very lightweight service that tracks user counts and sources and nothing else. If you visit the analytics website, all of the data collected is anonymized and public. I am only using it to gauge interest in GUTS+ so I can know what is most and least used on the website.

UPDATE: June 18, 2020 - I switched out Fathom Analytics for Matomo. It is running on a server in my office at home, and it’s still very lightweight and anonymized.

UPDATE: September 26, 2023 - I’ve changed the analytics to an extremely simple system I developed called TinyStats. No personally identifying information is collected at all, and it’s still exclusively to gauge interest in The GUTS+ System.

Character Sheet Update

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 10:13:00 -0600

The GUTS+ character sheet has been updated to include space for Status Effects! Since there’s no “master list” of effects, I left a space for writing a description of the effect next to the effect name.

I also decreased the size of the Inventory boxes and added some more. It’s up to the player to know how many slots their clothing allows, but in case they’re wearing extra baggy clothing or something, they can now carry everything they need! In addition to this, I made it a little bit easier to show that an item is being held in a hand by making them checkboxes next to the item slot instead of having their own boxes that you’d have to move text around to track correctly. I also added more slots to the Bag section on the section page. That way, even the largest of bags and the most pocketed clothing can be accounted for on the character sheet!

Other than that, the character sheet is basically unchanged, though I did also increase the size of the description areas on the Essence page, too. I hope you like the changes and that they’re helpful moving forward!

Download the New Character Sheet!

Status Effects

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 12:17:05 -0600

A little while ago, I learned about “conditions” in the Mouse Guard Role-Playing Game, and I fell in love with the concept. In addition to me loving them and how they are implemented, status effects are a pretty standard feature of many role-playing games that help players know how to role-play their characters better. Things like “afraid” or “discouraged” or “stunned” or “nauseated” or any number of other things that could affect a character. Because there are so many other ways a character can be affected by situations than just by physical injuries and how daunting a blank page can often be for GMs, I’m going to work on adding status effects to the game. They provide an in-game blueprint for how their characters should be acting in the current situation and allow the GM an easy-to-use negative result if they can’t immediately think of some way a situation could go bad.

The biggest benefit to adding status effects, particularly mental ones, is that it can be a realistic way to add consequences to Negative Impact results for qualities like Thought. Failing a Thought check to try to determine what an item is could make the character think it is something scary, which could add the “afraid” status. And stacking status effects on top of each other can lead to some interesting role-playing results. In addition to layering status effects, I’m also working on how to make them intensify. For example, if your character is scared multiple times, the “afraid” status could intensify into a “terrified” or “panicked” status or something like that.

The biggest challenge to creating status effects, I believe, will be working out what they actually do mechanically. Some may affect rolls, but others like “blinded” or “nauseated” will need to affect gameplay in some other way. I have some ideas for how to accomplish this, but it’ll take a lot of thinking to figure out how to do it well. Now that I’m thinking about it, some status effects may be chosen permanently if you want to play a character with a disability, which could be interesting!

Anyway, status effects will add another layer to the game that will help situations stay interesting, and I’m excited to add them to the rules!

Terminology Change: "Stat" to "Quality"

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 11:03:00 -0600

I’m working on adding a new feature to the game, and I got hung up on the name, which led me to re-think some other elements of the GUTS+ System’s naming convention. From the get-go, the GUTS+ System has aimed to have a somewhat unique naming scheme, from using “Gumption” as the main stat to using “Injuries” instead of “Health”. While reading through the rules again, using the term “stat” for what your character is able to do kept grating against me, so I decided to think about what I could change it to that would make sense.

First, my mind went to “feature”, but as I thought more about it, it didn’t feel right—features are things that come in word processors and cars. Even when it comes to humans, “features” are typically associated with “physical features”, which is patently not what I was looking for. After a bit more thinking, I landed on “quality” because that’s what those stats represent—your character’s qualities. Their gumption quality, their weight lifting quality—the things that make your characters who they are beyond their biographies.

When running the idea past some friends, I got some pushback on the term “quality” because they like to play characters who have flaws, but I still think quality makes the most sense because your character’s qualities in this case determine what they are able to do and how successfully they are able to do it. Flaws, quirks, problems or other things like that should go into your character’s Biography section and instead influence how you play that character.

So in the interest of theming, I’ve gone through and updated every instance of “stat” to “quality,” and I’ve also gone through and updated each instance of “stat point” to “quality level”. It’s not a super important change, but it makes a bit more sense thematically and will help keep things clear in the future.

As usual, if you have any thoughts on this, let me know. I’d love to hear your feedback!

Grimoire Complete

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 15:25:00 -0600

This week, I sat down finally thought through and wrote some rules for using Essence. I’ve had the Essence page up since the beginning, the concept being something I came up with years ago, but beyond it being simply a concept for magic, I hadn’t put much thought into how to actually utilize it in-game. I had alluded to the fact that a skilled Essence user could perform more traditional “magic”, but there were no examples of what that actually meant.

Now, I’ve finally updated the Grimoire book to include pages for how to use Essence in GUTS+ as well as 3 different skill levels and skills for each level. I also fleshed out the concept of an Essence running “hotter” or “colder” into the concept of an Essence’s Aura, which is a randomly-selected trait that allows your character’s Essence to do different things. For example, after growing strong enough, a Hot Essence will allow its user to set things on fire. There is a page for each skill level, Basic, Honed, and Master, and each of those pages lists all the skills possible for each Aura.

I still need to test out these skills in a real GUTS+ game, so I’m sure there will be changes in the future, but for now, I’m happy with what I’ve come up with. Essence is by far the most complicated thing in the GUTS+ system. If you read through the Grimoire and have any feedback or ideas at all, please share them with me! I really want to make sure this is something that will be interesting and fun and not frustrating or difficult.

GM Handbook Update

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 15:20:00 -0600

After thinking about what to include and how to structure it, I finally spent some time writing the Game Master’s Handbook. Right now, it’s not fully featured, but it has at least the basic information, much like the Player’s Handbook. If you want to get started as a Game Master, the handbook contains some guidance on how to do that. It covers how to create a world for your players, how to design a quest, and how to guide what happens to your players as they play in your world.

I intend to expand upon the GM Handbook as I have time to include things like in-depth examples of how to interpret situations, full-featured examples of basic worlds you can start with, and even example characters and scenarios to build upon for your own games!

If there’s anything else that you’d like to see in there or that’s unclear or confusing, go ahead and leave a comment and I’ll work on improving it!

Character Sheet Update

Sun, 21 Oct 2018 16:17:05 -0600

Over the weekend, I spent time updating the character sheet to a much nicer, editable version. Originally, I had just built the sheet in HTML, but that came with a lot of limitations and made it difficult to output into a nice, printable format. This time, I created the sheet pages with a vector graphics program called Inkscape and spent hours painstakingly laying out all of the editable fields and checkboxes using this extremely user-unfriendly PDF creator called Scribus. It took forever, and it tested my patience to the extreme, but sometimes that’s just the price of using free software.

In the end, I’m very glad it came out as well as it did! The sheet can be edited using most PDF readers and can also still be printed out if you prefer pen and paper. Check out the new GUTS+ character sheet here:

Download the New Character Sheet!

Or, if you prefer the old character sheet, you can still get it here:

Get the Old Character Sheet

Success Scale and Stat Change

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 17:08:25 -0600

My whole idea for the D6 being the only die in the system stems from the concept of making GUTS+ as simple to play as possible, so I’ve been unhappy with the Success Scale for Check rolls for a while for a number of reasons:

The more dice you roll, the more math you need to do in your head to understand where your roll lands on the scale
The more dice you roll, the lower your probability of getting a Positive Success roll gets
The way stat distribution works forces you into these problems much faster than they should
The “1 die per 3 stat points” concept leaves 1–2 dangling stat points that don’t really affect anything

As I tried to think of a way to address these problems, I realized that the answer lies in the fact that the D6 is the only type of die you roll. Instead of scaling the Success Scale with the number of dice you roll, the success scale should remain the same, meaning that each additional die you roll contributes to the overall success outcome. For example, if you roll 3D6 for one of your stats and the results are 4, 6, and 1, the roll equates to 1 Full Success, 1 Positive Impact, and 1 Negative Impact. The GM can then puzzle out an outcome in their head much faster, i.e. “Well, the Positive and Nevative impacts cancel out, leaving a Full Success, so you succeed!”. Or if you roll 4D6 and end up with 3, 4, 4, and 2, then the result should clearly be a success because more successful dice were rolled than failures.

Ultimately this is just a different way of thinking about the same system, but I think it simplifies the process a lot and should help the GM keep the game going at a comfortable pace without having to stop and do arithmetic.

While I think this change is good for Check rolls, I still think that the Contest roll works perfectly fine as it is. To make things a bit simpler, however, I will be updating the rules for Contest rolls to suggest matching up the dice to show which dice values surpass what dice to remove some of the work, if you are less inclined to do quick arithmetic in your head. (I know I’d personally prefer this method to trusting my brain to do the math right!)

So where does this leave double rolls? I think the best way to handle these bonus rolls is to allow the player to use the value to modify any of their dice for that roll. For example, if you roll 2D6 and get 1, 1, but your bonus roll from getting a double is 6, you can distribute that 6 between the 2 dice, raising the roll to 4, 4 to ensure a full success! Sure, it’s a little bit of math, but I think this is the option that feels the best in the moment.

That takes care of problems 1 and 2, but what about 3 and 4? For those, I need to adjust how Stats work again. I feel like I’m constantly trying to balance Stats because they’re so integral to the game, but this time, I think I’m approaching the best option: decrease stats, increase experience requirements. This was a hard decision to make, because I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like playing with huge numbers to feel super powerful when they reach a high level, but with “simplicity” as the goal for GUTS+, I figured it would ultimately make everything a bit easier to grasp.

Enough stalling: Stats now affect the number of dice you roll directly. You roll 1 D6 plus an additional D6 for each Stat Point you have on the given skill. That’s right, if you have 1 Stat Point in a Stat, you roll 2D6. If you have 2, you roll 3D6; 3, 4D6; and so on up the line. This way, there’s no Stat Points dangling meaninglessly between every 3 points you need to add a die—you just get that many extra dice!

With this change, however, comes the need to ensure characters don’t get too strong too fast. To accomplish this slowdown, I’m thinking of 2 changes: 1) increase the number of Experience Points needed and 2) change how Experience Points are awarded. Increasing the number of Experience Points is easy, but for awarding them, I think I’m going to lean into the “learning experience” concept. Currently, Experience Points are awarded for both Positive Impact and failure, but because of the change to Check rolls posited above, there are more chances to roll dice that have a failing value.

So instead of rewarding Experience Points on a fail/success basis alone, I’m going to leverage the fact that there are 2 types of Experience Points like this: every die that rolls a failure for a Check roll awards 1 general Experience Point (i.e. the type that allows you to create a new stat or increase any stat), and every Check roll that results in a failure awards 1 Stat Experience Point to the Stat you are rolling. This combined with the increased Experience Point threshold will make for a nice balance between pacing Stat growth and making failure less discouraging while also preventing success from becoming too powerful. (Note: Experience Points will only be earned from Check rolls, as Contest rolls are a test of what Stats you already have against the Stats of another rather than an attempt to utilize or improve those skills in isolation—also, it’s way easier to get a Stat Experience Point from a Contest roll and impossible to get a general Experience Point in a comparable way).

It’ll take some time before I’m able to update the Player’s Handbook, but that’s where I’m planning on moving it. If you have any thoughts about this change, let me know! If you think there’s a better way to handle these issues than what I’ve come up with, then please also let me know that! I can use all the help I can get. :)

Update: I have applied these changes to the Player’s Handbook, but I am still open to feedback and ideas!

Body Types

Sat, 28 Jul 2018 12:07:44 -0600

As I was reading through the rules about Health and Injuries again, I was thinking about how different characters can have different body types that might be able to endure different kinds of injuries more or less effectively. For example, a minotaur character might be able to sustain more major injuries to its head but fewer to its skinnier cow legs, or a body builder could potentially take more minor injuries to her arms and legs because they’re so thick with muscles. Or heck, if your lizardfolk character has a tail, the tail should have its own injury marks!

As such, I am changing the terminology in the rules about injuries to refer to the injuries chart as a baseline or default collection of injuries. I’ve also added to the Appearance section of the Character Creation rules a reminder to decide upon your character’s injury chart based on their body type and particularities. Most humanoid characters will have the default injury slots unless there’s a good reason that they should have more. Just consult your GM before adding (or removing) injury slots to your character sheet with pen!

Stat Tweaks

Sat, 14 Apr 2018 15:41:44 -0600

I just playtested the very first version of the GUTS+ system with some friends today with great success! As we were playing, however, some questions came up about how stats were allocated and used. This led me to think about how I could refactor things to make them a little bit less ambiguous.

Regarding allocation, one friend asked if it was possible to allocate all 10 points to just 1 stat and leave the others at 0. While this is mostly a joke, it was indeed possible to do, which could lead to some interesting bugs in the gameplay. To fix this issue, I added a condition that stats were limited to a maximum of 3 points during the character creation process. In order to balance the stats a little bit more, I also decreased the number of points to allocate to 6 and now allow any stat, including base GUTS stats, to be set to 0.

I made some of the biggest changes to how stats are used and how they affect rolls. I’ve been wanting to distinguish stats in GUTS+ from other RPG systems by not simply having stats add or subtract from the values rolled, but in doing so, I originally made the stats hard to distinguish from the base GUTS stats. For example, if a character has a 3 in Gumption but a 0 or 1 in Weight Lifting, why would they ever roll using Weight Lifting? To fix this, I now emphasize the benefit a stat provides on top of the base stat. For example, having a 1 in Weight Lifting would add 1 point to Gumption if you were trying to knock over a tree. This not only increases the stat level you’re working with, potentially adding more dice for you to roll and influencing near successes in your favor, but it also adds a clear focus to your attempt and ties it back to the base stats.

One of my friends is also pointed out that while adding more dice increases the success rate for rolls, it also decreases the positive impact rate nearly as much as it doe the negative impact rate. To remedy this, he suggested adding a feature that allows you to add an additional die roll’s value to your roll whenever you roll a double. This increases the likelihood of positive impact for higher skill levels, which I believe reflects the character’s growth well, while at the same time adding a bit of luck to each roll that adds a more interesting “flavor.”

In addition to these changes, I also published the first version of the Getting Stronger page for the Player’s Handbook, which details how experience points earned and used. It is fairly small, but as I explore and test the system more, it is sure to expand with more details.

For now, thanks for reading, and I hope you like the adjustments!

Experience System

Thu, 22 Mar 2018 14:05:19 -0600

The GUTS+ system is built on the idea that stats should help the story rather than hinder it. I’ve gotten hung up plenty of times trying to figure out what numbers apply to which thing in other RPG systems, and I just wanted something that would be easy to remember and easy to use.

I’ve been trying to think of a good way to do the experience system for the GUTS+ system that doesn’t involve an ever-growing experience points pool to chase, but that still provides a sense of accomplishment for reaching a “level up” point. I was thinking of leveling up each stat separately as you use them like in the video game Final Fantasy 2, but that adds a level of complexity that I didn’t want to have players deal with. Then I was thinking that the system in the video game Paper Mario, where every 100 “star points” gets you a level up, would be nice, because then you’d always know how close you were to levelling up.

A lot of RPG systems have an experience system that forces the amount of experience points you get to increase as enemies get harder to defeat, but I think this just complicates things for everyone. Small numbers, while less impressive, are unquestionably easier to work with and therefore, for my purposes, are better. I’d like to have the “level up” point to be whenever you reach 10 experience points, but I’d have to make getting experience a little bit harder so it’s not just a powerfest. Using 50 experience points might be a little bit more balanced, but my problem with using 50 is that it’s slightly harder to remember than 10 or 100. So instead, I’m going to shoot for 100 experience points and then just give experience points liberally. If that doesn’t work well enough, then I’ll slide back down to 50.

As for gaining experience points, I’m a big fan of the system from the Monster of the Week system by Evil Hat Productions. In their system, whenever you fail a roll, you get an experience point. If you need 100 points to level up, though, I’m going to need to expand on that a lot so it’s not as difficult for players to level up when they need to. So I’m thinking that in addition to always gaining an experience point when you fail a roll, you also get experience for successfully completing things. The GM should be pretty liberal in this: if it was a big task, then 10 experience points is definitely not off the table. (Again, I’m taking cues from Paper Mario with this idea.)

This is a fairly non-mathematical approach, I know, but I think that it will contribute to the enjoyment of actually playing by not causing long pauses for calculating the points out.

What do you think?

Introduction

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 10:28:45 -0600

Welcome to the home of the GUTS+ System, a role-playing game system for everyone! The system itself is still in development, but I believe it is far enough along to actually begin using for your gameplay.

As you have probably read on the home page, the basics of how to play are available for free, but the gist of the system is this: your characters themselves define what they are able to do. That is, your character’s background and personality influences what stats they have, and each character has special stats beyond the base 4 stats that enable them to do even more in the game. Playing the game is as simple as explaining what your character is trying to do and rolling a 6-sided die to determine how successfully they were able to perform the task.

Character stats are the only numbers in the game—rather than hit points and magic points or what have you, you have injury markers and strain. When a part of your character’s body is injured, they may not be able to do certain things as well as they might if it were not injured. So while combat is an option that is available, it is highly encouraged to try to find non-violent ways of handling situations to avoid any unnecessary injuries that would inhibit your progress.

The system itself also encourages a high level of Game Master (GM) freedom and flexibility. Rather than being (just) an antagonistic controller of enemies, the GM is encouraged to root for their players and help them when they get stuck. Die rolls are subjective and the GM is in full control of the outcome unless the player rolls high enough! If a player rolls the highest value, they are able to temporarily command the flow of the story and determine the outcome. In this way, the game becomes a bit of a give and take between the players and the GM, allowing for a more interesting flow.

If you have any suggestions for improving systems, please let me know! I’m always interested in any ideas that you might have that could make the game better.