I wanted to play Over the Edge, but I can’t stop tinkering with the mechanics of the game. So I combined Over the Edge and World of Dungeons to make my quick and dirty Over the Edge/World of Dungeons hack. It works like this:
PCs have the same traits as normal a normal Over the Edge character, with one central trait and two side traits and a flaw and such. But instead of multiple d6s, traits give you larger sized dice to roll. A superior trait gives you a d10, any regular trait gives you a d8. Narrow traits bump those dice up, giving you a d12 if superior or a d10 if not.
When you roll, you’re rolling against the standard AW derived 2d6 bell curve: 1-6 fail, 7-9 partial success, 10-11 full success and 12+ Critical success system as in WoDu. If one or more traits are applicable, you can replace one or both your 2d6 with the die listed on the trait. So if you have ‘Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu’ at 1d8 and someone attacks you, you roll 1d6+1d8 and check them against the results table. If you’re also fighting a demon in human form, you could use ‘Parapsychology Student’ and ‘Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu’ both to roll 1d8+1d8. Your flaw turns a full success into partial success: you can succeed, but it will never be clean or pretty.
Any failure gets you an experience token. Experience tokens can be traded in to add +1 to your roll after seeing the results. A critical success also gives an experience token.
When you’re hurt, you cross off your top (critical) result first. So thereafter, all critical die results are treated as a normal success. Later injuries continue to remove your highest available level of success (regular successes become partial successes, eventually partial successes are failures… or maybe just partial failures?) Particularly deadly harm might cause multiple injuries at once, though I’d let a PC roll some trait like ‘Sturdy as a House’ to reduce that damage. Medical care care restore some or all of that with a decent first aid roll and/or bed care, depending on the injury.
See some pregen characters as well. I’me most pleased with the house that took human form and the voodoo economist.
6 responses to “My quick and dirty Over the Edge/World of Dungeons hack”
I was looking at the World of Secrets hack, so do we follow the same wound/damage rules and all other applicable rules from AW?
Also the character creation section on the PDF does not seem to mention anything about the d8-d12 die rules. Is it necessary?
The World of Secrets game is entirely separate from this Over the Edge hack. (The only rules either game takes from AW are those in the document.)
For World of Secrets, you don’t have a damage system at all. Wounds are entirely tracked via compromise to your stats. A typical gunshot wound is going to compromise your Action stat, though the GM could argue for compromising something else (a head wound might impair Analysis, a broken hand will impair Technical). PCs die if they are compromised in the same attribute four times.
World of Secrets only uses d6s. The Over the Edge hack uses funky shaped dice where World of Secrets (and World of Dungeons and AW) give +1/+2/+0/etc. to specific stats. That’s me experimenting with different ways to change things around. Each hack uses different tools to achieve similar things. Larger dice give higher average results, effectively being the same as a +1 or +2, albeit while still leaving it possibly to roll lower results. (Using both would probably push the results out of the range desired for the 2-6/7-9/10-12 bell curve.)
Oh I see, sorry I guess I had the hacks confused. Thank you for the reply. So then I assume there is no need to worry about anything like leveling up or increasing stats at any point, and lastly, do I just handle harming an NPC simply as a success or failure and just improvise on whether they are dead or not?
In general yeah, NPCs don’t have any health levels. Neither of these hacks is intended to have a detailed combat system, because they’re not really combat heavy genres/games. I usually just wing it for when an NPC is defeated. Let the fictional description of the players and my intuitive sense of timing int he session tell me how tough the fight should be.
If you want some rules, you could give them a few hits boxes (perhaps partial or total successes do one hit and critical success does 2).
Thanks for your time, yeah I am slightly modifying a few things very little and I am going to give it a shot wednesday. Thanks again!
I would love to hear how the game worked for you, if you played. Or if you play some time in the future, I’d love to hear about that.