State of Play: December 2024

Long time no see!

Here's where I'm at, at the moment:

Nobody Poops on Television is a tabletop roleplaying game where you take on the role of a character in a sitcom world, who has recently discovered (or is in the process of discovering, or is blissfully ignorant of) that they are, in fact a character played by an actor, who lives and dies solely at the whims of the Things Beyond the Fourth Wall.

You can exist in this world as you have always done, or you can attempt to break free of their yoke, and be your own person.

The Core Mechanic

In Nobody Poops on TV, whenever you do something that has a chance of failure, you roll some dice and assess the result.

• Your Motivation (Avoid Obligation, Be Correct, Seek Status, Have it All, Do the Right Thing, Admit Fault, Be Charitable, Find Contentment) determines the base difficulty of the task, ranging anywhere from 0 to 20.
• Motivations represent why you are doing something; what you are hoping to achieve by performing the task.
• Each Motivation exists in a pair; these two Motivations must have values that when added together, equal 20.
• Your goal is to meet or exceed this difficulty, by rolling some 8-sided dice (d8s). 
• You can roll as many d8s as you want, but each d8 chosen must have an explanation given to the GM that justifies why that d8 is relevant in this situation.
• To justify your d8s, you associate each d8 with a Talent; each d8 must be associated with a different Talent.
• Talents can be anything at all, but they must each be fairly specific in nature:
• e.g., if you are cooking a meal, then Peeling Potatoes, Dicing Onions, Sautéing, Watching the Stove, and Meal Presentation might all be individual Talents you could theoretically use, which would give you a pool of 5d8; one die for each Talent.
• Talents represent what you are doing; these are the steps involved in the actual task being performed.
• Once you have rolled your d8s, you get to keep a number of dice equal to your Technique (Emotionality, Precision, Spontaneity, Cooperation).
• Techniques are related to styles of acting; they are how you are performing your task, the way in which you portray your Talents to the audience.

Gaining Talents

Whenever every d8 in your dice pool matches (e.g., all sixes, all eights, all ones), you gain a new Talent of your choice; these need not be related to the task at hand (perhaps you simply have a random idea!) but they should be something that the GM and player agree make sense for that character.

• A pool of 1d8 always matches with itself.
• Selectively discarding non-matching dice when choosing which dice to keep in accordance with your Technique score is a valid strategy, as the more dice you keep, the less likely it is that you'll get an all-matching pool.
• This means that high Technique scores (increasing your chances of hitting the target number) AND low Technique scores (increasing your chances of gaining a new Talent) are both possible strategies that a player can pursue.

Complicating Matters

Two meta-currencies, Applause and Heckles, can respectively decrease and increase the base difficulty by 1, per Applause/Heckle spent.

• You as the player can draw Applause from a pool of tokens, known as the Audience, making success come more easily, but the GM can draw Heckles from the same pool to make it harder!
• You can only draw as many Applause (or as many Heckles) as are currently available in the Audience.
• Spending an Applause (or a Heckle) returns that token to the Audience, allowing another player (or GM) to use it.
• If a player fails a roll, the whole party gains a Cancellation Token.
• If the party accrues too many Cancellation Tokens, they go into Hiatus.
• On Hiatus, the party is given one last chance to save their show (and therefore themselves) from cancellation; if they fail at this task, the show is permanently cancelled and their story ends.

...but how do you generate Applause and Heckles?

I've established that there's a finite pool of these tokens already. Should it be as simple as simply claiming them whenever you wish? That's not really how applause in real life works. In a real performance, you gain applause for doing something especially well.

So, it's what? A critical hit? If anything, the "match all d8s" system to gain Talents is my version of a crit, so I could always incorporate it into that.

No need to complicate things too much!

What if, when you match dice, you gain Applause. But it's dependent on the number of matches?

So you could match 1d8, gain a new Talent for your trouble, but only gain 1 Applause. This means that how you perform, your Technique, still matters--not only does it determine how well you perform (how many d8s you roll), but it's how well it's received (how much Applause you generate).

But any Applause you don't take, is taken by the GM.

I think this is a solid foundation.