Brief: an outgrowth of Uncharted Worlds / PtbA with a smattering of 5e / S7.

Only two core traits: Skills and Assets.

• Skills represent capability. Any fundamental attribute they require is baked into the skill, numerically speaking.
• Assets are something that can be gained or lost, including material goods, personal connections, and knowledge.

Unlike PtbA, players have a clear "level", although it's a pretty simple number: the sum of your Skills and Assets. Let's call it a Build Point. Guidelines:

• tiers of power:
  • 1-9 BP: pre-adventurer
  • 10-19 BP: hero
  • 20-29 BP: paragon
  • 30+ BP: legend
• spending BP:
  • Gaining a new skill: 1 BP
  • Advancing a skill: 1 BP
  • Gaining an asset: 1+ BP (depends on Asset value)
• calculating current BP total:
  • sum of all BP values of all skills and assets

Skills

The way all skills work:

• Roll 2d6
• Add your modifier (i.e. the number of BP you've spent in the skill, max is typically +3)
• Optionally, add situational modifiers, such as from an ally Helping Out, or by cashing in an Asset
• Results:
  • 2-6: failure (mark XP)
  • 7-9: mixed success
  • 10-12: complete success (or mixed plus gain a temporary asset)

General Skills

• Animals/Plants
  • Tend to animal/plant
• Archaeology
  • Learn something about a physical artifact
• Creativity
  • Create something
• Investigation
  • Learn something by analyzing evidence
• Hacking
• High Society
  • Connections
  • Decorum
• Linguistics
  • Interpret a language
• Mechanic
  • Build/fix something mechanical
• Medicine
  • Heal someone
• Mercantilism
  • Locate hard-to-find items for sale
  • Get a good deal
• Persuasion
  • Convince someone to go along with you
  • Incept an emotion
• Research
  • Learn something by perusing a knowledge base
• Underworld
  • Learn something by engaging Underworld contacts
  • Locate a person/place/thing, in exchange for Assets

Combat Skills

• Demolition
• Melee
• Mobility
• Piloting
• Ranged
• etc

Power Skills

(various, see universal S7 power list, e.g. Fire, Force, Telepathy)

Assets

Cashing in an Asset might not always work. It may or may not expend the Asset.

Assets can be vague or specific. In the former case, they can work for any purpose; in the latter, they can be protected from loss by logic.

Spending more BP on an asset increases its value exponentially. For example:

• Ships:
  • 1 BP: personal small craft (shuttle, light transport, fighter)
  • 2 BP: reasonable medium craft (transport, freighter, frigate)
  • 3 BP: large transport
  • 4+: capital ships

More TBD

Weapons

• Damage: 1 hit per BP spent on damage
• Other traits:
  • Melee: -1
  • Ranged: 0
  • Long range (i.e. sniper): 1 (you can engage from outside the encounter)
  • Splash damage: 1 or more
  • Extra damage, different type: same cost as more base damage, tracked separately for Armor purposes
  • etc...

Non-Combat

Generally speaking:

• PC wants to do something
• They roll a skill (which one? interplay between PC and GM)
• Die roll determines outcome

Combat

PtbA combat is too simple. 5e is too complex. This is hopefully a Goldilocks solution.

General flow:

• A PC decides to do something in combat. They roll a Combat or Power Skill.
• Target gets a chance to react, using a Combat or Power Skill of their own.
• Before considering target's response, normal die roll rules apply to attacker, i.e.:
  • Complete success: you hurt them the way you wanted to, with no major undesirable side effects.
  • Mixed success: you still hurt them, but there's a complication, limitation, or price to pay.
  • Failure: you didn't hurt them, and there's a price to pay.
• Similarly, the defender's action is interpreted as such:
  • Complete success: your defense prevents them from hurting you.
  • Mixed success: as above, but there's a complication, limitation, or price to pay.
  • Failure: you fail to prevent harm, and may yet suffer other consequences.

The price of failure:

• In general, complications and prices to pay are preferred. If there's an interesting narrative consequence that makes sense, go with that. Examples:
  • You succeed, but you suffer disadvantage to defend against target's next move.
  • You succeed, but are out of position, and cannot Help Out against your allies this round.
  • You succeed, but the enemy as a chance to use an offensive action as a reaction, instead of a defensive one.
  • etc...
• Power Skills have their own built-in consequences.
• Boring ol' melee and ranged attacks don't, so rely on the above.
• Knowing what the defender's reaction is will only add narrative options, so determine that first (along with its roll) before deciding on the cost of the attacker or defender's failure.

Reactions:

• Every offensive action allows the defender to take a defensive reaction. That is, they may use any skill they wish, but the intent must be to avoid or redirect harm, and it must make sense that the skill could do that. Even then, the skill roll must succeed (at least partially) in order to prevent harm.
• Counterattacks: reactions may be attempts to harm the attacker, rather than to directly avoid or mitigate damage. In this case, the attacker always has the option of negating their own attack, and in so doing, negating the counterattack. Reactions may not be attacks against unrelated targets, unless they are logical, indirect consequences of a counterattack on the attacker (e.g. a splash-damage attack centered on the original attacker)

Action Economy

• Everyone gets 1 action per round.
• Everyone who gets attacked gets a reaction against the attack.
• Those who haven't acted yet can take an action early to Help Out, either enhancing an ally's action, or reacting to an attack in an attempt to defend said ally.

Monsters

Monsters can invest BP into one more thing besides Skills and Assets: they're called TBDs

• Extra Hits: 3 BP each
• Armor: 5 BP each
• Extra Actions: 5 BP each

Powers

Taking a Power Skill is the beginning of using Powers, not the end. Landing a successful roll with a Power Skill is, of course, not too hard. The really interesting part is the power's cost.

The cost of any given action that uses a Power Skill is determined at the time it is envisioned, and ultimately determined by the DM, according to these guidelines:

• 0: trivial
• 1: about as practical as something you could do with normal tools (e.g. damage equivalent to a normal weapon, physical work equivalent to a similar PC's action)
• 2: something that would seriously change the game (e.g. major debilitation, compulsion, limitation on actions, major damage)
• 3: equivalent to instantly defeating someone as powerful as the PC (e.g. a 3-damage hit, zoning enemy into serious hazard, removing enemy from fight)
• 4: even greater

This cost is effectively the level of risk the PC is accepting by using the power. The intent is, presumably, to the benefit of the PC, but if they completely fail, they will suffer consequences of roughly equal intensity (which can perhaps be mitigated by Assets, aid from other PCs, etc). Quick sidebar: an extremely limited list of mitigating factors might be thus:

• Help Out: another PC can use an action to reduce negative effects from failure. If PC #1 suffers a 3-cost failure, PC #2 could attempt a 2-cost power to protect them, which, on success, would mitigate the 3-cost failure to a 1-cost failure.
• Assets: generally, you can mitigate a 1-cost failure by permanently expending a 1-cost Attribute, or damaging a 2-cost Attribute such that significant repairs are needed.

The general rule of Mixed Success applies just fine here: on a Mixed Success, the PC (or someone they'd rather not) suffers approximately as much harm as the intended target (as opposed to, say, dividing it up equally). And also, again as a general rule, the PC shoudl usually have the option to "shallow up" their intended effect, which decreases harm to both the intended and unintended targets.

Dev Notes

• Combat
  • Might make sense for the automatic, no-cost reaction to require a failure or mixed success on the attacker's part. This is separate from enemy moves. Then again, that might be swell for boring ol' weapon attack exchanges, but Power Skills already have a serious cost for failure.