Witless Minion

Witless Minion is a role-playing game covering the daily lives and travails of the low-level mooks, agents, numberless hordes, administrative staff, and minions of Mad Scientists, Criminal Masterminds, and Supervillains. In this role players desperately try to pull off capers, avoid the bad graces of their superiors, stock away cash, escape capture, and negotiate for a better dental plan.

Witless Minion is a low-detail, high-trust game system. The rules are fairly abstract and assume a group familiar with role-playing games. It is a more narrative-driven game but GMs with a desire for greater crunch can easily expand on the rules presented here. Each player assumes the role of a minion, selects an archetype and picks their own talents and flaws. Depending on the campaign frame, players may be trying to climb the hierarchy in a single organization or move between a number of masters.

Players will need a bunch of d10s, the usual pen and paper, plus a number of tokens or coins to represent drama points.

While the game uses a standard dice pool mechanic for resolution, it does provide a number of new systems tailored to the genre:

• Flashbacks: This mechanic allows players to ‘retcon’ preparation for a caper or operation. This encourages creativity and allows the GM to move forward into heists and the like without having the players spend hours debating the details.
• Limits: A system of drama point rewards for play based on a character’s disadvantages.
• The Hierarchy of Villainy: Minions operate at the bottom of the food chain– with a number of ranks above them. This mechanic simulates the difficulty faced by minions when fighting named characters.
• The Prisoner’s Dilemma: An optional system which offers a tangible incentive for sticking together and at the same time for bugging out on your teammates.

Download

• Witless_Minion.pdf

Tags: Lowell Francis

This entry was posted on Friday, September 17th, 2010 at 12:30 am and is filed under 24 Hour RPG, Free RPGs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.