Kids on Bikes

 On a trip to the local game store, I decided to pick up the rules to Kids on Bikes. This is a TTRPG system by Jonathan Gilmour and Dough Levandowski that is built primarily to play through stories of small towns with strange happenings, borrowing the tropes of 1980s stories like IT or E.T., or the more recent pastiche of that kind of genre, Stranger Things.

As someone who started with the Song of Ice and Fire RPG (briefly) before getting into D&D, it's a much simpler system, but a very versatile one. The recent Misfits & Magic season of Dimension 20 used a variation by the same company called Kids on Brooms to do their deconstructive take on the Harry Potter-style magical school setting.

There is a lot of emphasis here on creating complex relationships between characters as well as fleshing out the small town setting of your game.

At the core of the gameplay is your six stats. These are Brains, Brawn, Grit, Charm, Flight, and Fight. Brains is book-smarts and knowledge. Brawn is physical durability and stature. Grit is sort of emotional resilience. Charm is your ability to talk your way out of problems and influence people. Flight is your ability to evade and escape problems (both physically and metaphorically,) and Fight is your ability to attack and hurt others.

Characters can choose from several "tropes," which are the rough analogue of character class, which tell you how to assign each of the polyhedral dice to one of these stats (ignoring the percentile die.) You're also free to customize or build a character from scratch, but most of the ideas for this sort of story can be covered by these tropes. For example, you might play a Loner Weirdo. Your Grit die would be a d20, given that you're used to people treating your poorly and can handle it, but your Charm die would only be a d4, as you're, you know, a kind of off-putting weirdo.

You use these dice to make skill checks of the corresponding type. The GM tells you the difficulty you're trying to hit before you roll, and if you fail the roll, you get an Adversity Token, which can be spent later on to improve your luck later on (which nicely balances having really bad luck on rolls.) Because difficulties might be set above the maximum for your die (say your Loner Weirdo is trying to talk their mom into letting them go over to Suzy's house even though there have been stories of kids disappearing, and the Charm difficulty is set to 10, while your Loner Weirdo only has a d4,) you can also benefit more from a great roll. If you roll the maximum amount on your die, the die "explodes," allowing you to roll an additional die of that kind and add it to the total. This can continue until you hit the difficulty threshold. So even if our Weirdo is very unlikely to, they do have a chance, if they hit a 4 on the first roll, and then again on the second, and then get a 2 or higher on the third, to actually succeed on that check. (This also means that you're actually more likely to explode on your worst dice, as it's a 25% chance on a d4 compared to a 5% chance on a d20.)

When a skill check is required (and unlike in D&D, there's no distinction here between checks, saving throws, or attack rolls) it can either be a planned action, meaning something that you have time to prepare for, or a snap decision, meaning something you have to do in the moment. For example, trying to puzzle out where the shady government agents could be hiding the fallen spaceship you saw in town by poring over a map as a group together over the course of an evening would be a planned action, and probably a Brains check, whereas running from the alien menace that broke out of that warehouse after you decided to investigate it would be a snap decision Flight check.

For planned actions, a player can choose to simply take half their die's max amount as their roll. Additionally, anyone can expend the adversity tokens they have to increase the total amount (the GM has to declare the difficulty out loud, so players will know how many they need to spend.)

On a snap decision, the player has to roll the die, and only they can spend their adversity tokens to increase its result.

There are no levels and no hit points here - combat always carried with it the chance at serious injury or even death. There are also more complex mechanics I can't really get into here. And there's a lot of guidance on the building of relationships and setting.

But more than anything, the rules are built around creating a fun narrative.

Not to say that I have a ton of other examples I know that well, but while some players can kind of retreat into the mechanics (primarily combat) of D&D, this is going to be a very RP-Heavy type of game. Indeed, the game leans more on having all the players participate in the narrative-building, rather than just piloting their own character within a narrative mostly crafted by the GM.

One of the most interesting ideas is the "Powered Character." This is a sort of hybrid between NPC and PC - a character whose behavior is controlled by the entire party, each having elements of their personality and behavior to kind of advocate for. True to the tropes of this genre, this is the person with telekinesis or other psychic powers whose arrival in the narrative really gets the story going. The most obvious recent example would be Eleven from Stranger Things.

While the game puts its emphasis on small towns where everyone has at least a passing familiarity with everyone else, I suspect you could easily adapt these pretty simply rules into just about any genre or setting.

After reading Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, I had a concept for a campaign that begins with the absorption of a small town in America (probably in the 1980s) into the Mists of Ravenloft, having a short prologue session or handful of sessions in which the players are just normal teenagers, before scattering them into the Mists and having them develop into their D&D character classes after a significant time jump. I could imagine using this system for that prologue. I'd initially wanted to use the "Survivor" mechanics from Van Richten's, but I actually think the less combat-oriented Kids of Bikes system might work better for that.

Not to say that this is only valuable for tying into other games. The system here is less built around extremely long-term campaigns, instead treating its narratives more like episodes in a series or sequels. Character progression is not about an ever-higher climb in power, but is more about seeing a character change over time, for better or worse.