Risus Thread (4)

Do any of you play Risus? For one shots or long campaigns? What are your favorite cliches or houserules to use?
Discuss things vaguely related to the game too if you'd like.

Other urls found in this thread:

risusiverse.com/home/optional-rules/evens-up
risusiverse.com/home/rule-elucidation/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-death-spiral
twitter.com/AnonBabble

I used it to run Call of Cthulhu and Rifts. It was fun.

I think next time I'd add hit points as a separate stat because otherwise you get a spiral of death happening very quickly in combat.

And maybe weapon size modifiers to damage.

> Risus Thread (4) Anonymous Poster (4) Bored fa/tg/uy (3)

Hah, I larfed. But you're over the limit unless you have a deep backstory, and I don't see that.

I ran about a year and a half long superhero campaign in Risus. The Dogooder Squad.

Good times.

Maybe just rule that the first time you lose with a cliche in a given conflict "doesn't count", and you only lose dice if you keep losing? Tying attack to health does make combats end quickly but that's not necessarily a bad thing, if it seems too fast rule that each combat round is a minute or more.

One solution I see is people using the Best of Set mechanic described in the Risus Companion.
Another is the Evens Up mechanic where an even number rolled counts as a success and rolls of 6 explode:
risusiverse.com/home/optional-rules/evens-up
It doesn't fully get rid of the death spiral but it does lessen the gap between die sizes by quite a bit.

Shit, let's see. Will this do?
>Hook: As a Bored fa/tg/guy, he'll always respond to obvious bait and get involved in long drawn-out arguments full of contradictory statements and logical fallacies.

>the death spiral

I dunno man, t's a central part of what makes Risus work the way it does. It's also why you have so many ways to get around it. If you remove it, those mechanics become less useful, or even pointless.

risusiverse.com/home/rule-elucidation/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-death-spiral

Fine article, but it basically recommends hit points.

At least in the games I played PCs generally faced off against more powerful opponents (giants, dragons, mecha), not swarms of inferior opponents. With a death spiral they all got stomped to death almost instantly, in several cases. With a HP system they would have been very wounded but would have been victorious because their cumulative HPs would have been larger than their single opponent's HPs. In other words, the damage of a powerful opponent gets spread across the dice of the PCs, whereas in a death spiral it gets concentrated against the much lower dice of each PC individually.

And since healing is kind of a non-issue in Risus, endurance isn't a problem like it might be in D&D.

>In contrast death spiral mechanics often leave the victor completely unscathed unless outmatched, improving character endurance.

The victor in this case is the monsters, and it wasn't fun since BBEG are always more powerful than any individual in a PC party, that's how things are.

Not that we like death spirals in Shadowrun or other systems either, so that's just preference, nothing against Risus specifically.

I'd considered using a team combo/gang up bonus too (+1 die to everyone on the PC team when everyone does a combo move against a single enemy).

>it wasn't fun since BBEG are always more powerful than any individual in a PC party, that's how things are.

Yeah, but in Risus you're not supposed to just walk up and go toe-to-toe with them in their strongest attribute until one of you runs out of dice. That's what all the dice pumping and swapping cliches and characters stuff is all about, fighting cleverly and using teamwork to bring down an enemy that's too powerful for you to handle in a straight fight.

That sounds more like a problem with an inexperienced group and a DM with D&D mentality.
Try to break free of it.

I used to be really into Risus and built a lot of weird homebrew stuff for it.
Here's an alternate method of reducing the power differential between high and low cliches and making a contest even more random than with Highest Die. I call it the Wild Roll. In a Wild Roll, you only roll two dice (no effect on 1 or 2 dice cliches), a colored and a plain die. The plain die is counted normally, while the colored die is multiplied to fill out the cliche. For example, a 3-point cliche counts the plain die once and the colored die twice; with a 5-point cliche, the colored die is counted as if it were 4 dice.
Thus the colored die can count as 4 sixes or 4 ones, greatly increasing the amount of high and low rolls, and making the outcome very unpredictable.
You could make all rolls wild, or only some rolls depending on cliches or circumstances. E.G., a fencing duel is a standard contest where the most skilled guy is pretty certain to win, but throwing magic at each other is a wild roll because magic is unreliable.

Another bit of homebrew is my Racial mechanics:

Races are purchased like any other cliche. A racial cliche can be purchased at character creation, but cannot be advanced. A racial cliche of 4 dice is full blood, 2 is a half-breed, and 1 is one quarter.

The racial cliche's uses come in two kinds: natural abilities, and cultural skills. Natural abilities are used by rolling the cliche normally, but cultural skills have two applications: An individual who has cultural knowledge of a skill, but is untrained in a proper skill cliche may roll against his racial cliche and take 2/3 of the result.
On the other hand, someone who has real training in the skill may use the cultural skill as a Racial Add to his skill roll, as explained below.

Racial Adds:
Cultural skills are denoted with a slash and number at the end, and can boost a character's skill cliches. The number is the Racial Add for that skill. Whenever you perform a skill for which a Racial Add applies, you may roll your racial cliche, and add a +1 for any die that equals or exceeds that number, and add it to your skill roll.

As an example, orcs have "melee/5," so an orc (2) who had trained specifically as an axeman (3) could first roll on his orc cliche. He gets a 5 and a 3. The five is high enough, so he can add a +1 to his subsequent axeman roll.

You roll once per situation and keep the roll
until things change. Thus if you've entered combat and rolled three ones for your racial add, you'll have to disengage, catch your breath, take a moment to gather yourself up, and then re-enter the fray before you can opt to re-roll your racial add. How long this takes is up to the GM.

Humans don't have to buy their race, and can put those dice elsewhere. To be a half-elf you just take 2 dice in Elf, and keep your other two dice if the other half is human.

Example races:
Elves -- Guardian of the Forest/6, Singing and Dancing/6, Unearthly Skill with (bow/spell/weapon)/5, Nature Spells, Seeing in Star light.

(You select either bow, spell, or a weapon for the Unearthly Skill)

Orcs -- Fighting Everyone/5, Dark Sight, Shrugging Off Blows, Resisting Poison and Disease, Frightening People/6.

Goblins -- Sneaky devil/6, Born to Argue/5, Immunity to Starvation, Aging, Disease, and Poison. -3 to all spellcasting rolls.

I never came up with a Dwarf or Halfling I was happy with.

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I run one shots in it. I make my players design their charatcers without any knowledge of what the others are doing then run something with the mess that comes out of it.
Been a while since I did it so I won't remember all the characters but one game had a transforming spaceship bartender chemist, a gentleman adventurer who was a master in imaginary weapons, a necromancer and his skelly horde, and a postman who had to deliver pizza.
In another we had a closet gay death god who no one remembered so his afterlife was empty, a swarm of disco nanobots, a stupidly powerful psychic cat on the run from the law, and I forget the rest but they were tracking an evil fish that mind controlled the cat into sinking tokyo 20XX into the ocean (hence the on the run) and there was a fight involving godzilla, mecha, and ninja.

Yes, normally a lot of inebriation is involved

Way to overthink a fucking beer-and-pretzels game, guys.

This guy gets it.

>guys

That's all just me. Like I said, I got REALLY into Risus for a while, on a supernerd Asperger's level.

I thought RISUS was all about cajun ninja fighting monsters. How can you make a whole campaign off of that? Doesn't it hit your random quota really early?

Depends on what you do with it. You can use it for crazy, off-the-wall shit, and it's great at that, but there's no reason you can't also do more serious games with it. Especially when you start getting into the more tactical bits of the rules, which are pretty different from other systems. These are the bits which most folks don't even notice, (Like that guy upthread trying to run it like D&D and having trouble with "the BBEG" killing his party.) though that's usually due to drunkenness.
.

I know it's free, but I'm lazy and you sound passionate. What are some of RISUS' interesting mechanics? How can it translate into a long running game in different genres? Let''s say Space Opera, Heroic Fantasy, and Eldritch Horror.

I'm not trying to be a dick or call you wrong, this is legit curiosity. I just like to learn.

My passion for Risus has faded over the past three years or so, but I still remember it fondly.
There aren't many systems that do the "death spiral" thing, as most mimic D&D with its "sudden death" thing. (where you're still at peak fighting ability right on down to 1 HP.) Risus is one that embraces it, and then gives you a host of different ways to deal with it and to use it to your advantage.
In a comedy game, you might use the Inappropriate Cliche mechanic (which gives you an advantage against an opponent when you engage them in a way they can't deal with) by saying "I disarm the space viking using my hairdresser skill!" and thereby gain an advantage against a more powerful foe, but you can use the same mechanic in a more serious game, it just requires more effort and creativity to position yourself to use it.

The classic example I've seen bandied about is in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there's a scene where Indy and his dad are being shot at by a Nazi pilot. Indy's got a pistol, but it's basically useless against the plane's strafing runs. But then dad uses an Inappropriate Cliche: the guy's like Crotchety Historian (5) or something, and he remembers a bit about Charlemagne that comes in handy. He circles around and drives animals at his enemy, in this case a flock of pigeons who fly up into the air away from Dr. Jones, straight at the oncoming plane, wrecking it. Thus Historian beats Pilot, a scene that could be easily be played as silly or awesome, depending on how you go about it.

There are a lot of teamwork-focused mechanics like this for knocking down enemies you're outmatched against. Like pumping a cliche gives you a one round boost, only to weaken you in subsequent rounds. You pump your die and knock the enemy down a peg, then you can tag out and let an ally finish him off. The enemy you couldn't beat gets reduced to one you can go toe-to-toe with, by smart play. You just have to figure out how to get the right cliche in place.

>The classic example I've seen bandied about is in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there's a scene where Indy and his dad are being shot at by a Nazi pilot. Indy's got a pistol, but it's basically useless against the plane's strafing runs. But then dad uses an Inappropriate Cliche: the guy's like Crotchety Historian (5) or something, and he remembers a bit about Charlemagne that comes in handy. He circles around and drives animals at his enemy, in this case a flock of pigeons who fly up into the air away from Dr. Jones, straight at the oncoming plane, wrecking it. Thus Historian beats Pilot, a scene that could be easily be played as silly or awesome, depending on how you go about it.
That sounds like a really neat mechanic.

This right here is my go-to these days.

Forgot file