A couple of days this week I’ve been out and about, and had time to catch up on some podcasts. One of the ones I caught up on was Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk.

It’s a particularly nice podcast in my opinion. Firstly it’s UK based, Morrus is also the creator of the WOIN system and the Judge Dredd and World’s of 2000A.D. RPG (that uses WOIN as it’s basis).

One particular episode on Stealing Rules got me thinking and agreeing with them on a couple of things.

The first is using Morrus’ countdown dice mechanic from his WOIN system. He’s right to feel proud of it. When I read it in the Judge Dredd rulebook I thought that’s pretty cool. It’s also something that can be used in D&D quite easily.

Basically you create a dice pool of d6 dice. Then when you roll them, you remove any 6’s from the pool. And you keep rolling until there are none left. That’s as I said the basic concept. You can speed things up or slow things down by adjusting the number range used to remove a die, and the size of the dice pool.

It acts as a timer that you can use to simulate things like a countdown before an alarm goes off, or a trap/bomb triggers.

I love the concept. And definitely think it can be used in my current campaign. I’m thinking it might even lend itself to determine the length of combat. Hear me out. There is an encounter coming up where I want the NPC’s to attack my players, but it’s a smash and grab. Get in and get out quickly. It’s not a fight to the death. So how long should that last in combat rounds? If I use this countdown dice mechanic, and set it up for a quick countdown, then roll the dice at the start of each combat round. If it runs out the attackers split and fade into the night.

There is another nice part of this mechanic, where you can trigger things to happen when you reach certain numbers of dice. Say for instance once you hit 3 dice something bad happens like more enemies run into the room.

I think the hardest part is going to be deciding the size of the dice pool to use and the speed of the countdown.

You can read more about the countdown dice mechanic here.

The other one that I thought sounded interesting and worth investigating a bit more in-depth was the The One Ring/Adventures in Middle Earth (the D&D d20 version) journey rules.

For easy of use and porting into a full D&D 5e campaign I’d look at the Adventures in Middle Earth rules.

But I like the idea of using a system that is targeted at making travelling more interesting.

However that’s a research project for another day.

I’m kinda doing some stealing of rules at the moment. Except I’ve been stealing from the D&D Adventurers League. In particularly for character advancement. I like the points system it uses.

What rules do you steal for your RPG games?