It’s been close to three months since I updated Protoplastic officially, but believe me, I never stopped working on it. In spite of a variety of other projects and things going on in my life, when not otherwise occupied my thoughts always return to little plastic robots.
So many changes in this version that they’re hard to list. The core concept of the rules is roughly the same, but basically every specific component has been tweaked and refined. The basic action rules are nearing my Platonic ideal of a roleplaying game, such that I hope to not have to change them much anymore – apart from the way the dice pool works, which is still a matter of active development. In this update, each hero now maintains their own pool of three dice instead of drawing from a single pool, but can give them to other players with an aid action.
The book is twenty or so pages longer, primarily because it now includes a full GM section: the Tyrant has been renamed the Adversary, and has specific rules about making their own antagonist character and taking their own downtime actions. Also downtime actions are a thing now, because no modern TTRPG is complete without them.
Future work will switch focus from basic “doing things” rules to adventure building: procedures for the Adversary to follow that result in interesting challenges. I have some enticing ideas about converting the Megaman boss structure into a campaign format that I’d like to expand upon, and might cover in a future post. Of course, this means more playtesting, which I will also report on.
Thank you to everyone who was looking forward to this release. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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