Work on the homebrew continues. I’m thinking of calling it ARP (Aeon Role Playing), mostly because I really like the word aeon. It’s just an awesome sounding word; hell, even the definition is cool.
Anyways, I finally decided to ditch all the stats. I was already just using four (shamelessly ripped from Tri-Stat), but couldn’t come up with a decent way of fitting them together. Now there’ s just one: Edge. Task resolution is Edge + 1d10 => Difficulty. I decided to ditch the 1d6 because, well, it just wasn’t working. 1d10 looks like it will work a lot better.
Rolls will also be open ended, so if you roll 10, you take 10 and roll again (called exploding). If you roll 1, you subtract 1 from your Edge and roll again (called imploding). If your Edge drops to 0, you botch (read: seriously fuck up) the attempt.
I think I’ve got a good way of using skills as well. Since there’s only one attribute, Skills will be what sets most characters apart in terms of innate abilities. They won’t add anything to the roll, though; they’ll increase the chance of exploding or imploding. So a character with, say, Intrusion +2 can explode off of a roll of 8, 9, or 10 when trying to pick locks, disable security systems, and other intrusion-related things. A character with Might -1 would implode on a roll of 1 or 2 when trying to do strength related things.
I still have no idea how this will work out during actually play (that’s what play testing’s for), and I still need to come up with how advantages/disadvantages will work, and all the other cool things like magic powers and cyberware and what-not (I’m planning to use the system for whatever comes to mind). So here’s hoping d10’s work better than d6’s.