Responding to my first comment, sorta...

Thanx for the feedback, Paul.

Here's a question: how would it play out, in a session, if I had 5M and 7E dice, and I wanted to do something frighteningly mundane, like bluff my way into a bank (maybe by pretending to apply for a loan)?

What difficulties would I experience, given the die pool imbalances? What powers would be at my disposal?

I'd kinda been thinking along these lines lately. I think there will need to be keywords or aspects that govern Mundane acts as well as the keywords that govern the Extraordinary acts.

I still like the idea that the more boring a task is, then the higher its target number will be in mundane dice.

I d0n't have an answer to your question yet, but here's a sorta related idea to kick around.

What if doing something Mundane or Extraordinary didn't automatically draw dice from the opposite pool. Maybe there is some sort of exploding dice like mechanic. So you have 5 Mundane dice and the GM (or antagonist player, not sure yet) says the difficulty of applying for a bank loan is 4 cause that's pretty boring. You roll all 5 dice and get 3 successes. You've failed, BUT if you rolled a 6 that would allow you to pull a die from the Extraordinary pool and roll it to try to get that fourth success. Either way, that die would stay in the Mundane pool.

That may slow things down a little bit more, which is what I'm looking for at this point.

I found a balance, maybe...

I’ve been thinking a lot more about the balance and tug of war between the paragons and the gray world.

I’ve changed the setting slightly, added a new mechanic and probably ruined some of my existing ideas, but I think it will be worth it.

The players have 12 dice, and two dice pools. One pool is for the Mundane ability of the character, and the other pool is for the Extraordinary ability of the players. You would start with 10 Mundane & 2 Extraordinary dice. Every time you use a power a die moves from Mundane to Extraordinary. And when you do Mundane tasks by interacting with normal people, dice are drawn back to the Mundane pool.

The setting change… The paragons are now Essences. Instead of a single person, they are more an energy that connects the power users. They provide a hive mind like connection for users at a certain level. Eventually if you grow to the ultimate power level (emptying your Mundane pool) you are absorbed into the Essence. On the other hand, if you empty the Extraordinary pool, you fall back into the world of the Gray and lose your powers.

The other main setting change… The characters become more and more invisible to the people of the Gray world as their power grows. Power users are always visible to other users.

So that (I hope) provides a system by which the players will not want to become godlike, because they won’t be able to interact with the regular world.

First Ideas

First Post!

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. Most of them talk alot about Indie RPGs. After I listened to the Sons of Kryos Dreamation round table show I started getting all kinds of ideas.

Most of these posts will be from things I've posted on the Forge.


Out of the Gray is the title for the game. A lot of the theme is based on the color spectrum and light.

“Powers” exist and each one has a physical and mental key word. For instance Red is the power of Anger and Pain. Each power also has two aspects. White is the external use and Black is the internal use.

Each PC starts with one color and can use either aspect of it. Right now I’m using a D6 mechanic with 4+ being a success. You would start with one D6. Each time you use a power in the same aspect it gets stronger and you add a die. If you are using a different aspect than the last time you used the power, you lose a die. At a certain point when you succeed with a power (right now I’m thinking around 5 or 6 dice in the roll) it locks into that aspect and lets you choose a new power above or below it on the spectrum. In the future any time you use a power in the same aspect as a locked power and can justify their combination, you can add in the dice from the locked power.

You may already see what my problem is. This lets the PCs power up very quickly.

The setting gives me a natural system for slowing advancement, but I can’t come up with a mechanic. I’ll have to explain a little bit more…

The setting (in general)

The power first manifested in a world much like our own today. Two users discovered the aspect linking and each followed a different path. One became the paragon of White, the other the paragon of Black. They fought, but neither could win. A kind of cold war situation developed and they began to tame the world. Other power users were exterminated or joined one of the two camps. Soon everything was dull and safe. Most people are unaware of the situation, and never experience strong emotions due to the influence of the paragons. New power users are born when someone does feel something like pain or anger to a great degree and “awakens” to the Red power.

I want there to be a balance between two forces pulling on the PCs. There is the pull from the gray world to fall back into boring safety. The other pull results from locking powers. The more powers you lock into an aspect, the more influence that paragon has on you.