Together as One: An Overview

I've brought up this project a couple times before, but unlike InfiniCon and The Endless Wilds, this is one of the few projects where I started working on mechanics and rule systems first because this was based off an already existing concept and setting. There's something to be said about having a solid concept before working on mechanics, but that's a rambling post for another time.

First off, it should go without saying that this system isn't finished yet and certain parts are still unclear or not fully explored yet. Secondly, this is just a brief overview to give you an idea of what I'm doing with this system.


As I briefly explained in the intro post a couple months ago, Together as One is a game that is meant to vaguely emulate those toy-shilling sorts of anime. Those shows where some kid and his highly marketable toy or creature fight villains who want to take over the world using those same sort of toys or creatures or whatever. Most episodes only serve to introduce some new item or monster or card or whatever to be sold later. There's usually some overwrought platitudes about friendship and shit. You know the kind. They are sort of guilty pleasure mine, because they are so ridiculous.

The title references multiple things, which is why I like it so much and feel so clever for coming up with it, but the most important is the way it refers to the player characters. Player characters are actually split up into two distinct and separate parts: The Kid and their Partner (which can be a toy, vehicle, monster, robot, or spirit). In short, the kid is the personality and their Partner is the equipment. However, without each other, they are useless. Hence "Together as One". I thought it was clever.

The Kid side of the character is relatively simple, seeing as their purpose is to be a sort of vessel that just carries their toy or monster between battles, when you get down to it. Outside of the basic fluff of the character, like their name and appearance, they are made up of 4 major mechanics; Attributes, Traits, Strategies, Relationships, and Inventory.

• Attributes - Separated into Brains, Heart, and Guts, these act as a numeric measure of a Kid's personality. These have more of a combat application, as their values can be added to attacks and maneuvers under certain conditions. These values also act like as sort of charge bar for Special Attacks.More on that in a bit.
• Players start with a small pool of points to distribute between these three Attributes.
• Traits - These act like a sort of descriptor, ability, and feat rolled into one. Traits describe, in broad terms, something about the character and what they can or can't do. Instead of a list of Skills for most every conceivable action, you would have something like "Athletic" or "Silver-Tongued" as traits. To balance it out, you'd also have negative Traits like, "Naive" or "Can't Swim". 
• Kids have a total of 3 Positive Traits and 1 Negative Trait. I haven't worked out what it might entail, but I suppose characters could gain and lose Traits over the course of a game.
• Strategies - Relating specifically to combat, Strategies are written like If:Then statements. Each one offers a different condition and bonus and stringing them together allows for more potent combos and attacks. An example Strategy would be "If: You hit with your last 2 Attacks // Then: Make an additional attack attempt". These act as another way to define a character's play-style, and also give players a reason to mix up things every once in a while.
• Players would choose a handful at character creation, and unlock new and more potent strategies as they level.
• Relationships - A way to quantify and enforce that weird cartoony version of friendship and camaraderie. Relationships come in a few different varieties: Friends, Enemies, and Rivals. Friends give you bonus dice on rolls, Enemies give you penalty dice, and Rivals give mutual bonus dice, meaning both characters involved in the rivalry gain additional dice to their rolls, escalating their battles further.
• Players will start with a couple friendships and will be given the choice of how to advance them over the course of their game.
• Inventory - This includes a kid's Wealth and Allowance, as well as any miscellaneous items and belongings. Wealth is how much money the character has and Allowance is simply how much more Wealth they get at the start of a session. Wealth can be used to buy new or better parts for your toy or upgrades or sometimes just little things, like train fare so they can get to the next big tournament or whatever.
• I'm still unsure of how I want to do it exactly, but for right now, the only way to increase Allowance is through in-game rewards.

Then you have the Partner as the other half of the character. Depending on the setting or series being run, this partner can be some sort of ancient spirit locked away in a medal or chip, or it could simply just be some sort of creature like a Digimon, I guess. The point is that there is usually some sort of persistent element that allows for certain things to change while keeping other elements the same. I'm just going to refer to this element as the Partner's Core.

Like their Kids, Partners are made up of a little bit of fluff and several major mechanics. Seeing as the Partner is largely responsible for handling combat, a lot of their important bits have largely to do with how well they perform in combat and what sort of crazy shit they can do.

• Traits - Some sort of defining feature about the nature of the partner's core. This could be an elemental affinity or a type of animal. How these things interact is somewhat up for interpretation, but it's mostly for flavoring. Though it might be interesting to toss in elemental weaknesses and such.
• Combat Skills - This is the Core's specific fighting style in numeric form. Whether they are more offensive, defensive, tricky, or direct is represented through their combat skills. Attack, Defend, Parry, Dodge, and Feint. How they interact and how they are used will be touched on later.
• Partners start with a small amount of points to divvy up between these skills at creation.
• Parts / Combat Stats- Damage, Toughness, Speed, Stamina, and sometimes Range. These stats determine the minimum amount of Damage the partner can deal, how much damage is can soak, how fast it moves, how much punishment it can take, and how far you can strike from. Depending on what kind of partner it is, these values can be determined by the parts that construct it or just a lump sum applied to the partner as a whole.
• For Toys, each part may have its own scores, with different weapons or limbs having their own abilities and stats, rather than a total sum of all parts combined. The potential to switch out, customize, and upgrade parts
• For creatures, or at least partners that don't have the option to switch out parts, their combat stats are just distributed from a pool of starting points, which increases with level and training.
• Specials - The Partner's super attacks. I mentioned above that the Kids had a sort of charge meter, and this is what for. These specials have additional affects and applications, can use the Kid's attributes in addition to the Partner's, on top of offering the opportunity to deal more damage.
• At the beginning, a player may only start with one or two Specials, but the more they train, the more they could learn, with more powerful effects.

And with all of those things laid out, that brings up to gameplay. Like many of the shows that inspired this game in the first place, the scenes in between the fights and the cool robots and monsters and shit are only really there to talk about the cool robots and monsters and push to plot forward towards the next big match, tournament, or showdown. As such, most interactions outside of combat are what most would refer to as light roleplay, which means no dice or rulebook checks.

When it comes to performing most actions, as long as they are reasonable or unchallenged, characters can just do them. The key word there is "reasonable", which means that absurd actions like flipping a car over with your bare hands probably wouldn't get a pass, but climbing over a typical chain-link fence would.

Also, the idea of a task being unchallenged is fairly important. When there is another character opposing you, some sort of adverse condition is making things harder, or you have a negative trait that's in play, things get slightly more complex. At that point, it becomes a matter of tallying any beneficial factors (Traits, equipment, friendly aid) versus the amount of negative and challenging ones (opponents, adverse conditions, your own negative traits). If the positives outweigh the negatives, the action succeeds, otherwise its a failure. There are some additional rules for adding additional granularity to the pass-fail process, but I'll save that explanation for a fuller write up.

During combat, where winning and losing is more important, dice and a bit of number crunching are required. Combat is turn-based, like most RPGs, with players trading blows, lining up strategy combos, and carefully weighing their choices between their different combat skills. Each combat skill has a different use and effect depending on how much they surpass or fall short of beating an enemy's roll.

Players take turns, deciding which actions and maneuvers they will use and resolve them by rolling 2d6 plus the level of the combat skill they are using versus their opponent, who also rolls 2d6 and adds a skill of their choice to defend with. The result rolls are compared to determine who won and the difference between those rolls determines how effective the effort was. Without going into absurd detail, the bigger the gap between these rolls, the more damage is dealt or soaked or avoided.

I want there to be a certain element of risk versus reward in choosing which skills to use in a given turn as many of the skills have a draw back to balance the benefit of using one skill over another. A failed Dodge might leave you open to even more damage, while a failed Feint might penalize your next roll, for instance. For the time being, I'd rather not elaborate too much on the subject.

Finally, as I briefly mentioned above, there are also special attacks, which function differently than the typical combat skills. At the start of their turn, the player puts a charge counter on Brains, Heart, or Guts and when they save up enough, they can choose to activate one of their Specials instead of using a regular skill. Think of it like a special meter that can be expended to unleash a powerful combo or a signature technique.

Seeing as this post is getting rather lengthy, I think it's probably best to wrap it up for the time being. I've been fiddling with this post for far too long, putting off finishing it, and there's a good chance that I'll likely come back and edit and tweak it further, but for now, this is just meant to give you a rough idea of the basic concept.

With any luck, I'll have a rough draft of the basic rules and content put together soon for the few of you to peruse.