Depending on the intensity of the scare, the effects of a pass or failure change. Whenever something scary happens, a Student has to take a Fear check this is a straight roll of a single D8, attempting to roll higher than their current Fear. In Growing Pains, the Students can only take so much before they Give Up, and that’s when they’re at their most vulnerable. Obviously, Fear is a big part of a horror game. If their highest Effort Dice roll is lower than the highest Setback Dice roll, then they failed… oh dear. If the Student’s highest Effort Dice roll is equal to or greater than the highest Setback Dice roll, then they succeed at the Test. The numbers rolled aren’t added together you’re looking for the highest number of each colour. When you take a check ( “Test”), the Student rolls a number of Effort Dice depending on his Grade in the relevant Subject ( 3 dice for Good, 2 for Average, and 1 for Poor) and simultaneously rolls a number of Setback Dice equal to the Test’s difficulty ( 3 dice for Hard, 2 for Normal, and 1 for Easy). The dice system is basically a very dumbed-down version of FFG’s Star Wars RPG, in that you roll “good” and “bad” dice at the same time. One colour will represent Effort Dice, and the other will represent Setback Dice. Ideally you want six, three of one colour and three of another. A Student’s Grade in a Subject can be Good, Average, or Poor. These subjects broadly cover the various actions that a Student can take for example, Gym is used for sporty stuff like running, jumping, throwing, Arts & Drama is used for visual perception, acting, impressing people, and so on. Students then have six Subjects Arts & Drama, English & History, Gym, Maths & Science, Social Studies, and Tech. This is where the player can write a few words to quickly sum up their Student, like “jock”, “head in the clouds”, “exchange student”, “painfully normal”, and so. Obviously every Student needs a Name, and a Stereotype, shown on the character sheet ( “report card”) as the Who Is… field. Iscariot’s Academy, and are between 11 and 14 years old. As it was a new system, I went ahead and gave it a new name Growing Pains, for running adventures of adolescent horror. However, I wanted to make a few tweaks to some of the rules, and sure enough I had ended up creating a new rules system. It’s a really fun, easy system, and I was eager to run it. There’s also a stat called Wakefulness as the game goes on, students start becoming tired, and when their Wakefulness reaches 0, they fall asleep and don’t wake up… Task resolution is a single D6 roll 4 or higher means you succeed, with your Grade in the relevant Subject modifying that dice roll.
So instead of Strength 15, you may have Gym B, for example. One thing I like is that instead of your usual RPG stats like Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, etc, the students of Afterschool Activities have Subjects and Grades.
For example, Epic6 is probably the best way ever of playing D&D, but there’s plenty of rules for new wargames and RPGs, and one of my favourites is Afterschool Activities, a rules-lite horror RPG in which the players are students in a dark, creepy school. Their Warhammer and 40k tactics pages are excellent and often hilarious, and there’s plenty of good reading like The Guy Who Cried Grendel, Old Man Henderson, and Humanity, Fuck Yeah!īecause 1d4chan is lovingly maintained by a stable of creative grognards and neckbeards ( or elegan/tg/entlemen as they prefer to be known) there’s also a good amount of house-ruled and homebrewed material. Once you dig through the worrying amount of slash-fics and memes, there’s some really good gaming resources on there for tabletop gaming. And better yet, it served as a test-run (and a very successful one) for an RPG that I wrote! Sort of.
I managed to finally fulfill a long-running goal this week, and I ran a horror-themed one-night RPG session for Halloween.