Stay Frosty

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Séadna

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A little game I got recently. Stay Frosty is a roughly B/X or OD&D derived game for playing point crawl sci-fi bug hunts in the style of Aliens, Doom or Starship Troopers (the movie, not Heinlein's novel). It can work as an RPG or an RPG-lite minis skirmish game and can be played solo.

Quick Summary of differences from B/X:
  1. Lower attributes are better as it is roll over
  2. Your attributes function as your AC, armour instead subtracts damage
  3. Encumbrance is slot based, not calculated weight
  4. There is an advantage mechanic, mostly replacing modifiers
  5. There is a Tension system for how focused and nervous PCs are
  6. Magic is replaced by the small Psionic powers list, which require a check to work
  7. Items and weapons don't have a fixed number of uses/ammo, instead a descending die mechanic generates when they run out
  8. Assumed play is a point crawl

Resolution Mechanic and Attributes:
Checks are done as roll over attributes on a d20, so lower attributes are better.

There are three kinds of checks: To Hit, Skill and Saves with typical D&D meanings.

Attributes are: Brains, Dexterity, Brawn, Willpower

Dex is used for dodging, fall damage and firing weapons
Brains is for skill checks mostly (e.g. hacking colony security), getting into some areas of the military (e.g. Medical) or focusing in combat
Brawn is a combined strength and constitution, so it determines accuracy in melee, ability to withstand hunger and encumberment limit
Willpower is for resisting or making Psychic attacks, intimidation in fights and hooks into the Tension subsystem (see below).

There is no skill system, so for example repairing the colony's power unit is just a Brains check.

Most modifiers are modelled as advantages or disadvantages, roll 2d20 and take best/worst. Advantage and Disadvantage cancel when applied to the same roll.

Character Generation:
Attributes are determined by 3d6 rolls

You then choose a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) and roll for Rank (1d6)

MOS typically gives an advantage on rolls related to that MOS and an item, e.g. Medical gives an advantage on healing rolls and a medkit

Some have attribute requirements, e.g. Medical needs Brains 9

There are three Ranks (Private, Sergent, Lieutenant) each with their own benefits, e.g. Private gives +1 HP per level and you get a combat knife

Health is rolled randomly, not based on attributes.

All characters start with a list of standard equipment

Levelling Up:
d10 extra health
d20 check on Attributes, roll under and they go down by 1. You can reroll two attributes determined by Rank
Levels 3 and 5 grant an extra action in combat and a new Psi-Power if you are a Psionic

Combat:
Melee is handled by Brawn, Guns by Dexterity

Combat proceeds as:
  1. Dex check, failure means you go after aliens, success means before
  2. You roll over your stat to hit aliens
  3. Aliens roll under your stat to hit you
  4. The PCs have Fumble and Critical tables for 1s and 20s
  5. Roll damage dice
  6. PCs roll Ammo dice
So not only will a Dexterity 10 character hit twice as often as a Dexterity 5 character, ranged attacks will miss him twice as often as well. Also the aliens have no Attributes for this reason.

Aliens cause a -1 to both their roll and yours for every hit dice they are above your level. So an Alien with 5HD will give -2 to combat rolls against a Level 3 PC. This is to simulate powerful creatures like an Alien Queen and has quite a drastic effect statistically given the simultaneous increase in the chances to miss and be hit.

If you choose not to attack you can Intimidate (gives disadvantage to opponent), Focus to get an advantage, or use Psi-Powers via a Willpower check

Damage and Health:
Damage that reduces you to less than zero health is then applied to increase your attributes. If any attribute hits 21, you die. Armour works by subtracting damage.

HP is restored to its original maximum after eight hours rest. Attributes heal at one point a week, which to be honest won't be time you have in a typical scenario for this game.

Some aspects of the damage system return, I felt, to Gygax's original conception of HP. Falls and Tension damage do the base damage rolled times character level. Since HP reflects skill in a fight and being abstract "staying power" in a fight (AD&D 1E DMG), you wouldn't expect the HP increases you get from levelling up to help with falls.

Weapons:
Each weapon has an Ammo dice, e.g. Rifle has d8. Every time you fire it, you roll the dice and on a 1 or 2 it drops to the next dice level (d8 -> d6). When you drop below a d4 the weapon is out of ammo.

Guns have a disadvantage at close range and a disadvantage if fired one step beyond their listed range. Ranges are:
Hand-to-Hand -> Close -> Short -> Medium -> Long -> Extreme

However the implementation of ranges is purely GM/rulings decided.

They can also have up to three special abilities from a list of nine. Special abilities include typical things like armour piercing, being a heavy weapon or ignoring close range penalty.

Items, Hunger and Encumbrance:
Items have a Supply Dice similar to the Ammo dice for weapons and works in the same manner.

Encumbrance is slot based, you can hold 21-Brawn items.

Item list is quite short, twelve in total. It's what you'd expect from the genre: Rations, Medkit, Targeting Reticule. All work as you'd expect except Rations decrease Tension (see below). Also not eating rations and going Hungry prevents Healing and lowers Attributes.

Psi-Powers:
Make a Willpower check and pick from nine powers. These are typical ones like taking control of a living being or machine, healing others, telekensis, telepathy, pyrokensis.

On a failure you can take damage to get a success.

Point Crawl:
Every time you enter a new point on the point crawl you roll on a Danger table. This results in:
  1. An encounter with enemies or NPCs
  2. Simply a new location
  3. Increases in Tension
  4. End active effects (e.g. Psionic bonuses) and a check on the Supply Dice for consumables.
Vehicles:
Vehicles have four relevant stats:
  1. The heavy weapon they carry
  2. Speed
  3. Armour
  4. Health
  5. Special stats
Special stats describe the number of personnel they carry, whether they have heavy armour (meaning only heavy weapons can damage them), if they have a close range weapon and if they are all terrain.

For comparison a typical starting PC has 8HP and 2 armour, a tank has 75HP with 10 armour.

Having a higher speed than another vehicle/alien gives you an advantage in chase rolls. People on foot are always Slow with a disadvantage.

How chases function beyond this and what exactly the speeds might mean beyond determining advantages is left to the GM.

The Armour MOS gives an advantage when operating or repairing a vehicle.

Tension:
This reflects how focused the PCs are, giving cumulative advantages (called Frostiness) as it increases. The danger table above can increase it and any combat will as well.

By maximum the Tension of 6, PCs are quite a bit more lethal having advantages of saves and initiatives, extra damage, ignoring the Close range penalty on guns and having an extra attack.

The Danger table can also cause Tension to explode, an emotional outburst. This is a Willpower save to avoid taking damage. If this causes HP to hit zero, the PC gets half their health back and rolls on the "Going Apeshit" table, which can give advantages or disadvantages that can last for the rest of the scenario.



Miscellaneous:
The game comes with a couple of random generator tables for NPCs, locations, monsters, complications and some funny ones (how the facehuggers get into you with results like "anus").

Overall the rulebook has a funny tone, the author giving up barely a page into spot rules (only giving Falls and Hunger rules), Fumble/Crit tables being called FUBAR tables, etc.

How to get:
Lulu for POD:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/casey-garske/stay-frosty/paperback/product-23093720.html

Drivethrurpg for PDF:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/206742/Stay-Frosty

I'll be running a game here on the Pub. At night mostly.

(Video has swearing in case any are at work)
 
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Love this little and tight rule set. I notice one of the hosts of Fear of a Black Dragon podcast uses it to adapt OSR modules.
 
Is this in print? If so, where?
 
A lot of this reminds me of Mothership.
Agreed. Roughly speaking I think Mothership = Alien, Stay Frosty = Aliens.

I'll do a contrast when I've more experience with both. A good example is that they both have a "pressure" mechanic, but in Mothership it's more psychological having effects like descent into madness. In Stay Frosty it's action oriented, i.e. you "go ape shit"
 
How does that work and what makes it happen?
Moving between areas or entering special GM decided danger zones can up your character's Tension. The tenser the character is the better they are in combat. This is decided by an Danger table, with some rolls upping tension, but others being simply encounters at the location. Tension runs from 1-6.

One of the Danger table outcomes is Tension explodes! where your character has an emotional outburst and becomes less able to fight, reflected in lowered HP. HP is lowered more the higher the Tension was. Specifically the HP loss is Tension x Level.

However if it causes HP to drop below zero your character instead "Goes Apeshit". They regain half their HP and some benefit (e.g. +1 attack, greater damage rolls, cannot be surprised) or some hindrance (e.g. bad at stealth, run from fight).
 
Having finished out the Pub game, here are some notes if anybody intends to run this. This is going by RAW assumptions on how the game is to be run.
  1. The vehicles, especially the tanks, are extremely powerful. Roughly speaking the Heavy Tank will require a swarm of 40 or more of enemies that pose a serious threat to even two PCs, e.g. I had enemies of strength roughly like that of the book's "Hunter" and the tank survived 35 of them in good condition.

  2. By the time the PCs reach "Ice Cold" on the tension chart they are very strong. Equivalent to roughly 2.5 of their base self. If they have good stats in Dex even more so, they could be the equal of 3 average PCs.

  3. Remember that the status of an area is determined to a large degree by the danger table. So you don't have a fix on whether an area will be silent/exploratory or a fight when the PCs enter.

  4. The enemies are mostly intended to be melee based, with the PCs using guns. This gives the PCs the advantage of range, thus if you want to make things more equal use small rooms. This range advantage also tends to soften the book's Fumbles and enhance the Crits. This is because many of the Fumbles will have some time to be recovered from at a distance and one of the Crits stuns the enemies further delaying them reaching the PCs.

  5. Powerful aliens are more lethal than you might intuitively think due to how their cumulative -1 per size above PCs interfaces with the mechanics. Weak enemies smaller than the PCs will be mowed down due to the same effect.
 
I appreciate the notes, and I intend to run this over roll20 tonight with some friends.

I hacked it somewhat to lean a lot more heavily into the Aliens universe, and altered some character creation rules to give Players more choice on what stats to give focus to. I might have altogether broken the damn game but I'll see how it goes, it's just a one shot.

This will be the first game I run as explicitly point crawl but in hindsight, I have ran some Dungeon World games in the past as pseudo Point Crawl.
 
Can someone explain what is meant by “point crawl”? I’m not familiar with that term.

This sounds like a great option to run for ad hoc games.
 
Can someone explain what is meant by “point crawl”? I’m not familiar with that term.

This sounds like a great option to run for ad hoc games.
This thread has a good discussion:

As TJS TJS says there it's basically mapping out an area like a subway connecting points of interest, rather than in terms of accurate distances and geography.
 
Two new observations for those planning to run a game:

  1. A Medic is a substantial bonus to the team. Advantages on heal rolls combined with the Black Hack supply dice for the medkit gives one an expected value of ~44HP healed over the course of the game by an average enough medic. Though note one standard deviation from this is ~229HP. That's a lot of recoveries from near death if you think a 2nd Level PC has around 11HP.

  2. Drugs move a character to roughly 2.2 of themselves in combat. Thus drugs late in the game (with the Frostiness advantages on top) are quite a boon.
 
Thanks for posting. Glad to see slot-based encumbrance is getting more traction.
 
I'm throwing a surprise-belated-birthday-session of Stay Frosty! for a friend this weekend in lieu of our standard Dungeon World with extra friends to create a slightly curated Aliens themed one-shot.

I'm going to just use the basic ruleset, give her the best rolled character and give her the lore of having previously interacted with the Aliens (aka she is the Ripley-esque character) and use the RAW to use the enemies as they are in the films.

I love how straight-forward the rules are, perfect for little games like this.
 
I'm throwing a surprise-belated-birthday-session of Stay Frosty! for a friend this weekend in lieu of our standard Dungeon World with extra friends to create a slightly curated Aliens themed one-shot.

I'm going to just use the basic ruleset, give her the best rolled character and give her the lore of having previously interacted with the Aliens (aka she is the Ripley-esque character) and use the RAW to use the enemies as they are in the films.

I love how straight-forward the rules are, perfect for little games like this.

Sounds very cool man. Hope you have great game.

This game is indeed very good for one-shots. I have run it once for my boardgaming buddies. The setup was a bit different from the Aliens movie, but not by much. Since the characters are simple, each player could control more than one character. If a character died they still had someone else to play. It was an evening filled with great fun and lots of oneliners from the movies.
 
Game went overall as a success but I was far too lenient on the players, deaths only came late in the game (and in heroic self sacrificial moments). Overall I think Combat is a little slow in SF! and could do with a little more narrative hand-waving to keep the players feeling cool and heroic and the enemy goons going down much faster (I think in future I'll create 'groups' similar to how SWRPG handles it, with the more enemies in a group, the more dangerous it is).

The friend was very surprised, and unsurprisingly named her character Ripley. Everyone seemed to have a great amount of fun.
 
More hacks of the mighty Stay Frosty, here you play Roman Legionaires.


And an adventure for it as well!


The PCs are members of the Legio XI Claudia, or people connected with same, stationed at Durostorum in Moesia. When their ship sinks at sea, they find themselves on the shore of a barbarian land.

The Revenger awaits them, roaming the hinterland. An invisible spirit summoned by a dying sorcerer to avenge his tribe. It is out of control, killing even the tribespeople when it happens upon them.
 
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