The Chop Shop

I’m working on another game, because tinkering with otherwise perfectly functional games is part of the hobby for me. This one’s got parts from:

• Genesys/FFG Star Wars
• Year Zero Engine
• Cortex Prime
• Savage Worlds
• I don’t know what else, a bunch of polyhedral dice pool games got put in the blender for this one.

The main idea is car chases and gunfights – and while I will grant you that gunfights could be considered a solved problem in rpgs, I haven’t found a game that feels like a car chase. It’ll all be wrapped up in a setting that focuses on disillusionment, disenfranchisement, and desperation, but whether that turns out to be the quasi-mythical 197X or the near-future 20X6 remains to be seen.

You’ve got traits rated from 2-5d6, and you count 4+ as successes. Rolling ones generate “Threat”, which open up opportunities for opponents or introduce new challenges. Skills either add more d6s to your pool or improve one or more dice to d8s or even d12s. Rolls of 8+ count as two successes, and 12s count as three, so you can score several successes even with a small dice pool.

I’m aiming for trindie, but just ripping mechanisms off trindie dice games isn’t how you do that. Characters will need a Drive, which is a terrible pun for a driving-focused game but fuck it. They’ll have Edge, a authorial/metagame resource (you can “lose your edge” because more puns). Finally, everyone will have a Wheelhouse (sorry not sorry), areas of knowledge or backgrounds that also imply loss of some kind and provide context.

All this is subject to change, and probably should if it knows what’s good for it.