OSSR: Risus
Merry Christmas.
Risus is from 1993, which legitimately surprised me while I was "researching" this post, because I stumbled on Risus in 2008, along the same time as FATE was making waves and 4E was coming out. Slapping FATE's aspects onto other systems was popular at the time, so I started running Risus + Aspects as my default system for stupid one-offs. Eventually we dropped aspects entirely because they weren't pulling their weight next to Risus's cliches. Which brings me to the first of what will be two recurring points:
Risus is better than most other systems.
The first homebrew system I released into the real world (which I will not be linking here) started as 4E's combat system (its only good chapter) with Risus bolted on as a skill system. I quickly found that cliches-as-skills basically works, but Xd6 produces stupid results. I switched to Xd6-keep-highest-3 and it was okay. This was pretty damn easy, and if you backport it onto Risus it's a significant improvement. Which brings me to the second of my recurring points:
Risus is kind of garbage.
Which is, I think what you're all here for. Let's start from the intro paragraph, which I'll quote in its entirety.
This is a good summary. No prep, turn your brain off, play some Risus. It works as advertised for these purposes. It does not "work just as well for serious play" due to specific rules that I'll mention as we go. Taking 20 seconds to create a character is an exaggeration; you can do it but it takes a rare kind of self-confidence. Regardless, Risus's character creation is still actually too fast, which is one hell of a feat. I borrow FATE's practice of making the players pair up and decide what previous adventures their characters have been on, purely to stall for time while preparing an actual adventure.Risus wrote:Risus is a complete Role Playing Game (RPG) designed to provide an "RPG Lite" for those nights when the brain is too tired for exacting detail. Risus is especially valuable to GMs assembling a quick convention game, or any late-night beer-and-pretzels outing. While it is essentially a Universal Comedy System, it works just as well for serious play (if you insist!). Best of all, a Risus character takes about 20 seconds to create!
The summary also assumes you already know what an RPG is, and later it'll assume that you know what a GM is, because this operates under the GM + Players model but never bothers to tell you. It's pretty unlikely that your first exposure to RPGs will be this document, so this isn't the end of the world, but I actually would throw this at newbies if it defined its terms and had a proper GM's section.
Next is a brief set of credits, with most of the weight on games I've never heard of. I always consider that to be a good sign; the games I've heard of all suck so maybe these are good.
This chapter title has an exclamation point, because Risus. Maybe because the authors were excited that we got here in only two paragraphs; that is pretty exciting.Risus wrote:Character Creation!
Like many systems, Risus trips over itself trying to explain how to create a character in terms of mechanics that it hasn't explained yet. Also, to prove it really is an RPG, it makes a factual error about its own mechanics in the very first sentence.
The explanations here are awkward; you get 10 dice split between cliches with up to 4 dice in any given cliche, but we need two paragraphs to explain that. On the flip side, the examples given are excellent and completely carry the system; the example block for Grolfnar The Viking is almost enough by itself.
If I gave you only that and told you it's the stat block for a simple RPG, you might guess the rest of the system right there. Also the fact that he's a womanizer means a modern audience probably has a different opinion about this guy than they would have in 1993, but we're all still picturing the same guy, and in that sense it's timeless.Risus wrote:Grolfnar Vainsson the Viking
Description: Tall, blond, and grinning. Likes to drink and fight and drink and chase Viking women and fight and sail the high seas and raid. Wants to write great sagas about himself.
Cliches: Viking (4), Womanizer (2), Gambler (3), Poet(1)
The dice mechanic is burried in the character creation chapter, and if you blink you might not notice. You use Xd6 for everything, where X is the number in your cliche. This has the amazing property of not quite technically pushing anyone off the RNG until someone's at (6), but still making it less and less likely that you can touch the numbers output by higher-cliche characters, and still being remarkably swingy. This dice mechanic is one of the reasons Risus is only appropriate for comedy games. I'd drink here, but I actually wrote this paragraph last (because I blinked, and didn't notice that this is where it explains the dice mechanic), so I'm out of booze. But I won't be next paragraph; it's like time travel.
On to the system, which is why I actually wanted to talk about this thing. It's Xd6, meet or beat target number. Target number is pulled out of the GM's ass based on how well it matches your cliche. The game openly tells you this is subjective:
Also the target number scale is next to it, and it's okay, but could use way more intermediary results, and it's the only thing in the game that's not backed up with a boatload of examples, which it should be, because this is the single most important piece of information in the game, but it has no examples (because Risus is kind of garbage).Risus wrote:This can be subjective, and anybody can try anything: Crossing a chasm by swinging on a rope, vine or something similar would be child's play (automatic success!) for a Swashbuckler or a Lord of the Jungle, easy (Diffulcty 5) for a Pulp Archaeologist, and challenging but definitely doable (Difficulty 10) for a Gymnast, Barbarian, or Thief. Even a Wheelchair-Bound Eccentric Occultist could try it (Difficulty 15, but the wheelchair is lost unless the roll beats a 30!)
Okay, so why are we talking a system based around beating a number the GM pulled out of their ass? Because this is the core mechanic of most RPGs most of the time. In terms of D&Ds, it's 5E's entire skill system, 4E's if you ignore skill challenges (and you should), AD&D's ability checks, etc. In 3E you get precisely nailed down numbers for a variety of common situations, but if you go outside of those or try to twist a skill into an inappropriate useage, you're back to Risus. Also even when you're using the things 3E nailed down, it'll be something like: you can jump this far with a jump check of X, and the length of that chasm was just some number the GM made up, so once you've both consulted the relevant lookup table it becomes a difficulty number the GM pulled out of their ass, just communicated in a novel way.
So all of these systems are basically Risus again. But they also all use way more words and calculations to get there, so it's important to ask what all of that buys you. In 3E's case you could argue that obfuscating the difficulty number behind a codified way of describing the world is valuable (okay). For the others listed: nothing.
Unless you're playing Lasers & Feelings, your system was harder to learn than Risus. What'd you get for the effort? The answer is frequently "jack shit," and that's why Risus is better than most other systems.
Next is a big list of example cliches. It appears to be designed to communicate breadth, to open up your idea of what a cliche can be. Like most examples in this game, they manage to arrange things to have a punchline: in this case the last two examples are:
If we rewrote this today we'd have to add a third one that sparkles.Risus wrote:Vampire (Charming people, sucking blood, turning into mist or bats)
Other Kind Of Vampire (Self-pity, erotic blood poetry, wearing black)
Proper Tools. You automatically have equipment appropriate to your cliche. Good rule, puts in a lot of work. I'd throw it out if I was building an actual system out of a Risus hack, but as long as you're running beer and pretzles pick up games this is exactly what you want. Unfortunately, we spend two whole paragraphs suggesting that the GM can dick you over by stealing your tools, and they get to decide whether you get half dicked or fully shafted by this based on their mood. This is a stupid rule.
I was just talking about how Risus is better than other RPGs because it takes fewer words to get to "roll to beat a number the GM made up" than others. This doesn't mean I'm in favor of every place a system introduces an opportunity for GM fiat. Here we're actually wasting words on making the game worse; these rules are no better than what you'd come up with by winging it, and by having them here and so damn early in the book they're encouraging this kind of dickery.
Combat. Like many general systems, Risus redefines all contests as combat so they can share the same rules. Unlike most of them, it has more than three examples of what this could mean. Good on them. And a massive ew to seduction being on that list.
Also like so many general systems, it's roll vs counter roll, repeated more times than you give a damn about. Plus damage is tracked by reducing your available dice, so it's a death spiral. This is dumb. It's more complicated than "best 2 of 3," which is four words long and a better system, because Risus is kind of garbage.
By the way, I've made mulled wine with too many spices and not enough added sugar, just how I like it. It started as Rook by Corvidae Wines, which is a local red blend that's delicious and somehow getting cheaper every year.
Risus has no initiative system, or any other way to determine who goes first, but there's still a first-mover advantage. Whoops, good thing I just told you what I'm drinking.
Inappropriate Cliches. This is a system where if you don't have an appropriate cliche to participate in a combat with, you can suck the scenery or chew the GM's cock (wait, is that the other way around?) to use an inappropriate one. Not only does this let you use your best cliche, you also deal triple damage with no risk in return. So this is mechanically optimal by a long shot. Get used to milking the giant cow.
This rule is only really appropriate for comedy games, and it's pretty poorly constructed anyway. You'd do just as well to pretend it doesn't exist (because Risus is kind of garbage). By the way, something in this wine is making it so I can't feel my mouth; I think maybe the allspice? Or maybe it's the cloves. Whatever it is, it's very pleasant.
We also have part of the advice for how to determine allowed cliches shoved into this section in a hamfisted manner.
Teaming Up. This is two different sub-systems. You can have a grunt-squad where 700 rat skeletons act as a Skeletal Rat-Horde(7). Good thing to have rules for, often overlooked. But that example number of 7 is bonkers and could easily be a party wipe on its own. My wine also has cardamom and star anise in it; they're pretty low on the list of standard mulled wine ingredients but half the point is that your house smells delicious when you make it, and anise is really a star there (eh? eh?).
Player-Character Teams are the longest sub-system in the game and they're fiddly and dumb. One of you does the main thing, the rest contribute only the 6s you roll, so you can all work together to take down an overpowered thing, but it'll be even more swingy than normal. You can receive double damage and roll double dice next turn, or if you can't get your shit together you can do needless extra rolling to assign damage to your team randomly.
This doesn't fit into the system at all - it has actual tactical choices (but not good ones; they can all be solved by number crunching) and doesn't lean on making shit up. It's like it came out of a parallel universe where Risus has actual rules, and meshes awkwardly with the rest of the combat system. It's also mechanically optimal if your GM likes to throw one big monster at you, so get used to it. I've never actually used this rule; it'd take longer to explain than the entire rest of the system. I used pears instead of orange peels when I made this wine, because that's what I had handy. Didn't work as well.
Conflicts That Aren't Combat. This game has opposed rolls. They're down here in the dumpster of page 4 for some reason. I drank enough during the last section, so you're not getting more description of my wine right now.
When Somebody Can't Participate. If anybody would feel left out of the combat, give everyone 2 extra dice. It's a nice thought, but doesn't actually accomplish anything because the dice mechanic is fucking Xd6 and you're not rolling high enough to matter. You can donate dice to the person with a relevant cliche using the teams system, but then we're back to where we were before we added pitty dice, so I don't know why you bothered. Similarly, I just tried eating one of those wine-soaked pear slices, but it wasn't as good as just drinking wine in the first place.
Character Advancement. If you're using your Risus characters for a second game, they should advance straight into a real system. Maybe replace its skill system with Risus if you want some continuity, because Risus is probably better than its skill system anyway.
If you want to actually use the characer advancement rules as written in the system, you instead make a roll with each cliche you made significant use of, and if it comes up all evens you add a dice. It's a cute way to do diminishing returns; your advancement chances go from 50% to 25% to 13% to 6.3% as you go up the ladder. But rolling at 6% chances is way to swingy for a permanent boost to your character's stats, this is even stupider than OD&D ability scores. I finished my wine so I have no more description.
We're four pages in and all that's left are advanced options, so we're going to call this a post.
