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Sunday, March 6, 2022

Into the Odd Reaction

 I got to play some Into the Odd last night. Justin pitched the game -- space hobos with massive debt are sent to an alien megastructure to recover lost artifacts. The game was ItO based, but heavily influenced by Numenera and some other stuff, Justin said. 

The system is very similar to The Black Hack, but has some differences that seem, on first play-through, to be improvements (although how much are house rules by Justin, I'm not sure). There are only 3 stats, rolled with 3d6. Hit points are just 1d6 (but once 0 you take damage from abilities). Most checks are rolled on a d20, roll stat or lower, similar to TBH. But there is also a luck die mechanic, a d6 roll high check (maybe that's Justin's house rule?). Also, in combat, you don't roll to hit or to defend as in TBH, you just roll damage (armor soaks some damage). I much prefer this combat system, as deadly as it is, over the constant rolling of TBH. I've mentioned before that I'm not one of those players who plays just to get to roll the dice a lot. ItO is definitely a step up from TBH in my mind. 

Also, I don't think there's a usage die baked into the system, but Justin ended up defaulting to that for our "class" abilities, since the rules didn't really mention things like how many eyeball darts Denis' cybernetics addict character got and so on. 

Oh, and for deciding on character type, there was a 3x3 chart of character types. One axis was your highest ability score (STR, DEX, CHA), the other was your hit point total (1-2, 3-4, 5-6).  I had equal STR and CHA (10) as my high scores, so got to choose between the AI Parasite (an AI using a dead body as a vehicle) and the Holo-Wraith (a living hologram). I went with the holo-wraith, which was again fairly poorly defined. Justin ruled that I was basically a walking hologram with my own force field generator similar to the Doctor in Star Trek Voyager. 

The session was fun, and fast moving whenever the mechanics were called up. Combats were a mix of "just shoot everything as fast as we can" and "we'd better figure out something clever before we die" type battles. Most of the session was done exploring, which didn't really require that many Ability checks. It was definitely worth trying out again. Probably not a system I'd ever run myself, but worth playing if Justin keeps running it.

3 comments:

  1. I'm running a version of it -- Silent Titans -- for my group and I've found a lot to like about it.

    I've also hacked a Usage Die mechanic into it for similar purposes as your GM. It felt a bit extreme for some abilities to have infinite uses, but making them one-shot seemed stingey, so Usage Dice work well there.

    Luck is a standard ItO mechanic, although I'm not sure how I feel about it. It feels a bit basic in play and I think I want something with a bit more nuance. Not sure what yet; maybe an adaptation of the B/X reaction roll, or something similar.

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  2. Played in Death in Space last night. Kinda similar.

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  3. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

    The character gen stuff is often where ItO builds its setting. So the matrix of stat/HP I used came Trash Planet Epsilon-5. Other ItO systems use different ones with the default in the book being a sort of grotty 17th century flavored one. There's a lot of these out there. My favorites being the Trash Planet one, Anna X-66, Weird North, and Into the Bronze.

    The luck roll I used to decide things instead of planning somethings before hand. The Numenera house rules didn't really get much play, but you can basically burn stat points to get bonuses to stat checks.

    What I do like and what I think it shares with B/X is a lightness in the rules that makes it easy to bolt on some things like the usage die or burning points off stats to get bonuses to a roll and it won't break the game in any fundamental way.

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