Pocket TTRPG Roundup, Part Four
One more entry for my review mini-series about RPG adventures that fit in your pocket. See Part One for the money, Part Two for the show, and Part Three to get ready. Now, here we go.
Bookmark No-HP RPG (Compleat Bundle)
Publisher: Lester Smith Games
Year: 2021
Dimensions: 2½” x 3½” (poker card size) or 6″ x 1½” (bookmark size) x ¼”
Players: 2-10
(In the tone of “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha”): Fantasy, fantasy, fantasy! That’s all these pocket games are! If only someone would come save us from all these swords and sorcerers! They’re knee-deep! The neighbors are starting to complain!
Bookmark No-HP RPG comes in two formats, bookmarks or cards, either of which satisfy the size constraint of these reviews. The bookmark format is slightly larger, but they’re functionally identical. You can only get the card version PoD from DriveThruRPG, so that’s what I’m working with. You’ll also need at least one full set of polyhedral dice and (once again) a pencil or equivalent.
Gameplay: The game takes the bolt-on approach. One bookmark/card describes the underlying system for everyone, the players get their own “guidebookmark,” and the Game Host (that is, the GM) gets a third. All of them together explain how everything works. (It wouldn’t hurt for everyone to read all three, but you know how players are.) This basic setup is extended with genre cards, described below. The bundle also comes with a “battle bookmark” describing an “advanced” combat system, plus nine blank character cards.
The rules are a convoluted form of generic. Every character has a Vocation, like Fighter or Detective. Vocations can be literally any job or lifestyle you can imagine, and are assumed to come with everything you need; equipment is Not A Thing. Characters also have four Attributes: Brawn, Grace, Will, and Wits. Players divvy up d4, d6, d8, and d10 between these.
To perform an action, the Game Host assigns a Difficulty from 1 to 10. The player then rolls one of their Attributes’ dice that many times. (A player can use any Attribute for any action if they can come up with a reasonable explanation for it, unless that Attribute is exhausted [see below].) If any of these die rolls are a 1, the action fails. Otherwise it succeeds. The degree of success or failure depends on the highest die in your series of rolls, so you’ll want to roll the full number of times even if you fail early.
If a roll fails, reduce that Attribute’s die by one step (d8 becomes d6, for instance). If you fail on a d4 roll, that Attribute is exhausted and you have to rest to use it again. If the roll succeeds and at least one roll is maximum (e.g. rolling an 8 on d8), the die increases one step, usually to a maximum of d12. If you max-success-roll with a d12, you get a Boon, like a new weapon, an ally, a book of spells, etc. Characters can save six Boons and trade them in for a Trait, essentially a permanent piece of equipment, as a way to level up.
Sometimes you’ll come up against a high Difficulty and don’t want to risk a stat by rolling a zillion times. In this case, you can gamble either your Vocation, a Trait, or one of your Boons, which halves the Difficulty. If you fail this reduced roll, you exhaust whatever you gambled. Exhausting a Vocation or Trait is meant to simulate a loss of face, a power-down, a crisis of faith, or similar. You get exhausted Vocations and Traits back after rest and reflection. Exhausted Boons are gone for good.
The gambling and exhaustion stuff take the place of HP in this, the No-HP RPG. Death is story-driven. Either you or the Game Host can declare you dead if you fail a particularly deadly action with a particularly poor roll, but you’re not beholden to. Mostly your survivability depends on how far you can push your bullshit rationalizations to stay alive.
So let’s unpack the die rolling thing here. Obviously it’s best to roll your highest Attribute, especially for low Difficulty actions, to quickly max out your die and start generating Boons. The chance of failure goes up rapidly at the low end, but levels off for higher Difficulties.
The gambling mechanic is a neat way to mitigate this, though a starting character with no Boons and cold dice could easily shoot their wad early and then stumble along, shedding dice levels until something really bad happens. Note that, RAW, resting during an adventure doesn’t reset your dice levels, though it does restore any d4’s you’ve exhausted. The best you can hope for is a hot streak to build them back up.
The genre cards toss a few spins on top of this formula.
- “Swords and Spellbookmarks” add Heroic and Arcane character types. Heroes can perform Epic Actions which bump up their die type, and Arcanists cast Charms, Spells, and Sorcery, with increasing risk/reward structures for each.
- “Bookmark the Stars!” gives everyone Species and Homeworlds with unique abilities and liabilities, and rules to generate a shared spaceship for the team to travel in.
- “Bookmark Cyberpunk” has an alternate character generation system that gives you up to a d20 as a stat, cybernetic Traits, and hacking rules.
- “No-HP Supers!” replaces your Vocation with a Super Identity and an Alter Ego (which gets exposed if exhausted). It also adds super powers, of which you can take as many as you’d like. However, you have an additional risk of exhausting the one you’re using if you roll less than your current number of powers on a d20.
- “Bookmark Cthulhu” adds the Dread Attribute, which increases as you encounter Things Man was Not Meant to Know until you go buggo and melt your face off or explode or something.
- “Dracula’s Get!” makes all the PCs into vampires, with all their classic powers and a powerful thirst for that veiny good-good. I’m sorry. I’ll never say that again.
- “Paranormal Wordbookmark” gives everyone their choice of a psychic gift based on one of their Attributes, and then … they just go around being psychic, I guess. There’s nothing more to the card than that.
The rules don’t say anything about mixing and matching multiple genre cards, but there’s nothing stopping you either. I’ll allow it, but don’t tell your mom.
Pocket fit: The Compleat Bundle is 20 poker-sized cards and/or bookmarks, which have small but detectable mass in the pocket. You’ll also need your dice bag and something to write with, which adds most of the bulk. Still not much. C+ and I’m being kinda mean about it.
Legibility: The rules cards are quite readable for their size, and the bookmark versions are even better for their larger text. Every genre card has its own typography, which is mostly fine, but the sci-fi and cyberpunk cards are printed as white text on dark backgrounds. The sci-fi card has a sort of mottled space nebula background with red highlights, and the cyberpunk one has a light geometric font which would be hard to read in any case.
Everything else is fine, though. B overall, with a couple C-’s in there dragging the average down.
Completeness: There’s no adventure generator or particular game world, but the rules do cover a wide swath of whatever you might want to do. The Game Host card has a tiny “crafting adventures” section which is insultingly rudimentary. There are published adventure sets if you don’t want to be creative. Otherwise this is mostly a toolkit to build your own world on top of. B-.
Final thoughts: I like this one, though more for its audaciousness than for the actual system. In my experience, the dice mechanic is initially difficult to get through to some players. Once a player gets it, it does seem to stick, luckily. The multi-genre thing is a huge breath of fresh air after all those Tolkiens with the numbers filed off. It is a little undetailed in its base form, which is weird to say about a system this comparatively large.
In the end, though, it’s not hard to have fun with, which is all you can really ask for.
The Bookmark No-HP RPG Compleat Bundle is $20 on DTRPG, which includes PDFs and physical cards. If you don’t want the whole passel, they also have “cut-up solo” bundles which include the base rules, one genre card, and one or more sourcebooks for a more in-depth experience. That takes away my complaint about a lack of campaign structure, but also moves it beyond the realm of “pocket RPG,” so [OUT OF BOUNDS ERROR]
Next time: Just one last little thing