To run Kidnap the Archpriest I decided to build a little system, sorta kinda-FKR style. Mostly Inspired by Weird Writer's ablogposts on FKR, I wanted something very light since the adventure itself has enough scaffolding on its own. I also ran the same system with minor modifications in a random one-shot with my weekly group, as a side-story. It turned out well! Though there are some things that need a bit of a change-up.

Fairly simple system based sort of on dice-chain games. There are 3 difficulties, which all have a target number: difficult(4), very-difficult(5), near impossible(6). Rolling the number or over counts as a success, rolling under is a failure. My goal is that all of the consequences are laid out explicitly before the roll.

What determines the dice rolled is a "skill rank" sort of mechanism. Characters are mainly created with a 15-30 word description of the character(based on desired power level) which I stole also stole from Weird Writer's description of the Olde House Rules method. Then, I hand around some highlighters and have players highlight nouns or noun-ish verbs that describe something their character is good at. This determines the dice rolled, as long as one can defend why this skill pertains to the roll at hand. It goes Unskilled(D4)> Skilled(D6)>Adept(D8)>Master(D10)> Best in the World(D12). I gave players 1 Master skill and 3 Adept skills, with the rest on their sheets being considered Skilled.

This is the core of it. For Archpriest, I bolted on a quick slot-based inventory system (stealing Blade in the Dark's item page), and 'hero points' which serve as sort a meta-currency to negate the consequences of bad rolls. I gave them 30 words and a basic description of the setting. I also had to institute a 1 spell policy, since multiple players made spell-casters.

Mid game, I also changed the core idea in the following ways: Rolling something that can apply to two thinks on your sheet gives you an advantage, where you roll the dice from both skills. Secondly, retrying a failed or consequence-less check (usually from using a hero point) increases the difficulty by 1 and makes the consequences of a failure worse. These sort of naturally spawned out of gameplay, as these were certainly not niche occurrences.

It was quick. I don't know how much to chalk up to the system and to Archpriest, since Archpriest sort of requires above-the-sheet thinking in the first place. For my other game, we'll call "Sha Side Stories", the system flowed well for and helped me run an hour long game. I didn't really try out big combats in it, mostly due to the game's I ran not focusing on that. The little bit of combat here was short, though- mostly 1 roll. If I wanted more granular combat, I'd probably have to bolt on an HP/Wounds system. For the game's I'm planning on running with this, probably not a big deal, though.

There's one big glaring weakness, but plenty of smaller ones. First, the D6 basically becomes the standard die. I ran it sort of with every character getting the "adventurer" skill by default, so the d6 becomes sort of the standard roll. We only rolled 1 d4, which I don't actually remember the context anymore. I don't necessarily think it's a huge problem, though it does sort of flatten the experience. I think the main goal of the d4, in hindsight, was to create a die roll for things that should be much harder without training, such as doctoring. Perhaps in the future, I will just increase the difficulty or not allow one to roll something which they could not feasibly do without training, and remove the d4 bit.

The big issue is within character-creation. Some of my players were involved in both sessions, and leaned towards... well, making lists. It makes sense as that's what the system currently rewards in descriptions, though to it doesn't reach the intentions I'm desiring. I think if I want to keep the general core, which I quite like, I'm going to have to 'lift' the actual mechanical bullshit off of the character description. The hope would then be that players will write their description and then draw info from that into some derivative mechanisms. I'll probably give aspects/separate skill boxes a try, sorta like fudge/fate. I'm a sucker for those games anyway, what's the worst that can happen?