From reading I would question why keep the d20? Having two dice behaves in the bell curve manner that is then odd/hard to re create in a d20. Does keeping the d20 give us something that 2d6 cant do?
A main concern for me is compatibility with ICRPG CORE. You should be able to read the hack, then grab CORE and start playing with minimal conversion. Because of this, keeping the d20 keeps the modifiers and so you don’t need to edit LOOT to compensate for the shorter modifier range that PbtA games usually rely on with the 2d6 dice rolls. I lament the loss of the precious partial-success oriented bell curve, but it’s not a big deal at least in paper.
- Starting Stats from Dungeon World. Along with levelling up.
Leveling up is good! I’ve been personally using “7+lvl exp = lvl up!” for a long while and you can easily convert DW’s playbook moves into cool tiered LOOT!
- Take the ICRPG effort mechanic and thus time aspect with it.
I’ve thought hard and deep about this, and in the end I realised that the core gameplay structure of a PbtA game relies too much on the “natural flow” of conversation which contradicts ICRPG’s phylosophy of “always go in turns”. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t have an initiative-like mechanic to keep such conversation in an ordered fashion. If I had to implement one, I would go with a popcorn approach: A die roll, the GM or players themselves determine who goes first and, after that player makes a move, decides who goes next until everyone has taken a “turn”. This is optional rule material haha
- Make monsters from ICRPG. This monster is 1H and rolls a d6+2 to hit. (Need to work out armour a bit better in my head)
“To hit” is not something I would translate into this sort of PbtA structure. Remember DW’s Hack&Slash move. You fail to H&S the monster properly, you take damage! As a GM, you can easily do your monster’s damage (deal damage GM move) as a move if your player fails his “I slash him with my sword” risky move. Also about armor, “armor reduces damage taken in a 1 by 1 basis” to me fits perfectly. DW already does this and if you also add the “you always take at least 1 damage” extra bit, you can have ICRPG characters sporting that sweet sweet armor LOOT and stacking up to 10 but still having to stop and heal once in a while. It’s simple, it’s fast, it keeps CORE LOOT as it is. And I playtested it a lot at this point! haha
Also about monsters. I personally think that DW’s approach to monsters is perfect for this. They just have damage, armor, tags, instinct and moves. This means monsters are narrative and simple, and CORE monsters are also super easy to “convert” to that framework as their action structure is already built like monster moves from DW.
- Use abilities and paths from ICRPG as open options for levelling up.
Yes! Also DW’s moves as LOOT!
Just thinking, could get rid of the d4/d8/d12 effort die and use that Adv/Dis with d6s for effort instead.
Yeah you can do that, but again, it makes ICRPG CORE less compatible. Also, the only advantage I see in using d6 only is accesibility (d6 are common dice), but this is a hack for 2 games that already use all of the funny dice so…
1 Hart might need to be 20hp though…?
You see why I praise compatibility so much? haha I want to keep using my ICRPG books with minimal work, but with a core gameplay hook that works like DW.
EDITS: Wording, typos, etc. English is hard lol