As many of you have seen already, we've just released the character sheet for our Ruttigers TTRPG.

Many of you may already know this, but creating a tabletop RPG takes a LOT of time, and a LOT of iterations, so we held off on posting updates until we felt the system was solid enough to share.

We are so excited to get started! So here's the sample character sheet, and I'll chat a bit about what we're trying to do with this design down below:

 

 

Most of this sheet should look pretty familiar, we've all used STR, CON, DEX, etc, but I think there are two key things worth mentioning here, Attack Modifiers and Defenses.

The Attack Modifiers are:

 

Martial Attack (Heavier Fighter Weapons)

Occult Casting (Dreaded Warlock Spells)

Rogue Attack (Lighter Rogue Weapons)

Sylvan Casting (Fey Magic Druid Spells)

Arcane Casting (Complex Mage Spells)

Divine Casting (Gift of the Cleric's god, spells)

The Attack Modifiers are used for... Attack rolls! I know, I even surprise myself sometimes, but what's different is that we have several Casting Roll modifiers, for four spell casting classes. Now, not all spells require a Casting Roll, if you drop a necrotic cloud on a bunch of goblins, they'll roll a Save for that, but something like an Arcane Missile uses a Casting Roll.

 

This Casting Roll is made versus one of the three Defenses (FORT, RFLX, WILL), so our Arcane Missile is cast versus RFLX, while an Evil Eye type curse would be cast versus WIll, for example.

So what are the Defenses?

Each Defense is a combo of two Attribute Modifiers, plus 10.

FORT is STR+CON+10

RFLXis DEX+WIS+10

WILLis INT+CHA+10

This creates the Defenses number that you roll against for Cast Spells, and you also Roll Under a Defense number to attempt a Save or Test. 

We dithered around about the Roll Under mechanic, since we weren't sure if people would like it, but it worked so well, and was such a nice nod to old school play, we decided to keep it in for the wider public play test, coming very soon.

Another major benefit to the Defenses, is that it allows us to really streamline our Creature Stat Blocks, so we can give game masters and players a lot of info, with just a few notes.

Here's a Good Ol' Bog Troll for example:

As you can see, this smelly beast has the three Defenses, which also let's us know the creature's Save and Test numbers, and we've derived Attribute Modifiers from the Defenses as well, so those three Defenses are doing a ton of work, in terms of succinct information.

You'll also notice that the creature has some cool Special Traits at the bottom of the Stat Block.

Well, characters will get traits like that as well, we call them Talents, and some might refer to as Feats and Spells, but we'll get into that next time.

For right now, please let us know what you think of this little teaser, and the game thus far, and also please spread the word. When we release the play test doc. we'd love to have a ton of people try it out!

Final note, to answer questions people have asked previously:

1. The play test will be released as a Free PDF

2. It will contain our Six Core Classes, lots of sample Monsters, some Magic Items, some Setting Lore, and a bunch of Drawings that I've done, just for this.

3. Everyone is welcome to download it and give it a try!

So, thanks again all, and more soon

Again, do us a favor and spread the word!

Richard