How did you survive

As every sacro-mechanical engineer worth a dime knows, you always need a chassis! A skeleton made of hardened steel, well-thought rules and disturbing visions where your dice, your late night beers and your bad acting can attach to.

Given that the aim of this blog is presenting my boring musings on the nature of Pen & Paper RPGs* and disseminate yet another HACK, I should start with the chassis of my very personal Fantasy, Pseudo-medieval, RPG.

Hence, I will start with something else... A 20 entries table that sheds new light on rolling low on ability scores... Your Rogue with STR 5 and COS 3 might be much more viable than you think... afterall. 

I use the Bonus = [Score / 3 round down - 3]  rule, this means that a score of 5 is a -2 and a score of 16 is a +2, and the usual Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma.

ME stands for Magical Encumbrance, a measure of how much eldritch weight you can carry in your mind and a sloppy gauge of the strength of your links to otherworldly powers.

Ah, and I use ascending armor class, the higher the better.

How did you survive?

Roll a d20 once if your total ability bonus is negative, roll twice if your total ability scores bonus is -3 or less. If you get again the same result you get to choose the second reason you survived.

#	You survived due to…
1	Sheer luck, one reroll per session
2	Money, start with +2d10 gp
3	An Incredible sense of smell: You can pick tracks and find things like a trained hound
4	Hard work: Become trained in 1 Skill or increase a skill
5	A good Imaginary Friend: It does not exist but you have advantage on saves on mental abilities
6	An horrible mutation: Roll three times on the mutation table and choose
7	A good dog: You have a good big dog with you and you have advantage to checks to influence animals
8	Granma’s recipes: The food you cook is incredibly good whatever the ingredients and it cures one ability point more in a day
9	An understanding of the Unfathomable: You are trained in Occult or increase your proficiency by one. Furthermore your ME is increased by one.
10	A better self: Once every 24 hours when you get back from being knocked out you regain your true self, threat the result as a 2. You regain 5 HP and you treat all your ability modifiers as +2, if they are less. You get back to normal the next time you sleep.
11	Grit: Each time you suffer CON damage there is a 50% possibility that you ignore it.
12	Your thundering Rage: You can enter a status of furious rage, you treat your strength  and constitution as 18 or you score +2 if it is higher but you have to use the attack action every round. If there aren’t enemies close enough to be attacked you attack your allies, the rage finishes when there are no more creatures to attack or you are knocked down.  Once the rage finishes you cannot fall in rage again until you have a good night of sleep.
13	Friends down below/above, +1 to saves and -1 to death rolls
14	A link to all creatures: You can telepathically communicate with all creatures in a 100 feet radius and you take +10 at Insight checks against creatures in that radius.
15	A dumb strong friend: You have a 0th level very Strong (16 STR & CON, 9HP) henchman. He/She is a simpleton
16	Overprotective Nymph mother: Add 3 to your armor class, if you die due to a wound you just discovered the hidden spot that leaves you open to harm
17	A dark secret, you know a 1st level spell (your choice) and you can cast it without rolling for mishaps as long as you drink blood/eat human flesh/sniff bones.
18	A shitton of Money, start with +2d10 gp you can get another 1d10gp in big cities, your family knows the bankers
19	You did not, you are Undead. Add 5 HP and resist 1 damage + usual immunities
20	Mindspinner**, You start with 3d6 doses of Mindspinner, furthermore you are one of the super rare cases that resist the worst effects. For you the subsequent effect is only Fatigued when not under the effects and 1d2 CHA and WIS damage

For the glory of the "Polyhedral Society" we will continue filling the world with plastic replicas of the perfect forms and roll them to divine the future of our imaginary counterparties.

*Rocket Propelled Games/Roll Playing Games
** A  magical drug that has to be eaten. Initial Save: Impossible (COS). Initial Effect: Advantage and +4 at INT and WIS checks for 12 hours. Subsequent Saves:7 Difficult (CHA) once per day Subsequent Effect: 1d3CHA, 1d3WIS dmg and 1 day exhausted when not under the effects