Action Dramatic

Intro

Action Dramatic is a homebrew system which hopes to emulate the cinematic style of action movies from swords-and-sorcery (Conan) to kung-fu flicks (Kill Bill, House of Flying Daggers) to spy films (007), to the future (Blade Runner, Equilibrium, Matrix). Action Dramatic, or AD, is based off the following principles:

One Dice Roll

Wherever possible, simplify actions down to a statistical similar roll. By reducing the number of die rolls, the action speeds up and a battle which took 12 seconds in-game doesn't take 2 hours to play in real life. Speeding up gameplay is almost always a good thing: it gets the players more involved in the game, it keeps the right tone (battle for life and limb not a plodding and extremely complicated war game), and it allows more to get done in the game in the same amount of real life time.

Emergence

Define the properties of in-game objects and how they interact. "Hardcoding" leads to more "hardcoding" which leads to a game which is both more complicated and slower. As an example, all action films have both mooks (those nameless thugs that get beaten up by the dozens or hundreds) and villians (named characters who are usually as good, if not better, then the protagonist). We could either define two classes of enemies, the mook and the villian, giving those classes different rules, or we could just define a person class which can vary between being very strong (villian) and very weak (mook). Doing the first choice is probably easier than the second, but what happens when we want to add lieutenants (henchmen of the villian who are stronger then normal mooks)? We would have to add in a henchmen class with the first choice but with the second we already have the lieutenant possibility so there's no need for creating new rules and content.

Story-Focused

The purpose of Action Dramatic is to create a story and have fun doing it. Together, the GM and players create a story in the style of a movie action flick. This isn't a tactical combat simulator, a turn-based strategy game, or a realistic war game. We don't care about balance except where it impacts the story and how much fun the players are having. We care about realism as far as the players willing suspension of disbelief can be stretched. If anything interferes with making a fun story, than it should be edited if it can be saved or cut if it can't be.

Rules (as much as they are)

Die

Right now, the way to resolve actions is by using 1d6-1d6 i.e. roll 2d6 with one being a positive die and one being a negative die and representing each with different colored die. Now, one way of doing this is to simply add the negative and positive dice like so this:

Jack Burton needs to make a strength check. He rolls a 4 on the blue (positive) die and a 5 on the red (negative) die. 4 + -5 = -1. So his result is his base strength - 1 (plus other mods)

However, this requires two arithmetic operations and thus slows down the game needlessly. A statistically similar system is to roll 2d6s (one positive and one negative) and add the lower roll, with ties being 0. Using the previous example:

Jack Burton now needs to make a constitution check. He rolls a 3 on the blue (positive) die and a 6 on the red (negative) die. 3 < 6, so his result is his base constitution + 3