Dudes on a Map

We firmly believe anyone of any gender can opt to be a dude, but if you prefer, you can be a dudette, duder, babe, boi, folk, or other slang noun that fits with your group. Anyone who gives you a tough time about gender or dude-ocity can't play. [revision note: not meant to imply that resisting being labeled a "dude" specifically is a problem]

Dudes on a Map is a TTRPG in the brainstorm phase that has the following goals:

• Enable translating narrative concepts to a tactical board
  • Some people really like things to feel gamey when there's a fight
  • Allows very similar mechanics to stay intuitive while outside of a fight
• 3 results:
  • Ace: You do the thing
  • Match: You do the thing but you lose something or your opponent also does a thing to you
  • Counter: You lose something or your opponent does a thing to you, which prevents you from doing the thing
• 3 status toggles:
  • Impact: The amount you effect your target or challenge
    • Buff/debuff the target's risk through a detail
    • Buff/debuff the target's impact through a detail
    • Or, apply knocks toward defeating the target or overcoming the challenge
  • Risk: The amount of impact your opponent deals you when they match or counter you
  • Chance: A change to your roll's likelihoods of getting each result
    • The amount of the change is written on your character sheet because many dudes have different roll mechanics
  • A GM can always upgrade or downgrade the impact or risk based on whether they think the skill is bogus (spammed, a stretch, or less appropriate) or excellent (clever, cool, extra appropriate)
  • A player can always trade an impact for a risk on the action
    • They can be cautious, reducing their impact by 1 to decrease the risk by 1
    • They can be confident, increasing their impact by 1 to increase the risk by 1
• Details are pieces of the narrative that impact the mechanics of the game
  • They can be cleared by taking narratively appropriate actions
  • Something like tripped can be cleared by spending an action to get up
  • Something like grabbed can be cleared by rolling an action to break free on an ace or match
    • A match incurs risk effects as normal, but the effect cannot be the same or too similar to the one you're clearing
  • Something like cursed can be cleared by
    • Someone rolling an action to bless you, if it makes narrative sense (like, the character is actually very spiritual), transferring a debuffed version of the curse onto the blesser on a match or clearing it completely on an ace.
    • Waiting for it to wear off
  • If the detail no longer narratively makes sense (such as the person making you grabbed being KO'd or knocked away from you), it clears automatically
• Asymmetric characters allows players to play with different roll mechanics
  • Keep it clear enough that the GM only has to care about the Result
  • Translating the roll mechanic to a Result is on the character sheet
  • Shift which aspects of the game are random depending on your dude
  • Use probability analysis to balance the various roll systems, or communicate clearly the effects when that isn't possible
  • Different, but fairly general skills for each dude
• Allow players to have different skill mechanics
  • A Surfer dude can chillax, a Punk dude
• Support the following dude archetypes:
  • Greaser?
  • Surfer (the classic 2d6)
  • Punk (d6 dice pools, always takes +1 risk and dishes out +1 impact)
  • Goth (3d6, occult, familiars, sad)
  • Sk8r ("dice" use a deck of the 13 spades, rewarded for constant and tricky movement)
  • Gym (d100, stats conceptually amount you lift in kilograms?)
  • Frat (in a himbo way)
  • LARPer (in a fantasy d20 way)
  • Scoundrel (in a Blades in the Dark way)
  • Tough (in a Panic at the Dojo way)
  • Hobbiest (in a Legend in the Mist / :Otherscape way)
  • Chrome (in a Shadowrun way)
  • Kiddo (an easy-mode geared toward allowing kids to participate without their character getting hurt and only dealing with chance when they want to, but their character can still gain and lose impact and risk)
• Be a gateway drug for other systems:
  • Blades in the Dark
    • The Scoundrel dude's everything: mechanics, flavor, etc.
    • Risk and Reward (Position and Effect)
  • :Otherscape and Legend in the Mist
    • The idea of story tags and their impacts on rolls
    • The Hobbiest dude's mechanics
  • Panic at the Dojo
    • Action dice for the Tough dude
  • Pathfinder 2e
    • Simple action economy
    • Well-controlled vertical scaling
    • Reduced effect for repeating attacks on a turn
    • Condition stacking and teamwork good
    • Goodbye Reactive Strike / Attacks of Opportunity
  • Shadowrun
    • Chrome dude rolling too many dice for no good reason
  • Flames of the Meta-Dragon:
    • The whole idea of players playing entirely differently but not complicating things much for the GM