The Infinite (Actually) Possibilities of Grant Howitt's RP6

 Ever since I learned about Grant Howitt’s one-page TTRPGs from the actual-play podcast Dungeons and Daddies (about which I have many future blog posts up my sleeve), my friends and I have been obsessed.

The Witch is Dead, a game about familiars avenging their murdered master, was my best friend’s first experience GMing and resulted in a hilarious high-speed carriage chase with the witch hunter (who was also a sandwich hunter in the nearby sandwich-making village’s annual ingredient scavenger hunt). Goat Crashers, a D6-only game about goats sneaking into a human party, was my family’s introduction to TTRPGs. I rolled for a random setting, and my brother’s goat ended up eating quite literally everything in a Cthulhu-worshipping, bioweapon bootlegging Jay Gatsby’s house, including the anthrax tanks he was selling under the table.

Howitt has countless amazing RPGs, and I highly recommend them, even the ones I haven’t tried myself—and I do want to try them all. However, when browsing his itch.io for games to run while I’m home for winter break, his latest RPG, aptly named RP6, caught my eye.

In the past, my friends and I have tried creating our own fully homebrew role-playing systems, but we’ve always ended up pulling rules from larger systems we run in our primary campaigns, like Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu. We usually default to rolling D20s and loosely basing all combat on D&D, despite most of the players (myself included) disliking the slow pace of D&D combat.

With RP6, I think Howitt has created the perfect D6-only one-shot system. Before sitting down to write this post, I spent quite a while thinking through all the possibilities presented by Howitt’s example genres and rules alone, as well as what my players might choose. Almost any open-ended TTRPG has endless replay value, but RP6 has no preset setting or magic system; you and your players can create something wildly different from every previous game, every time. I can genuinely imagine RP6 being the only system I use to run one-shots with my friends.

However, some players do want more to work with, especially first-time players. With my family, for example, I initially tried running a D&D one-shot, but they were overwhelmed by all the options and the planning required before the game could actually start. Since they’d never played any TTRPGs before, though, I wouldn’t use RP6 as a starting point, either; the open-endedness of collective worldbuilding bound only by genre would likely overwhelm them, too. Howitt’s more structured RPGs ended up being perfect for them, and now that they have more experience, I’m considering running an RP6 game with them, too.

Initially, I had gripes with the dice rolling mechanic. A 6 being the only way to succeed without consequences felt too difficult. However, after reading some of Howitt’s examples of ways to “persuade the GM” for positive modifiers and rolling some dice while thinking through possible situations, I realized this mechanic is actually pretty well-balanced, as long as it’s used fairly.

For example, if a player rolled a 4 to redirect a spaceship but explained that their character is the ship’s pilot, as GM, I would definitely accept and give them +1 to their roll. However, if they explained that their character piloted a ship once somewhere in their backstory, never mentioned before that their character knows how to pilot a ship, and are clearly just making it up on the spot to succeed… I probably wouldn’t give it to them (unless they looked really pitiful and bribed me with a cookie or something).

My only suggestion—yes, literally just one—would be to give players whose result is above 6 more than just a clean success; it should go better than they had even hoped. For example, if the player is the pilot (+1) and rolled a 6 to redirect the spaceship, they are lucky enough to fly even better than usual, maybe even diverting the enemy ship hot on their trail into a debris field while the players escape scot-free.

For the optional rule about injuries, I’d also suggest adding GM persuasion: Maybe the player’s character is shot and the GM rolls a 6, meaning the player would be out of the game, but the player reminds the GM their player is a prepper who’s constantly wearing a bulletproof vest, or maybe their character has yet to confess their love to an NPC and is really convincing about their right to stay alive until they can accomplish that goal. Of course, the GM and players could workshop this idea with specific modifiers for their own game.

I haven’t actually run an RP6 game yet, but I’m absolutely thrilled by all its possibilities. Maybe my friends and I could pick up our failed homebrew Twilight parody RPG again, or maybe I’ll suggest a genre and a couple of rule ideas to my family as a starting point to give them more structure. Whatever I start with, I plan to write an update post after winter break with how it went and any other suggestions for other GMs/players!