Howdy!
It's been a while, so here's a new pack to thank you all for your patience. Last week's poll asked for a Kowloon style slum, so I've taken it to the rooftops. The pack includes an Ops Brief packed with job hooks, security posture, environmental pressures, etc., as well as 8k HD, gridded, and night vision variants.
Hope you find a use for it in your game, and let me know what you need next.
I'm designing a rules-light fantasy TTRPG that uses a card deck of tables and rules, and I'm in playtest at the moment. One of the areas I'm still not fully happy with is the watch roll system — travel is divided into morning, afternoon, and night watches, and each one triggers rolls for weather, terrain (if the party haven't been there before), and navigation.
The navigation roll is a d6. Roll 3 or under and the party goes off course — another d6 determines whether they end up heading in the complete opposite direction (3 or under) or veering 90 degrees off their intended path (4+). If they go off course they also roll on the mishaps table, since getting turned around means expending energy and resources.
Each watch can also trigger rolls for points of interest, random encounters, and chaos magicks.
My concern is that this might feel like a lot of rolls per watch, even for an OSR-leaning game, and I'm not fully convinced the navigation d6 mechanic is doing enough interesting work — it feels a bit binary right now. I do have a roll generator on the page which rolls this up in one button, but to be honest my main aim is for it to be easy at the table where no screen are being used.
A few questions I'd love input on:
- Is a 50/50 navigation fail chance too punishing for players, or does that kind of attrition feel appropriate in an old school context?
- How do you handle the tension between giving travel mechanical weight vs. it feeling like a slog of table rolls?
- Are there games you've designed or played that handle watch/travel rolls in a way you think works particularly well?
Happy to share more about the system if it's useful context. Genuinely at the stage where outside eyes would help — I'm probably too close to it now to see it clearly. Thanks in advance!
Here's the current mechanics:
https://thechaosttrpg.com/pages/cook-the-chaos-running-a-session#rolls
Illicit Medical & Asset Harvesting Facility | Operational → Lockdown → Blackout
They fix you upstairs.
They take what’s left downstairs.
This facility operates in the grey space between desperation and opportunity. A street-level clinic offering fast, no-questions treatment… backed by a hidden sublevel where cyberware is stripped, organs are processed, and nothing goes to waste.
This is a two-layer location built for tension, discovery, and escalation, with 3 operational states + an Ops Brief with job hooks, escalation states, and more.