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.
Risus Thread (4)
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.
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