MUTATION NATION

X-men '97 was not something I was expecting to impact me this past year, yet it did. Not just a nostalgia hit, but something genuinely inspiring to me. Of course, it wasn't the only thing, just the first thing to get the ball rolling for me. Either way, thus was the first brick toward my current project: Mutation Nation.

X-men '97 returns back to the X-men 90s cartoon. It clearly uses inspiration from later X-men stories but weaves them to tell stories the old cartoon couldn't ever dream of doing. Here are the X-men at their best to me, stories about them struggling with a world that hates them, facing a threat only at the end to have find a path among mutants forward that isn't continuing the hate. Masterful. Needed it so very much.

Makes me want to write a game inspired by it.

YAHTZEE

The second thing was a silly what if after playing a few games of Yahtzee and King of Tokyo (Yahtzee meets King of the Hill, but with Kaiju). What if the dice rolling mechanic in Yahtzee was the main mechanic in a tabletop roleplaying game? Could that work? Surely.

Part of it excited me in that it could let you do a different kind of target number and give players a bit of a minigame to do with the dice. People love rolling dice, and part of me also wanted a way to get the different hands in yahtzee into it as well. Theme wasn't something I was thinking of, until I was glancing through things about recent changes in X-men comics- the end of the Krakoan Age felt sort of raw and wrong to me. Then it clicked.

Five dice in Yahtzee form an X. Oh. This is a great thing to try to tie it into.

I have some vague familiarity with supers games, although I've only played one as a GM, Godsend Agenda, I own more than a few and have some ideas how they approach the ttrpg scene. Lots of dice being rolled, often with players tending to succeed on big rolls with powers that did spectacular things. How do get there with yahtzee and also capture the same beats I saw in X-men '97?

THE HEART OF IT

I read through Heart: The City Beneath recently as well, and found there a mechanic I thought could be handy to steal. Beats. Heart is many things- dungeon crawler, horror, etc., but one thing it does is give players narrative choices to steer the path forward in ways that don't require them to do so from nothing. Beats are that mechanic, and they are neat.

Each character in Heart has access to a list of beats, and selects two from their list. If the game can have these beats come to pass, the character advances and gains abilities. However, this means the GM has to balance different beats to try to help guide the story for the players. But boy that looks like such a fun way to do things.

So this started to form the basic pillars of a game in my head. Yahtzee die rolls, while using beats from Heart, a top the bones of Blades in the Dark. Beats augmenting XP and giving players some narrative control, with some of my own new ideas of where beats could go. That and bits from other places I've been wanting to throw together. 

Overall, mechanics that can reinforce a family feeling, and superpowers. Potential drama and relationships between players, as well as the common tropes in X-men stories being on a list and used in missions. I'm playtesting it at the moment and it still doesn't feel complete, but as time goes on, I feel like this might be my first TTRPG project like this that might do what I want it to do.