Flying Shoes by Paul VanDerWerf used under CC BY 2.0
Roll for Shoes (RFS) is a tiny little roleplaying system. Yet despite its size, it offers worlds bursting with possibilities, allowing far more freedom than 5E D&D (the only other system I’ve played) in its breathtaking simplicity. It’s not for everyone, but lots of players love it, and you should try it too! If you need more convincing, let me tell you all about it.
It’s Quick to Learn and Quick to Play
As a micro system, RFS requires little time investment before getting the first game up and running. It accomplishes this mainly by having few rules. No eldritch math or searching though endless lists of feats for character generation; all that’s required is stating a name and pronouns.* My “character sheet” was just a name, a list of skills, and a running XP counter.
Let me teach you the entirety of RFS’s single mechanic: the skill system. You start with Do Anything, a level-1 skill. The level of the skill corresponds to the number of d6s to roll; beating the GM’s roll of d6s means your success. Failures give 1 XP. A roll of all 6s gives you a new skill, which is based on whatever you were doing and one level higher than the old one. If you don’t get all 6s but want a new skill anyway, you can make up the difference for 1XP per die. A short example:
Mira tries to sneak around the villain while they monologue. She rolls for her Soft Slippers (2) and gets 2+6=8. The GM decides that the villain will be watchful and rolls two dice against Mira, for a challenging task.* They get 4+5=9, beating Mira. She narrates that she slips and falls into some metal tools, raising a racket. Mira’s player spends the XP from the failed roll, compensating for the 2, to get a new skill: Sudden Loud Noises (3). Whether that will help when the villain’s minions come after her is a different problem…
It might sound complicated, but since those are literally all the rules, it can all be picked up naturally during play.
The Skill System Encourages Creativity
The difference between D&D and RFS can be boiled down to this: one game says you can do anything, while the other gives you a skill called Do Anything. I found that having that on my character sheet was a useful reminder that I could interact with the world however I wanted. No need to check with the GM for what skill to use or figure out advantage or whatnot. If no skill seems to fit, you can always default to Do Anything.
Freed of the need to interact with the world only through the hazy curtain of predetermined skills, my group did whatever random things we wanted. One friend particularly liked to make up spells that his character was attempting and simply roll to see if he could pull it off; once, we summoned the Monsters from the Grand Beyond. While these actions are technically possible in D&D, they’d likely prompt a stop as we checked to see if the rules allowed it, if it was overpowered, what mechanics to use, and so on and so on.
In general, Roll for Shoes encourages improv (do a thing, roll a thing!) and stories that get progressively weirder as the game goes on. Characters accumulate increasingly powerful skills, which also tend to get progressively more and more specifically odd/wonderful/specialized. GMs should be careful to make sure that higher-level skills are specialized, anyway, to prevent characters from spamming a single skill over and over – that’s no fun. All these wonderfully specific skills encourage creative thinking as players maneuver their characters into situations where their skills are applicable.
Abstract Rules Encourage Roleplaying
In D&D, a lot of rules center around combat. There are detailed descriptions of how to resolve actions within combat, how to determine everyone’s status, order of turns, etc. Many skills, bonuses, abilities, and items also are most useful in combat. While it’s possible to do other things, the game doesn’t support that style of play as much. Every creative roleplaying scene requires effort from the players to figure out how it should happen and how to rule what is possible.
RFS, on the other hand, is perfectly happy if all your skills lean toward roleplaying your way out of situations instead of hacking out of them. As an example, one friend gave himself some variant of Pose Dramatically as a skill over multiple games. He would endeavor to find situations where he could pose. Once, his character posed so dramatically that the roomful of enemies he had walked into were terrified and ran. Of course, he could have narrated his way into getting a combat skill – Sucker Punch is one I remember a friend using – but the noncombat resolution was equally valid and supported by the rules.
Because you only gain skills that are relevant to what you do, and you get to make up the specifics of the skills as you please, the skills define your character. Having a skill like Pose Dramatically says something about your character: that they’re the kind of person who would and does pose dramatically. Having Sucker Punch, on the other hand, suggests a character who is more physical and, well, sucker punches their way around. And at the end of a session, the list of skills your character has is a precious artifact all by itself.
Finding situations where you can apply the skills that you have is also a creative act, and the sky (and GM fiat) really is the limit here. Of course, this happens to some extent in D&D as well, and arguing that your higher-bonus skills are applicable in extra situations is a time-honored tradition. It’s just far more fun to do this with skills that you make up that are specific to your characters.
It’s Simple and Easy to Run
Disclaimer: I’ve only ever GMed RFS, so I can’t use my experience to compare it with D&D in this regard.
I found RFS to be a smooth entry into running a game, even though the first time I did so was also the first time playing for both me and my players. Because of the lack of stats, extensive preparation wasn’t needed. In the moment, I simply decided how many d6s to roll against my players as dramatically appropriate. I pulled off several successful games with just a bare sketch of the initial situation and some lines I was interested in exploring further, relying on my players to drive the plot with their random actions.
One of my friends, who does have extensive DMing experience, also expressed how quick the game was to run compared with D&D. While he would actually plan scenarios, he would typically take only about 15-20 minutes to come up with some ideas on the spot based on our genre/theme requests and then be able to jump in.
A minor downside is that RFS isn’t particularly interested in giving you support or structure for GMing.* To help you, though, the person who pointed me to the game in the first place suggested that players should be encouraged to describe how they failed or succeeded. While my players had variable ability and comfort with pulling this off, it was one less thing I had to do and one more way for them to have creative freedom. As an example: That player who liked making up spells attempted to turn the monster attacking the party into a cuddly fluffball. When he failed, he proposed that it instead got giant spikes all over it and gave himself the skill Create Spikes; both developments I was happy to take and roll with.
RFS is simply a blast to run, easy to learn from both sides of the table, and guarantees a game night with lots of laughter with its freeform skill system (if your group is anything like mine, that is). If you want a break from the usual, or suddenly find time and need a game that doesn’t require hours of prep, I encourage you to try it!
Treat your friends to an evening of ritual murder – in a fictional RPG scenario, of course. Uncover your lost memories and escape a supernatural menace in our one-shot adventure, The Voyage.
I have the feeling that this have the same flaws as Fate Accelerated and Fast&Easy: they put the burden on the GM. Less rules just mean that the GM have to figure out how things work.
If any skill is enough to accomplish any task, then there is no meaning on which skill you train. There is no specialization, nor role diversity. Whenever i tried a game that promises to be lighter and easy i’ve found out that they don’t cover the basics very well.
How does the damage work in RFS? combat in general? chasing or tailing someone? questionings? it all is leave to GM to figure out. “Whatever you please” is a poor answer as it would make veteran GMs to sweat, and novice ones probably quit altogether.
If there is a bonus/malus system, it is a rule and each GM will have their own rule, with enough time, each GM would have a different set of rules to handle game situations, despite the game itself telling “there is only one rule”. No there are hundred of rules, you just didn’t wanted to think about them.
Of all the games i played (WtA, Shadowrun, L5R, FATE, CORTEX, SAGA..) the one i love is FASERIP (the old TSR system for Marvel super heroes) that encourage the players to tell their actions as comics panels. IMHO the best point of that game is providing a set of “intensities” that you cross reference on a table, making that the same d100 result would be a success or a failure depending on your level and the difficulty of the task. That leaves out much of the guessing. Of course, as a 30+ years old game there are thousands of home rules to make the game fit everyones tastes (like a very popular Character Point creation system to substitute the random rolling “official” one).
My point is that a good game should help the GM and the players to tell thier story, and the time spent guessing difficulties, outcomes and creating rules ad-hoc will be more that the time invested on checking existing rules. Plus you will need to learn the specific table rules when you change GMs.
I’ll take this one part at a time
“If any skill is enough to accomplish any task, then there is no meaning on which skill you train.”
I feel like this fundamentally misunderstands the RFS skill system. Yes, theoretically you could role Samba Dancing if your goal is to get past the guard. Great, now explain *how* Samba Dancing does that. You take/make up skills based on what your character does and is thus good at.
“There is no specialization, nor role diversity.”
See above, skill diversity = role diversity, taking skills = specialization. You’re building a list of what your character can do better than the average human.
“How does the damage work in RFS? combat in general?”
You are correct that RFS does not have basic rules for this. That has never once mattered in my sessions; the only combat-like situations we had were resloved in dramatically appropriate ways with single rolls of skills the players asked to use. Several games had no combat at all. “Combat” is not a separated land with its own special rules, just a situation you can get into and out of.
That said, if you really want a damage system, there’s one in a semi-official extra: https://rollforshoes.com/extras/ and they put it pretty well:
“By default, outcomes are handled purely narratively, around goals and actions that characters perform. Each action is a discrete move towards a goal, with no resulting values taken into account other than success. This works fine in most games and groups that don’t have a need to track damage.”
“chasing or tailing someone?”
“I’m want to follow that guy through the crowd.” *Do Anything roll of 6*
“Success”
“Great, I keep my eye on them while fighting through the flow of people.” *marks down Eagle Eyed (2) as new skill*
“questionings?”
I’m not sure what this is talking about, but if you mean interrogation, then I’d say the players can roll any justifiable skill (including Do Anything) and describe what they’re doing to try to active their goal. Like every other part of the game.
“If there is a bonus/malus system, it is a rule and each GM will have their own rule”
The basic rules on the GM side for rolling is to do as many dice as you feel like. If someone is hard, more dice. If it’s possible for a normal person, maybe one die. You get a feel for it, the correct number to roll and keep the fun going.
I have to get to my Real Life soon, so no further replies for a while.
That’s exactly my point: homemade “quasi official” tables and rules to fix the lack of rules on their own.
Having to guess the difficulty of every event (and not a fixed difficulty but account for a roll to define target number) can work for low rolling games, but i know it wouldn’t work for my table, for example (as my players have the feeling that a turn is “wasted” if there isn’t a roll). I think it is a novelty, but have a niche usefulness, as the player would either go toward a defined set of skills or having skills that are useful once or twice. As time goes by players would have a bunch of lv 2 or 3 skills unless they specialize in some skillsets (as a new skill depends on the previous one and just get one level higher), and going back to the Do Anything die for any new situation can be undewhelming. Fate also give “the sky is the limit” versatility, but that too end up either in analisys paralisys or munchkin behaviour hammering aspects into the narrative. I don’t think is a system for all.
“Having to guess the difficulty of every event… can work for low rolling games”
First off, it’s not going to break balance or whatever if you roll 2 dice when 1 might have been better. And I’m not sure how deciding on the fly “climbing that wall is challenging, 2 dice” is any worse on the GM than “climbing that wall requires a check, now let me go look up the target number”. As a GM you should know if climbing the wall is difficult or not anyways, and games like D&D would take that knowledge and assign it a number.
“as the player would either go toward a defined set of skills or having skills that are useful once or twice”
I’m not sure why either of those would be a problem. I’ve had characters that fell into both categories and it was always fun. (More often the latter – I really like making up skills, and I don’t mind the inevitable failing that comes with that path). If you could expand on why you think this would be a flaw in the game, that would be interesting.
“As time goes by players would have a bunch of lv 2 or 3 skills unless they specialize in some skillsets”
Yes, that is inherent in the game. Note that the easiest way to get better at something is to fail a lot, which gives you the XP necessary to get level-ups. If you’re spending all your XP on getting highly specific skills, then that’s your character, a specialist. If you’re spending all your XP on levelling up low-level skills, then that represents your character trying lots of things and finding out they’re decent at some of them. Again, I really don’t see the problem here.
“going back to the Do Anything die for any new situation can be undewhelming”
In new situations, you can go back to Do Anything and fail a bit to build up XP. I’ve done that and had fun. You can also come up with creative ways to use your previous skills and I’d let you if you can justify it narratively. Neither seems like a problem. It might be nonoptimized but then RFS isn’t much interested in optimization.
“I don’t think is a system for all.”
You are correct. RFS requires players and GMs to put in narrative creativity, perhaps more than some other systems where you can fall back on structured rules as a safety net. I’m not trying to argue that it’s for every table out there, just that “you should try” it. If you conclude based on this write-up that the playstyle RFS expects is incompatible with your table, great! Don’t waste your time with it, other groups can still enjoy it and you can avoid having less fun with a system which doesn’t fit your needs.
My point is that if you have a framework of rules you can guess the difficulty by aproximation, but if your players can come up with any imaginable skill, who would have it easier to climb a wall, someone with Iron Grip or someone with Parkour? and these skills shows up on the fly so someone failing a shot and gaining Sniper is a posibility.
I’m not trying to discourage anyone to try the game, it’s just that going from D&D to the complete opposite (rule-less and totally narrative driven) is quite sudden for a change.
“who would have it easier to climb a wall, someone with Iron Grip or someone with Parkour?”
Depends on the wall, but I’d probably roll the same number of dice. No need to get feel into the weeds of numbers, just roll and narrate on. The rolls are not the point, they are the improv prompts.
“someone failing a shot and gaining Sniper is a posibility.”
I’d veto that, as a GM. Skills should be related to what the character *did*, and the character emphatically did *not* act as a successful Sniper. They could take something like Wild Shots.
“going from D&D to the complete opposite (rule-less and totally narrative driven) is quite sudden for a change.”
It is, for lack of a better word, a culture shock from D&D, but I think it’s one well worth it :)
Your answers to these questions were really helpful in understanding how the system would work in a practical situation, especially the skill acquisition bit there.
Would it be acceptable for the GM to reject a proposed skill roll?
For example, a player proposes to use “Samba Dancing” to distract a guard, and the GM does not think it would be realistic in the setting, would the GM be able to say “dancing wouldn’t be enough to distract these trained guards”, or would they have to allow the player to attempt to win a very unlikely roll?
First off, saying “no” is something a GM should be able to do in any game. That said, I’d probably tell the player it’s unlikely to work, let them try (probably fail) and then have fun figuring out what happens when the guard sees them…
It’s also worth considering that crunchier systems don’t necessarily put less burden on the GM, but a different burden.
In a system like RFS, if a player says “I fight the guard,” you roll once and then describe the outcome. That’s certainly work for the GM, unless the player is taking on a lot of the heavy lifting.
In a more traditional system, you have to roll for initiative, figure out range, check movement, compare attack roll and AC, make sure the guard’s stats are an appropriate challenge, etc. The specifics change depending the system, but that’s at least much work as the narrative responsibility in a rules light system like RFS.
Obviously the GM should put work on designing an adventure of the right difficulty and with the right amount of storytelling, action and humor. Thats a given. But i think is easier to get the difficulty right having examples or right out of the box challenge levels than trying to decide what a “challenging” situation is. Fate put it like “opening a door is easy, opening a locked door is harder, but forcing a lock while under fire is daunting” or something, but again is not more than a base target number and bonus/malus to it. Having a villain rolling 3 dice (while the basic is just one) for it to achieve a 3 would be anticlimatic as best.
D&D have been the staple for complex systems (complex in a bad sense, where you spend hours searching for rules about the rules) but as i never played it i can’t speak of it. I hope to get into Pathfinder 1ed soon, but my wife is too busy to GM.
My point is that a more complete system will always be better as a more “basic” one, as the roleplaying Golden Rule is “Don’t let the rules kill the fun” hence you can ignore any cumbersome rule that get in the way. But if a rule you need don’t exist, you have to stop the game on its tracks and come up with one, and then balance it to your table.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as ignoring rules you don’t like. While house ruling is important, rules don’t exist in isolation. A GM can’t just pull one out unless they’re prepared to deal with the effects on the rest of the system.
For example: Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition has this very confusing table you need to consult any time two characters directly compete with their stats. Strength vs Strength for arm wrestling, Dex vs Dex for a balancing contest, etc.
That table is super annoying and complex, but the GM can’t easily take it out since without it, there are no rules for what to happen if two characters compete stat vs stat. This can be fixed with effort from the GM, but it’s just that, effort.
The same is true of combat systems. Calculating the area of a cone in systems like D&D is a huge pain, but if you don’t do it, then a bunch of spells with a cone AOE aren’t working right and players who took them will be upset.
There isn’t a “better” or “worse” when it comes to more complex vs less complex, it’s a question of trade offs. A super simple system like RFS has draw backs of course, but adding more rules wouldn’t necessarily make it better.
I couldn’t say it better.
You, as a GM trade annoyment for effort. But if you take the effort to fix the rules that are annoying you do it once, and save the future annoyment. If there are no rules you’ll still have to invest effort for each rule you want to use, creating a whole new system in the end.
“simpler” games like this or Fate retort too often to “discuss it with your table” and they don’t know how that slows down the game!
Shifting the burden to the players is a huge flaw of this kind of “narrative driven” systems (like “I don’t know how to solve this, if the GM doesn’t know either let the players discuss and decide” sounds “ideal” but so lazy). The “discuss with your players” bit is always present in most games, but in the way of “Player and GM should discuss beforehand how this will work” and since RFS push in the improv direcction there isn’t any “beforehand” aka legwork.
You can replicate RFS “rules2 by rolling 1d6 and ask for a target number from 2 to 6, but that don’t make it a roleplaying game.
Unfortunately, house ruling is not nearly as neat or “one and done” as you suggest. Every house rule you make actually *increases* the game’s complexity as you now have to figure out how that house rule interacts with all the other rules.
Like, if you create a house rule to simplify calculating a cone AOE, that can have all kinds of knock-on effects as it changes the balance of cone spells. And that’s for a fairly minor rule. Lord help you if you need to change something integral to the game like Armor Class or attack rolls.
Both rules light and rules heavy systems require constant effort by the GM, that’s just the nature of the beast. The question is what kind of effort a GM is best at.
For GMs that prefer rules light games, the narrative burden of “roll and I’ll describe what happens” is no big deal. While GMs who prefer crunchier games tend to be better at working out the math of house ruling.
I am so happy you are covering non dnd games. I love dnd but I came to mythcreants for the indie rpgs.
That said, I feel like rules light games can be very difficult for some players and can often leave people incredibly stressed. I can’t play light rules games because two of my players start being overwhelmed very quickly. The lack of necessary “logic” to the game will make one player quit as well.
I like rules light games a lot, but if you have players who need grounded ideas and dislike open worlds you might get a different experience.
For me, a nice middle ground that does something similar but has a few more rules and less likely to stress my players is heroquest 2nd Ed.
You can’t do any skill but you can start with any thematically appropriate skills. So pose dramatically could be a skill as can create spikes or sucker punch, but they don’t level up so quickly and you start with about ten of them at different ratings.
You can also have flaws.
I think as a person who’s favourite part of D&D is stacking up a bunch of math to get big numbers these kinds of rules-lite ttrpgs are a hard sell but your article was really compelling!
Out of curiosity, do you mostly play one-shots with this or more campaign length stories? It seems like the numbers of dice could get impractical over longer run-times unless the GM is careful to keep a tight grasp on how big dice pools are allowed to get.
My group has mostly used RFS for one-shots, because it was originally something to do while we were waiting for everyone else’s schedules to align for a planned campaign. That said we’ve done everything from 1hr quickies to the campaign equivalent of a novella (5 sessions, spread over a few weeks). We had a lot of fun figuring out how the random skills our characters got at the beginning could come back near the end. Some quick searching brought up this Q&A elsewhere on how to use RFS to run a longer campaign: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/31580
Thanks!!
RFS is one of my favourite games!
I think it’s the RPG equivalent of a party game, and so if you’re an established GM and are squinting at this and thinking “I don’t know if I can run a campaign with this” – you’re right, you probably can’t. That also doesn’t matter one lick, because where RFS shines are oneshots.
It also tends to be extraordinarily silly. There’s (one) clever thing RFS does, and that is to make your most specific skill your most powerful one. You know the way you become very alert to enemy positioning if your character is, say, good at backstabbing? Well, same, but what if what your character is best at is “Insulting Grandmothers’ Cooking 3”? Well, now you’re asking old ladies about their grandkids and telling her to please boil the apple she just gifted you – so that in case she turns out to be an elder dragon, you can be prepared to cut her down with your wit.
The game does not have a lot of structure, but what structure it does have tends to make it warp the session to be around the things players find most engaging, in the silliest way possible.
It’s a one-shot comedy game. You will be delighted if you use it as such. :)
This sounds a little like Kintsugi
https://mythcreants.com/blog/four-tiny-story-games-for-when-you-have-less-than-an-hour-to-play/
Actually Kintsugi was inspired in part by RFS