Thread by @frasersimons

I'm going to talk a bit a bit about Never Knows Best: An RPG Inspired By a wild anime I watched as a teenager named FLCL. I'm proud of the design work I've done on this and I'm gonna highlight a couple things here. kickstarter.com/projects/16354…

Mechanically it's got moves, like in most PbtA games. There's tiered success and it uses six-sided dice. You build dice pools looking for the highest die rolled, like in Blades in the Dark and others. The pool stems from two things:

All PCs start with 2Traits. Every time a player says what they do, trigger a move, and they're embodying a Trait, they get a die in their pool. These are also great at goalposting their character to others and helps roleplaying in general, I find. Secondly,

Labels are pretty much what they sound like. They're given to players ala Monsterhearts. When you're rolling dice and embody a label, or another PC in the scene goes to help or hinder you by tagging a Label, dice are added or subtracted to your pool. Labels can be mechanically...

...altered in a few ways. You can remove them entirely, accrue new ones, and change them with moves. So they can also be a source of empowerment and similarly goal posts to the PC how others in the game view their character.

When you're trying to cause harm or distress,

the amount you do on a successful roll is the number of dice in your pool. Which means as PCs take Advancements and gain more Traits, their damage scales with them and it's easy math. Something that fixes things in the playtest before I moved to dice pools.

The setup is also...

...something I'm proud of. At the start of play, before character creation. Everyone goes through a procedure to create the town. It establishes societal expectations and "mainstream" culture in the form of visual motifs.

Then the players establish counterculture motifs that

subvert the mainstream and similarly work to populate the world with metaphors in line with the overall theme of teens pushing back against these pressures and expectations.

When PCs "overflow" (ala FLCL) they transform into robots that embody hidden, repressed Traits that

empower them, and, when and if the player proves the repressed Trait to be correct, embodying it--that Trait is no longer repressed.

However, undesirable Traits (codified by the players when creating a character) are also released and used by the GM to

create creatures that embody the Traits from the players and the societal expectations visual motifs already established.

When a PC defeats a creature that embodies their own undesirable repressed Traits, they increase in power level, which

in turn, increases their dice pool when overflowing. So by defeating their own inner turmoil, they level up, essentially.

As these PCs gain new Traits, swap Labels, and generally learn more about themselves, they show case these changes at the start of the session by

describing their room. That way every new session, whatever has changed with the character is telegraphed visually, as though it were a tv show or a movie. Maybe they dress differently, have something new, threw something out, etc.

At the end of a session there is also

a procedure to go through that works kind of like Dungeon World? There's some questions posed to the players about their characters and XP is given out. It's structured to serve as a debrief tool and asks stuff like if a PC internalized anything about what growing up, or

if players used the visual motifs representing adolescence or societal expectations to reinforce the theme. Or what to do if they defeated something embodying an undesirable repressed Trait they released, etc. They goalpost what the fictions about and rewards for it.

Experience and Advancements are all geared toward solidifying who the PC is, and the fiction is about challenging them to confront expectations and the stuff they're growing through. So the advancements translate to character growth that's goalposted for everyone. /end, I think..

It’s also pretty cheap. You can get the ashcan book + PDF for $7 USD, and I’m putting together a special hardcover, notebook edition with digest size reference sheets and pages for notes so you can write in it while playing,only available through this KS.
kickstarter.com/projects/16354…