Carl Sandburg mentioned iron thoughts in one of his poems. Mine come when the insomnia  wears out the part of me that second guesses my ideas.

About ten days ago, I flushed out an idea for a general purpose RPG that used two regular six-sided die and a standard deck of cards. For those that do not have tsu.co accounts, I repeated it again on Google Plus. The idea can be summarized as follows:

Spread ten points across three attributes, Brawn, Finesse, Acumen. If you are a Wizard, set your Magic stat as 1.

The secondary stats are Health and Mana. Health is calculated by (2*Highest Stat)+2nd Highest Stat+Magic. Mana is calculated by your Magic stat + 2.

Draw a card from the deck and mark it on your character sheet. This is your chi or whatever you wish to call it.

For non-magic actions, roll 2d6+associated stat. If the result is 10 or more, the character succeeds! If not, mark a tally under the associated stat. Once the tally marks equal 4 + stat, increase the stat by 1 and erase the tally marks.

For Magic, draw a card and add your magic stat to the rank of the card. Then consult the table below. The first item that applies is your result.

  • If you draw your chi card, the spell is a success.
  • If you draw a card that equals your chi card's rank, the spell is a success, but deduct the spell's Magic Rating from your Mana.
  • If you draw a card that matches your chi card's suit, the spell is a failure, but do not deduct Mana.
  • If you the drawn card's rank + Magic stat is 10 or more, the spell is a success.
  • If you draw a face card, the spell is a success.
  • All other results, the spell fails and deduct the spell's magic rating from your Mana.

That was a week ago. Since then, I realized that I could add other special abilities with a fourth stat and a resource pool to manage it. The ideas started flowing.

Yesterday, Eric Nieudan happens upon this post and decides to build his own dungeon generator with 2d6 plus a deck of cards.

I read over it and instantly love it. So, I did what any self-respecting geek would do, I made a spreadsheet of it for testing. After testing it, I offered some suggestions that tested out well. I'll post a link to the corrected system when it comes available.

The iron thought that will not escape me is that I need to finish this game somehow. In addition to the Wizard character that uses magic, I have a psionic character, a priest character, a thief character, a martial character, and a few more. With Jens D and Eric Nieudan to start the idea, I have something for the referee's section of the game.

This needs to be made and I can't sleep for thinking about it.

Maybe supers would work on this system...

More to come on this and other game stuff in progress.