PDQ in a Gritty Setting

[QUOTE]A gritty PDQ ... how does that work? I mean, you can create a grossly unfair world and pose moral dilemmas, but to me part of gritty is the very real risk of bleeding, maiming, or death. GURPS, BRP, and FUDGE variants can do that with hit points/damage tracks and hit locations, and even HeroQuest can sort of do it (except for the "Death is never the result of a die roll" rule). Or maybe I depend too much on mechanics ...[/QUOTE]

Hit dice or tracks from other systems provide a quantitative means of determining health. It's helpful in that it helps you determine the overall status of your character. When killing a character in these systems, aside from special circumstances, you are required to exceed a damage threshold, which can take many rounds for high level characters to be killed.

In PDQ we have explicit/implicit options concerning the occurrence of death:
1) Characters can be killed once they are down/out (no roll required, just a declaration on intent to kill) (This is the Default assumption. A gritty setting would use killed once down.)
2) A Killing attack is declared with intent to kill and is successful (and is plausible given circumstances – game mechanics allow for this in combat)
3) Environmental Physical Damage can kill, “Continuing Danger” rule (useful in gritty setting)
4) Bleeding to death is possible. A blade across the throat will cause bleeding, but the results are largely based on intent and success of the attacker (or GM intent).
5) Accidental death is a matter of flavor for PDQ, and obviously appropriate for a gritty setting.

Sometimes there is a damage threshold, but PDQ does take the mechanics out of most of the death process. In a gritty setting it lets a player hold on to that last little bit of hope that maybe, just maybe, he'll pull through. Because in some systems recovery can take days or special acts from healers (very mechanical and unrealistic to me), but in PDQ, if the danger lets up a little, some recovery is possible (2nd wind) and the story can pick up from there.

In my Supers campaign, when a PC was attempting a violent act against another character, I would ask the player if the intent was to kill. So far, this has worked out very well. Though the supers campaign would not be considered gritty.

Silver Cord RPG

I'm working on my game again. Silver Cord is a roleplaying game in a world where psychics are real and some are even powerful. I hashed over the rules and I kept getting stuck on mechanics. I want the game to be simple. I don't want a lot of difficult to understand relationships between game mechanics and the game.

That's right. One thing I tend to do is think of RPGs as games on two levels. Game mechanics are sort of puzzles that some of us like to tinker with until were blue in the face. However, these mechanics are there to facilitate roleplaying. Most mechanics don't do this. They're there to give the game a sense of structure. This sort of structure is an imaginary scafolding that ultimatly limits the imagination of so many of us. We try to create a fun character that we would enjoy playing, but mechanics get in the way and prevent that from happening far too often. Mechanics do allow some gamers to play with very little effort on the part of the players imagination.

The second level of game play is the roleplaying aspect. The fleshing out of character, story, and imagination that fills our minds with the fantastic, the gritty, the real, and the terrible. This is the part of the roleplaying that I consider to be the real game.

Silver Cord is coming together. I've dropped most of the mechanics and the setting is also coming along very well. I am looking for play testers to try out what I have so far. Beware!