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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ART!" data-source="post: 8859475" data-attributes="member: 79926">Along the liners of Fate and the PbtA games, I became  a big fan of the Smallville rpg, which used the Cortex system. Cortex is now a very modular system that you could use to build a (near?) replica of the Smallville rpg.What that game had was a lot of the usual things games like D&D have to define characters. I can't remember all the terms the game used, but you had the equivalent of skills, feats, backgrounds, and super-powers (which in D&D terms would be your class features and spells. The kinds of stuff that exceptional Ability scores represent in D&D were represented by one of more of the above.But the thing that really caught my eye, really stuck with me, and that I would love to make the time to hack into D&D, was Values and Relationships. Values were ideals, basically. There were 5 or 6 of them, Smallville had a thematic pre-set list of them, but a Cortex game could be built with your own tonally-appropriate list. You would basically rate each Value with a die type (d4 to d10, maybe d12 was in there, too).Relationships were very rated the same way, but you had as many of them as there were other PCs in the group. Each relationship was rated in terms of how strong yourbond was to that other PC. Remember, this was designed to emulate the kind of serialized drama you get in tv shows.Powers, skills, etc. were also rated in dice.Here's the clincher: when you're trying to do a thing and going to roll dice, you and the GM would decide which Value, Relationship, power, skill, etc. was relevant. You had to roll two dice, but you could roll more if other stuff was relevant, and then you choose the two results you want from the roll.So, if Lois Lane is on a train while investigating a criminal thing, and the bad guys have cut the brakes, Superman would definitely use his Super-Strength die to stop the train, and his Justice (a Value) die, but could also add his Lois (a Relationship) die.I've tinkered with ways to do this in 5E without messing with things much. I tried giving Background characteristics a die you could add to relevant rolls, and that works as well as any other "add a dX" class feature or spell - i.e., it works...okay? when you remember to do it.Anyway, something along those lines would be a way to bring out the storytelling that 5E likes to think it already has built into but doesn't provide much support for.</blockquote>

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