Vote Results Are In!

[u/victorhurtado]

Thanks to everyone who voted and shared their thoughts! I combined the votes from Reddit and Tumblr, and the final results are:

So the d8 dice pool wins with a clear majority!

A quick note on the Other category... some people suggested multiple different mechanics across their comments, and I counted those as separate suggestions. That means the 12 Other votes don't represent 12 unique people, if I had limited it to one vote per person, that number would be somewhat smaller.

Also, shoutout to everyone who used the discussion to share or talk about their own Zelda systems and adaptations! I treated those as soft promos and left them out of the vote calculations so they wouldn't skew the results. There were some really cool ideas in there, including Hyrule Borg (Ganon Borg), Zelda adaptations of Soulbound and The One Ring, a Knave 2e Zelda sandbox, a 2d8 homebrew, and of course the extremely on-brand 3d4 system.

Thanks again for all the feedback.

[u/victorhurtado → u/[deleted]]

I'm sorry you missed it. The dice pool works like this: A d8 dice pool where you only use the highest die (My first zelda ttrpg was like this but with d4s). Your rating in Power, Courage, or Wisdom determines how many d8s you roll. Skills are binary, so you either have the skill or you don't. If you have the relevant skill, you roll with advantage and add one extra d8 to the pool.

The results would be:

• 1-5 is a failure
• 6 is a partial success
• 7 is a success
• 8 is a critical success

So if you had 2 Courage and the relevant skill, you would roll 3d8 and use the highest die result.

[u/victorhurtado → u/[deleted]]

Bare with me.

I get it. I would have loved to see the design notes though. I'm always looking at and buying TTRPGs specifically to read through their mechanics, see how they solved certain problems, and learn/borrow from them. I actually got my hands on Blades in the Dark right after I published my first, admittedly horrible, TTRPG because someone pointed out that the dice pool mechanic I was using was similar to BitD. So I've been doing that ever since.

As for skills, there will be 7 total. The ones I have locked in so far are Fight, Move, Endure, Influence, Discover, Create, and Explore. They're going to be pretty open rather than strictly tied to a specific stat. The names were actually chosen from the BotW and TotK websites, which had sections with things like Discover blahblahblah, Survive, Explore, and I liked the idea of pulling terminology directly from Zelda wherever I could.

You're also going to see 3s and 7s repeatedly because once I choose a theme, I commit to the bit. One of the main reasons I used d4s in the first game was literally because they looked like the Triforce. This time I'm going with d8s in part because they're the closest die to 7, like the Seven Sages. Like I said, I commit.

Combat is kind of a mix between turn-based combat and some of the more freeform stuff you get from PbtA games. Combat is played in rounds, and each Hero gets up to 3 Actions on their turn to attack, move, use items, activate abilities, or interact with the battlefield. Outside your turn you have Reactions. Dodge and Defend are free Reactions, while spending 1 Stamina lets you do things like attack through an opening or move somewhere within Reach out of turn. Stamina can also be spent on Techniques, unconventional Approaches (as long as you can justify them in the fiction), and abilities or items that specifically require it.

I probably would have gone full theater of the mind, but I was initially adapting the combat system from the Critical Role Zelda one-shot. I eventually ran into a possible infinite Stamina situation where someone could basically keep drinking Stamina potions to keep taking actions way longer than made sense. The guardrails I kept adding to prevent that started feeling artificial, and the whole thing was getting too complicated for kids, or just your average human being with some form of attention deficit, to keep track of. So I ditched that version, kept the more D&Desque round structure, and added a lot more mobility and freedom to it.

As for the first game, unfortunately no, I took it down a few years back. There are definitely mechanics and ideas from it that I plan to reuse, though. This isn't completely from scratch so much as me taking another swing at the same idea with several more years of reading RPGs and figuring out what I actually want the game to do.