The Town of Odyssey

Does anybody here play?

If so, what's your system of choice?

I have never actually had the chance to play myself. Though I have gotten SO CLOSE a couple of times: first as a player (our GM basically ghosted us before we managed to play one session) and then as a GM (I was in the midst of prepping a one shot for a couple of friends when Covid hit.)

ALSO if you have any cool moments or fun stories you should share them!

I haven't played one in person before, but I've done some here in the Chatroom using Skid's homebrew of the Cypher system which were quite enjoyable.

bookworm wrote: ↑Fri Mar 04, 2022 11:55 am I haven't played one in person before, but I've done some here in the Chatroom using Skid's homebrew of the Cypher system which were quite enjoyable.

Interesting.

It wasn't entirely clear to me from the rules given: does the system employ some kind of ability modifier? Or is burning points for effort the only way that they help augment a roll?

Spending XP between sessions to make a specific Skill trained/specialized gives a permanent modifier to rolls related to that Skill. (Technically it actually reduces the difficulty rating of the target roll, but that's the same effect as boosting the roll result.) If you think you will need additional success chance beyond what your base Skill is, including that modifier, you can spend effort to stack additional modification on top of that which only affects the single roll you make next.

bookworm wrote: ↑Fri Mar 04, 2022 3:12 pm Spending XP between sessions to make a specific Skill trained/specialized gives a permanent modifier to rolls related to that Skill. (Technically it actually reduces the difficulty rating of the target roll, but that's the same effect as boosting the roll result.) If you think you will need additional success chance beyond what your base Skill is, including that modifier, you can spend effort to stack additional modification on top of that which only affects the single roll you make next.

Ah. So having a higher Intelligence (for example) just means that you have more effort - in the form of lost hit points- to throw towards actions that would be considered intelligence based actions?

It's been a while, but to the best of my memory yes that's an accurate summation.

Example: You're asked to make a perception check. Your character has Perception as a trained Skill, so automatically the challenge level is reduced by one (or you get +3 to your roll, if it's easier to think about it that way) so you can just go with that and roll knowing you already have an advantage over someone who only has the Perception Skill at the default level, or if you think it's extra important to succeed on this roll you decide to also spend effort, which is an additional +3 each. Trained Perception (+3) and one Effort (+3) would get +6 to your roll.

If you do want to spend effort, for Perception those points come from Intellect so yes if you have that stat higher you could do it more times before depleting that point pool. The long term idea is to spend your XP improving Skills you use often to Trained and then Specialized so you have the permanent built-in modifier every time you do that check and don't need to spend points using Effort on those rolls anymore.