3d6 sucks in Risus

Following a really rocking' game of Risus Primeval last night, some discussion came up concerning the dice mechanics. This prompted me to run some numbers this morning. Oh, the numbers I crunched. My brain is sore, and it mostly just confirmed my suspicions, but at least now I can actually make non-anecdotal arguments to defend my position concerning the character generation system.

In Risus, a character typically starts with 10 dice to be divided amongst their skills (known as clichés), with a limit that no skill may start with more than 4 dice.  So, you see a lot of 4/4/2 or 4/3/3 builds, spotted by the infrequent oddball builds like 4/2/2/2 or 4/3/2/1 or even 3/3/2/2. I'm here to tell you that anything other than 4/4/2 sucks horribly, and should be avoided at all costs.

Risus features two types of rolls. Generic rolls vs a static target number to see if you succeed at some standard task, and then there's combat. 

Let's look at the non-combat rolls first.

According to the rules, rolls have a difficulty of 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 (20 or 30 just sounds crazy to me, given that the hard-cap for a PC whose maxed out a trait is 4 dice at character creation and 6 dice after much XP spending).

Difficulty 10 is meant for things that should be challenging for a professional, and 15 is for "really inventive or tricky stunts".   Then the GM is vaguely instructed to sometimes lower this if a given cliche is particularly appropriate, but only a handful of examples are provided and no real advice on adjudicating it. In my experience, this means most GMs don't really adjust the numbers much. Even if they do, as a player reading the rules you feel really motivated to get at least 3 dice in anything you ever want to do, because the rules state that 3 dice represents professional-level skill. Sounds like you want 3 dice, right?

Wrong. Here's the first wrinkle. Most GM's never have you roll against the lowest difficulty, which is specifically 5 in Risus. Someone at the table is going to have 4 dice in something (in fact, in my experience, nearly every PC has 4 dice in something) pertinent to the roll. The first time the GM sets a "5" difficulty, people grab their 4 dice and someone asks "why are we even rolling this?"  There's a social pressure then to not roll vs difficulty 5 on 4 dice, as it just feels too silly. Most GMs pretty much default to difficulty 10 for average tasks worth dicing for, because it  feels fair regardless of whether you got 3 or 4 dice to roll, and is a lot more interesting than difficulty 5.   Perhaps some other number would be better, but 10 is nice and round, it shows up in the rules, and really who wants to deal with a sliding scale of improvised values in the middle of a fight?

So now 10 is your routine average difficulty, even though that's not really what the rules say.

• Chance of succeeding at difficulty 10 on 3d6: 63%
• Chance of succeeding at difficulty 10 on 4d6: 90%

So 4d6 is a good deal better than 3d6 at routine standard tasks, but 3d6 is still plenty respectable. 3d6 feels professional.

Of course, in a typical gaming scenario, not everything is routine. GM's frequently want to make something a little tougher than average. Players also frequently come up with crazy ideas, and it's very normal for the GM to respond to that by raising the difficulty up one step. Officially, one step up in difficulty in Risus is a 15.  But as it turns out, a 15 is terribly hard to score on 3d6:

• Chance of succeeding at difficulty 15 on 3d6: 9%
• Chance of succeeding at difficulty 15 on 4d6: 44%

So the 4d6 character is still reasonably proficient, but about half as likely to succeed as they were on a difficulty 10 challenge. Most GMs (and most players who have a 4-die stat) could live with that.

The PC rolling 3d6 however, is nearly guaranteed to fail at that test that's just 1 difficulty level above "normal".  Already 3d6 is starting to suck, and we haven't even gotten to our first fight scene.

If the GM realized how low the odds were on getting that 15, they probably wouldn't use it as a difficulty very often.  Chances are the GM hasn't realized how hard the 15 will be. Most people aren't that good at intuiting actual odds, that's how casino's make money after all. We remember the big successes more than the day-to-day failures. While gamers are often more math-savvy than the general public, we've all been kind of brainwashed by years of D&D optional character generation rules teaching us that a 15 stat isn't all that unusual.  Don't believe it.



Combat:
Combat in Risus has a somewhat infamous death spiral. If you fail a roll, your dice pool shrinks for the rest of the fight.  Combat uses contested rolls, so each round one side of the fight grows weaker, while the other maintains their strength.  It's in such a combat that 3d6 clichés really become a liability.

Two hypothetical characters (or players), Alison and Brad, are about to have a duel.  Alison has a relevant cliche rated at 4 dice. Bradley's cliche is only 3 dice. What are the possible outcomes of the first round? Most of us would correctly deduce that Alison's got better than even odds, but how much better?

Alison's 4 dice are in fact 4 times more likely than Brad's three to win the first round of the fight. I ran the numbers on it this morning, and was a little surprised just how dominating that extra die is.  Here's the results of round one:

• 75%: Alison (with 4 dice) rolls higher than Brad. Brad drops to 2 dice next round.
• 19%: Brad (with 3 dice) rolls higher than Alison. Alison drops to 3 dice next round.
• 6%: The rolls are tied.

Risus doesn't actually address what happens when there's ties on a combat round, so the GM is left to figure out what to do on the ties. Most GMs have both sides reroll, either as a new round or as just a second roll in what is technically the same combat round. If that's the case, the 6% is replaced by:

• 4.5%: The rolls tie initially. The GM calls for a reroll, and Alison wins it.
• 1%:  The rolls tie initially. There's a reroll, and Brad wins it.
• Half a percent: This round of combat takes 3 or more rolls to resolve. It's likely Alison wins eventually.

I've seen a few GMs try other tie-breakers to avoid delays from rare consecutive ties. Usually these tie breakers are either "highest stat wins", or "highest single die wins". Either of those basically make the 6% tie chance into another case of Alison's 4-die stat delivering a win. 

So there's about an 80-20 split in favor of the 4-die character. And that's just round one, where the difference in stats is just 1 die.

Round two now deals one of two situations.

It's 80% likely that Alison won the first round, and is still rolling her 4d6 against Brad's now weakened 2d6.  Her odds of winning the second round have just shot up to 96%.  Brad's hosed.

The other 20% of the time, Brad will have gotten lucky and won the first round. Alison's 4-dice are knocked down to 3. That means both characters are rolling 3 dice. Even though Alison lost once, she's still got a 50-50 shot at winning the second round. If she does, she's retaken the advantage.

So a true break-out of the full results of the 4-dice vs 3-dice fight are basically thus:

• 80%: Alison trounces Brad without ever taking a hit.
• 10%: Alison takes an unlucky early "wound", but still manages to win the conflict.
• 10%: Brad defies the odds and comes out the victor.

And that's assuming that Alison only has the one 4-die skill.  If Alison's build is 4/4/2 vs Brad's build of 3/3/2/2, she can essentially soak up one bad roll without it diminishing her attack strength.

Even if Brad's got the second-best build, 4/3/3, he's still likely to come up short in a fight.  Let's see how that 4/4/2 vs 4/3/3 conflict plays out over several rounds of combat.

Rounnd 1: Alison with 4/4/2 vs Brad with 4/3/3. Both characters roll 4 dice.
50% A wins round 1: Rnd 2 is A4/4/2 vs B3/3/3. A has advantage.
50% B wins round 1: Rnd 2 is A4/3/2 vs B 4/3/3. Even dice next round.

Round 2: Number of dice adjusted by who won round 1.
40%: A wins rnds 1 & 2. Rnd 3: A4/4/2 vs B 3/3/2. A has advantage.
10%: A wins 1, B wins 2. Rnd 3: A4/3/2 vs B3/3/3. A has advantage
25%: B wins rnd 1, A wins rnd 2. Rnd 3: A4/3/2 vs B3/3/3. A has advantage.
25%: B wins rnds 1 & 2. Rnd 3: A3/3/2 vs B4/3/3. B has advantage.

Round 3:
32%: A wins all three rounds. Rnd 4: A4/4/2 vs B3/2/2 A has advantage
8%: A wins 1 & 2. B gets lucky on round 3. Rnd 4: A4/3/2 vs B3/3/2. A has advantage.
8%: A wins rounds 1 and 3. B wins 2 Rnd4: A4/3/2 vs B3/3/2. A has advantage.
2% A wins rnd 1. B wins rounds 2 and 3. Rnd 4: A3/3/2 vs B3/3/3.  Even dice, but breaking in B's favor.
20%: B wins 1. A wins rnds 2 & 3. Rnd 4: A4/3/2 vs B 3/3/2. A has advantage.
5%: B wins rnds 1 & 3. A wins rnd 2 only. Rnd 4: A3/3/2 vs B4/3/2. B has advantage.
5%: B wins rnds 1&2. A wins rnd 3 only..Rnd4: A3/3/2 vs B3/3/3. Even dice, but breaking in B's favor.
20% B wins all 3 rounds. Rnd 4: A3/2/2 vs B4/3/3. B has advantage.

So at the end of three rounds:

• There's a 68% chance that Alison (who started with 4/4/2 stats) has a strong advantage of being able to roll 1 more die than Brad can.
• There's a 25% chance that Brad (who started with 4/3/3 stats) has a strong advantage of being able to roll one more die than Alison can.
• There's a 7% chance that they're rolling the same number of dice next round, but that Brad has a minor long-term advantage that may allow him to outlast Alison.

Even if we count Brad's long-term advantage as being as potent as rolling an extra die immediately (which it's probably not), that still means the 4/4/2 build as having twice the chance of the 4/3/3 build at winning a protracted battle.

Just how big of a deal this advantage ends up being has a lot to do with the GM, and what the stats are of the challenges they throw at the players. PC healing rates are totally a matter of GM Fiat in Risus.

Even with a very generous GM who hands out free heals after every conflict and doesn't put you up against NPCs with lots of dice or back-up stats, there's still never a situation where you'll regret a 4/4/2 build. Some GMs might be easy enough you don't _need_ to go 4/4/2, but there's never a downside to doing it. Risus' clichés are so open-ended (you can use "hairdresser" in combat), and the "penalty" for using an inappropriate skills is so unthreatening (it's actually an advantage), that you should have no trouble coming up with just two big cliches that cover everything you really want the character to do and a minor 2-die stat on the side just for flavor.

The basic rules give no advice on how to handle the implications of the math behind rolls, nor does it give any good advice on how to stat out NPCs. Heck, one of examples in the rulebook casually throws out a horde of rats that roll 7 dice, with not even the slightest mention of the fact that 7-die horde is a TPK waiting to happen.  I just spent this huge article talking about how much better 4 dice is than 3, and I assure you 7 dice would be a damn spot better than that.

A few other numbers that may be useful as data points:

4 dice beats 3 dice 80% of the time.
4 dice beats 2 dice 96% of the time.
4 dice beats 1 die 99% of the time.
3 dice beats 2 dice 90% of the time.
2 dice beats 1 die 90% of the time. 

They said "Dinosaurs", not giant blooming Cockroaches!

At last night's weekly one-shot, my buddy Mark ran this awesome little Risus scenario inspired by a TV show Primeval. I'd never seen the show, but the premise is pretty simple: portals open up to the ancient past, dinosaurs pour out, and the PCs have to wrangle the monsters back in. Kill a dino and you might change history.

He said for player characters, we had basically four options.

1. Badass
2. Scientist
3. Badass Scientist
4. Some combination of 2 or more of the above.

That cracked me up.

My three Cliches (the Risus system's form of attributes) were:

• Croike! I'm like that crocodile hunter guy!
• Parkour traceur
• Chemistry Set

The team was rounded out with an ex-special forces commando, a quick-thinking facewoman, and multilayered inventor type. We built our characters to complement each other, and the group functioned great as a team.

Mark did a wonderful job of handling the game, and it's mechanics. I've found that, despite being a light and simple system, the spiral of death inherent to Risus can really be a problem. Out of probably 8 games I've played of it, this was only one of 3 where the mechanics really shined, instead of hindered. It's a deceptively simple system, that takes a good GM to make it work - and Mark was up to the task, I'm happy to report.

To start the session off, we were called down to the Pike Market in Seattle, responding to an anomaly / gate that something had come through. We all had dinos on the brain, and as the clues amounted to some smaller critter, we assumed little compsognathses or the like.

Turns out they were trilobites, instead. This was a fact we discovered when I was dangling some bait over the hole in floorboards. Instead of a little lizard popping out, long exoskeletal tentacles lashed out and tried to pull me in. "Croiké! They said dinosaurs, not giant bloomin' cockroaches!" It was a great surprise, and really shook up our assumptions. Well done, Mark!

He did a series of short encounters, spread over several in-character days, as various gates opened. When all was said and done, we'd wrestled with trilobites, commandeered a DUKW from a tour group, swam with an apatosaurus, crashed an ATV into a smilodon, and exchanged trophies with primitive hominids. The plotline was simple, and largely an excuse for megafaunal havoc in the modern day, but it was a hoot. Great game, all around.

Henching International Temporary Services

Despite my grumblings about the rules, I had good fun playing Risus last night.

It was a superhero scenario, where the PCs were the henchmen of a supervillain. Actually, we were temps. We worked for H.I.T.S., Henching International Temporary Services.

I played a big dumb thug. My attributes (called "cliches" in Risus) were:

• "Want I should whack dem now, boss?"
• Gettin in ta fings.
• Keep on Truckin.

We were using this house rule where every PC also has a boon and a bane, which can boost or penalize other actions. My boon was "immovable object" and my bane was "big as an armored car". The later was applied literally. I was a normal human from the waist down, but had something like a 14 foot shoulder span.

We'd been hired by a supervillain named Chow Fun Yung, The Yellow Peril. He was an exageration of ridiculous pulp villains like Dr Fu Manchu. He gave us all spiffy yellow costumes and proper henchmen names tied in to various Asian menu items.

• I was Yam Pot,
• Sarah's wiry contortionist acrobat was Udon Noodle,
• Eric's unappreciated yes man was named Pig's Ear,
• John's aged, possum-playing, Henching Union organizer was named Thousand Year Egg,
• Steve's crooked beat cop was named Special Pork Surprise.

We were hired to rob a charity benefit. The supervillain's alter ego was the caterer of the event. He pretended to have nothing to do with the crime, and was an "innocent victim" of our attack, so he could have an alibi. That was a fairly clever way for the GM to keep the NPC supervillain from overshadowing us PC henchmen. Of course, it meant we were without guidance from da boss for most of the session, which meant we improvised... fairly poorly. The group tended to splinter, because half of us were dumb, and the rest incompetent. Jolly good fun.

I got beat up by Miss America - the superhero who once won a major beauty pagaent. I also got beat up by her Red, White and Blue Helicopter. I awoke in jail, and had a hard time getting reunited with the rest of the group. I was really good at getting in ta fings, but not so good at gettin out uv um. Once I got moving, though, it was hard to stop me, thanks to "Keep on truckin".

Risus is actually a c6

Last night (at the Emerald City Game Feast), I played in a Risus game, and my PC got knocked unconscious by Miss America. While I was out of commission, I picked up the printout of the Risus rules that someone had brought to the table, and started looking at them.

I noticed several things we were doing "wrong". Not wanting to be a rules lawyer, I said nothing. I may bring it up with the group before the next time we play Risus again, I just wasn't going there at that moment. The notion of arguing over rules in the middle of a scene is excruciatingly vile to me, even if the thing we did "wrong" was part of what caused my character to be knocked out just then.

More importantly, and more to the point, in those 5 minutes of reading I learned a good deal about Risus that I hadn't known before. I've played it several times, but had never read it. When designing my Crunchometer, I had rated Risus as a c4, upgraded to a c6 if this one optional rule was being used. I've never played with said optional rule, I've just heard three different GMs say they had no intention of using such a rule because mucks up an otherwise elegant system.

Having now skimmed the rules, I can say that Risus is not as simple as I believed it to be. It's not really a c4. It's a solid c6 (even without the dreaded optional rule that I still know nothing about). I've played it under 4 GMs, and they've all abstracted / house-ruled the game into something a whole bracket simpler than the rules as written. The more complicated by-the-books rules actually strike me as far more robust than the dumbed down version we've been playing, but it's not as easy to remember across the months between one-shots.

I think I'll have to download Risus and read it more thoroughly sometime.

Crazy Characters

Last night's session at Wayward was a one-shot (sort of an opening to a once-per-month ongoing game) called Omniverse.

---

Setting: It was described in advance as being vaguely Sliders-esque, but turned out to be actually more Farscape-esque, bordering on SpellJammer-esque. Minor quibble, really doesn't matter, as even with that unexpected change, the game was great fun. We were encouraged to come to the session with a bizarre character concept in mind - nearly anything would be okay. We could steal from any show or genre, blend them mercilessly, or make up our own unique character.

---

System: The GM had said he'd be using a modified version of Risus. He'd run Risus for this group once before. In that game, he'd allowed a very liberal definition of our Cliches (that's Risus-speak for Attributes), and also had house-ruled away the prohibition against using the same Cliche for attack and defense in a round. The end result, I'd discovered, was that having as few Cliches as possible, and thus all highly rated, was significantly superior to diversifying into several medium-ranked Cliches. Since Risus is famous for the unforgiving spiral of death that starts whenever you fail a roll, this conclusion was fairly important.

Going into this game then, I knew I'd want a character that was fairly simple, with just a couple things they could do - though, those things might be fairly broadly defined. For example, it'd be far better to be a rank 4 scientist, then to be both a rank 2 chemist and a rank 2 physicist.

---

First Concept: My planned character was going to be named Larva. He'd look like a big rotting dinosaur. In reality, he'd be a couple feet long, and grublike. He'd be a child form of an advanced alien species, capable of reanimating the recently dead. However, to do so, he'd have to burrow inside the dead body and attach his sensory organs to the corpses degrading nerve center. This would mean he could only reanimate one corpse at a time, and it would have be big - at least the size of an oxen. I figured I'd wear the biggest dino the GM would let me get away with.

My cliches would be something along the lines of "Gentle (but rotting) Giant", "Reanimator" and "Looking to Prove Himself". As a youngster, he'd not yet earned a name. In his culture, you were all just called "Larva" until you'd proven yourself worthy of becoming a named adult. He'd have a big inferiority complex, and not be completely aware of his own (borrowed/rotting) strength.

---

GM's curve-ball: Turns out Malachi (the GM) wasn't just using normal Risus character creation rules. Instead, he wanted each person to use the following structure to describe their character.

(Name), the [Descriptor] [Species] [Profession] of [Planet]

You'd fill in the blanks, and things you dropped in the brackets would become your Cliches. Each different bracket had limitations as to what sort of thing you could fill it with. Descriptor had to be an aspect of your physical body or your personality. Profession needed to be a job.

Planet was fairly open, but if it wasn't immediately grokkable to the rest of the group you wouldn't be able to roll it for much. Species had a similar hurdle. Being a Fzghuhoyt of the planet Snizlukka would be sub-optimal, but being a Werewolf from The Death Star would give you lots of abilities and story hooks.

Larva, the Puppy-Like Body-Snatcher-Bug Child of Bugworld just wasn't going to work. I could probably get away with putting in something dinosaur-related into one of those brackets, but it was an awkward match. Chances are my Descriptor and Profession would be redundant, as would my Species and Planet. It was the whole Chemist and Physicist problem I'd previously identified, except worse because being a child is not so helpful as being a scientist. My concept was just too narrow.

By contrast, if you were (as one of my fellow PCs was going to be) Despotron, the Badass Motorcycle Politician of Cybertron, you were getting combat skills, a mode of rapid transit, social skills, a robotic body and shapeshifting powers out of your required 4 Cliches - that's pretty sweet.

Needless to say, I was going to have to think fast and change my concept. I needed something with a broader skill base and more than one schtick. More importantly, I needed to belong to a species and world that communicated something to the GM and my fellow players.

---

Thank my lucky Starr: A friend of mine once made a really cool Amber character that was a Narwhal - well, sort of. Technically they were a Kangaroo-Legged, T-Rex-Armed, Parachuting Psychic Narwhal from a Non-Euclidean world, suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of having been kidnapped by a Dimension-Hopping Circus. Actually, the backstory was far more complex than that, and involved shape-shifters and secret parents, a Matriarchal society where males were forced into breeding programs, a magic parachute, multiple personalities, secret magical soul names, and a huge opening bid on Psyche.

I wasn't going to need anything nearly that complicated. But it did occur to me that I could take a cue from Starr's old character, emulate (aka steal) a few of the better (aka simpler) bits, put my own twist on it, and have a character I was comfortable with in under a minute.

That's how I ended up playing Dr. Fiddlesticks, the Bat-Winged Narwhal Parapsychologist from MCEscherLand - a concept which communicated volumes to everyone.

---

The rest of the cast: I don't remember every bracketed Cliche from every character, nor most of their names, but here's what I do recall (and my best guesses) about my fellow PCs...

• I already told you about the Badass Motorcycle Polititician from Cybertron
• Nard, the Space-Faring Glow-Jellyfish Combat-Specialist from some planet I'd never heard of. (She'd originally envisioned the character as using a mini-mech battlesuit and a fireball cannon, but instead ended up using Jellyfish Kung Fu.)
  
• Buck something-er-other, the Two-Fisted American Fighter-Pilot from WW2World. (He later clarified his version of earth had just two continents: "America, F*** Yeah!" and "Over There", and that, yes, American was his Species.)
• Farnsworth, the Dashing Human Explorer from Steampunk Victoriana. Or maybe his descriptor was Brave and his Profession was a Gentleman. Or his job might have been an Officer, and his description Gentleman. The exact details escape me, but was the sort of character who'd be perfectly at home wearing a Pith Helmet and a Smoking Jacket while firing an Elephant Gun from the deck of his Airship. He was decidedly British.
  
• and a Mutant Half-Vampire from the Marvel Universe. For some reason, I'm blanking on this character's name and profession, as she was more cerebral and understated then you might expect from a Mutant Vampire of the Marvel Universe. Part of that may be because most of the session was daylight, but she did get to turn into mist, hypnotize mooks, and have Wolverine-ish healing factors.
  

Overall, the characters were awesome, and the game was a blast. What might not be obvious from those descriptions was what a disfunctional band we were. Everyone had lots of skills and powers, but the GM also gave us the option of choosing a flaw to get some extra perks, and we happily handicapped ourselves in various ridiculous ways that nearly imploded the scenario more than once. Luckily, our GM was also a skilled improviser.

The big undead-off

Warning: I don't usually "work blue" on this blog, but this post has some adult content. It's pretty minor, but I didn't want to shock anyone.

In the 3 different RPGs I've played in the last 7 days, all of which were great fun, I have one particular scene that I'm proud of.

It was a Risus game, and I was playing a Vampire. The main villain was a Liche/ Necromancer. We had this big battle at the end, where I guess I shamefully stole the spotlight, but everyone got a kick out of it. We were out-undeading each other, not so much fighting as having an undead-off. (The other PCs were trailing behind and either fighting minions or just watching the show.)

Our actions back and forth involved all sorts of tropes from various films: gliding weightlessly, vamping menacingly, raising the dead, having our shadows wrestle while we just locked eyes, etc, all the while with massive velvet cloaks unfurling behind us and blowing in the wind. Since it was Risus,we didn't have to make real attacks. "Damage" isn't neccesarily flesh and blood, it can be anything demoralizing or penalizing.

It came 'round to my action in the back-and-forth, and I realized this could be the killing blow. So I pulled out all the stops:

"For my final act of contempt, to show how vastly superior my undead mojo is to his, I turn my back on him dismissively. On cue, my three vampiric brides, previously unmentioned, slink forth from shadows that concealed them and proceed to fellate me. Take that!"

I got applause not only from my table, but also from the NaNoWriMo group that was sharing the cafe with us.

Unfortunately, I completely blew my roll - nothing but a handfull of "1's" on the dice. The GM laughed and said:

"What you described happens, but your taste in women leaves much to be desired. Three pathetic, scraggly-haired, disease-ridden, ugly hobgoblin vampires attend you and your member."

That was probably the best laugh of the year, even better than "Can I roll to make Sarah Palin rub my belly?"

Simple Systems Are The Best

Last night, I played Risus.

• Of the rules-light RPGs I've played lately, Wushu is still my favorite. Wushu, however, is very much a "Hippy Game" - it's got an unconventional structure, that takes some getting used to. It's very easy for a new player (or GM) to miss the point of Wushu and fail to make it deliver to it's full potential. If I was GMing for a new group of random players I'd never gamed with, I'd run Risus over Wushu. Both have about the same potential for abuse by a player who defines excessively-broad attributes, but Wushu adds to that the potential to fall flat if the players are timid, since the GM does less in Wushu than in most RPGs, and the players have all the power.

That said, Risus, too, is not without it's problems. At it's core, Risus is a game with a terribly broken fundamental flaw. Yet despite that glaring problem, both times I've played it, I've really enjoyed Risus. The rest of the rules are so simple, that both GMs were able to compensate for the flaw and keep it from mattering. There were no ripple effects to account for when you altered one of the games handful of rules / paradigms.

The primary mechanic (and source of the flaw) is that each player has a small number of attributes/skills (known as "Cliches") numbered from 1 to 4. Whenever you take an action, you roll d6s equal to your relavent cliche and add them together. Where this breaks down is how it relates to damage. Each point of damage (you get one each time you're hit, or each time you fail a roll) reduces one of your Cliches by one die. As you can imagine, this leads to a quick and nasty spiral of death. I get one bad roll and mydie pool drops by one. Which makes it more likely I'll have another badroll. One unlucky roll means you're going to lose the entire fight,unless your foe rolls even worse (despite now being a die up on you) twice. Once you hit zero dice in any Cliche, you're incapacitated.

The two GMs I've played under have both managed to entirely sidestep this fatal flaw.

1. Honestly,I don't recall how Jeremy dodged it, probably because the game he ran was 2 to 3 years ago. If forced to guess, I'd say it was via a house-rule that changed how damage worked. I remember him discussing the flaw before the game started, so he was aware of it, and probably had a work-around.


2. Last night, Malachi got around it by providing healing potions at various points during the game. This felt pretty forced, he was obviously pulling our fat out of the fryer. Not that we complained. Still, it didn't feel balanced or natural, and therefore eroded his verisimilitude.


3. Solving it via the age-old tradition of fudging the dice is unlikely to work. There's 99% transparency on the monster stats. Die pool equals one stat minus damage, so if you see the GMs roll just once (not even the result, just the number of dice rolled) you can conclude the monster's strength, hit points, and capabilities. Therefore, it's fairly hard for a GM to fudge things without the players noticing he'd just thrown them a bone.

The secret to why I've enjoyed Risus is that it's so incredibly freeform. The system lends itself to light-hearted goofiness, and both one-shots started out ostensibly serious but quickly developed unique quirkiness. This can be directly attributed to the Cliche system.
Cliches can be:

• traditional ("Ranger" or "Smart"),


• over the top ("Blood-Sucking Vampiric Fiend"),


• damn-near useless ("Philosophy Major"),


• a wee bit odd ("I know I've got one of those around here"),


• or truly bizarre ("Oh, dear God no, don't tell me I'm actually a Unicorn").

Description is just that - flavor text only. Yes, "Hollywood Vampire" allows forsome cinematic effects that are harder to justify from "PhilosophyMajor", but mechanically it's no better. Nothing really stops you from doing damage with "Philosophy Major" as long as you think quick and describe how your actions make the enemy doubt themselves. One or two bad die rolls while turning into a Bat, and your vampire stops being so fanciful and cinematic.

That said, there's a definite advantage to having just a couple of broadly-defined Cliches, and rating them as highly as you can. Standard character creation involves spending 10 dice, and you can't take anything above a 4. Three stats at 4/4/2 respectively seems pretty darned optimal, though I could see a case for a 4/3/3 build if you didn't have two Cliches you felt were likely to cover everything you'd want the character to do. That said, PCs with just three defining characteristics/concepts tend to besomewhat flat.

One or two of the 6 PCs last night were built differently than those two models, and it was noticable. The player with 3/3/2/2 had trouble being useful - she could do a lot of very different things, but none of them very well. Further, a 3-Cliche PC could fail 7 rolls and still be on their feet (though reduced to one very vulnerable die in everything), where as the 4-Cliche PC is in that dire strait after just 6 failed rolls. Luckily it was a one-shot, since being the unintended sidekick would suck heavily after the second or third session.

I'd recommend Risus for one-shots and short-shots, especially if you don't mind the game getting a little goofy. However, you'll need to be prepared to handle the out-of-control PC-death-spiral, and you'll want to keep an eye open for PCs that are spread too thin at character creation. Still, Risus is free, so you expect it to be a little rough around the edges.