Wastoid and the unwritten rules of rolling

I played Wastoid a while back as a playtest. I am a big Fallout fan and Wastoid fit my ttrpg tastes and has some strong Fallout flavor. I did an exploration section, a section with NPCs and a combat. Combat was using some OSR I found that closest fit the Fallout vibe. First they had to fix a lighthouse, which was fine, I used the faction tables and exploration I liked along with the players. Then, they turned on a power station and combat was quick and brutal, 2 players went down but they fixed the power station. The table was so happy when the new characters both had hacking, which made the robot infested station much easier and interesting. One character that was rolled was a robot and they liked how there was risk and reward. Go in head first and you can get junk to heal yourself and you are immune to radiation making rushing in a good idea. But if you got hurt you lose valuable junk to healing yourself. 

From Bethesda

 

Slots were something my players were mindful of and they really felt powerful once they found a weapon as they rolled poorly for items during character gen. A recurring theme of the playtest was how the players used their perks. They were new to tabletop games and one of my players told me something I have never thought about. They said "So the harder something is, the less likely I can try it?". This is because Wastoid has perks which mostly give you advantage or disadvantage on certain rolls. A few of them do auto success while even fewer allow anyone who takes those perks to do things that would normally be impossible. 

I have yet to see a game that jumps from: 

• Impossible (you can't roll for this, you don't need to as you already know the outcome)
• Disadvantage (doable, but it would be hard to beat the DC)
• Rolling normal (the default for a lot of stuff)
• Rolling with advantage (chance of failure but it's unlikely)
• Auto-success (You can't roll for this you don't even need to as you already know the outcome) 

Wastoid does this very well the the use of perks. The perk "Knickknack Paddywhack" lets you move improvised attacks from disadvantage to normal and suitable stunts are upgraded from normal to advantage. This feels familiar but then perks like Wall Crawling upgrade a normal or disadvantage roll up to an auto success. The hacking perk upgrades an impossible to disadvantage roll at best up to normal or even auto success based on the circumstances. I find this very clever and it allows the wastoids to stand out and play outside the rules, that they are so good at what they do, they feel superhuman because regular people have to roll, but if you have the perk, you can feel unstoppable. 

From Jason Tocci's itch page

I am incredibly excited for wastoid as it not only plays with dice, but when you use dice. This game feels great for a new GM especially, inspiring one of my players to become a GM. It codifies something that most games assume you have already mastered. I mainly see rpgs that show the difference between rolling normally, with advantage and with disadvantage. My only complaint was there are no monsters and it would be nice to have a baseline so that I could eyeball them. I used Old School Essentials monsters as they kinda work but I can't wait for what Jason Tocci comes up with next.

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You can get Wastoid on itch.io 

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