You might be familiar with Quest RPG because it made some waves in 2020 for its wonderfully accessible design. It still stands as an example to all RPG designers, frankly, and to that end has been made freely available.
https://www.adventure.game/What I'm curious about is what you all think of its core mechanic, in principle, because it's fundamentally different from most TTRPGs.
In Quest, you character is mechanically defined by their abilities. These are essentially super powers that automatically succeed when invoked. To invoke them you pay from your pool of ability points, which refresh in various ways.
Each ability is linked to others in a tree, and that's how you're able to create a unique character mechanically-speaking.
Otherwise every check in the game is a roll on a dice, with critical success, success, success with complication, or failure. Some form of success is guaranteed around 75% of the time.
No modifiers. Not attributes, not skills, not situational, nada, no modifiers to the dice roll ever.
In the case of two player characters having an arm-wrestle, for example, who would win? It would be the character who's strongest or most skilled at arm-wrestling according to their description, unless one of them could invoke an ability that overrides this. It might be a no-contest or perhaps the player of the less likely character can convince the other player of a reason in the story why the outcome might be different.
The idea is to encourage players new to role-playing games to keep using their imagination, keep talking and driving the story forwards, rather than staring at their character sheets... or the rule book!
What do you think of the core mechanic in principle?Does a character need mechanical attributes and skills, flaws, special abilities and other doodads?
Is a pithy description and some iconic powers enough?
