A toy game from the 2016 game design advent calendar.

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The picture above is of Monticello, the charming but kinda-ostentatious home of Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson, renowned for being a Renaissance man, was a man of many skills and knowledgeable in the ways of apparently everything. Sounds like a party, so let's make him into a game.

Requires:

• A GM and some players
• A bunch of d6's. Apparently I really like dice pools.
• Some paper for writing down skills

Rules:

One person is the GM (with the standard duties). Everyone else collectively plays Thomas Jefferson; let's call these aspects of Thomas Jefferson the Toms. Each Tom should choose a skill of Thomas Jefferson's; maybe "Political Theory" or "Lacrosse" or "Flirting". Each Tom should also choose a suitable adjective. Perhaps Nerdy Tom, Sporty Tom, or Peeping Tom.

Pick someone to control Thomas Jefferson first. They keep control until another Tom has a skill more applicable to the current situation. You just kicked James Madison's ass at lacrosse, and as you walk off the field he brings up that damnable Federalist party. Looks like it's Nerdy Tom's turn. When that happens, and another Tom takes over, he gains a new skill relevant to the situation at hand. They just tell the table, and make it make sense in the fiction. Turns out Thomas Jefferson also knows a good bit about Hamiltonian financial policies, so Nerdy Tom gets the skill Hamiltonianism.

Toms get 10d6 each to assign to their skills. At the start of the game, all of those dice will belong to the initial skill. At any point, you can pull dice from one skill to another, but only if:

• The donor skill has more dice than the recipient skill
• The donor skill still has more dice after donating. You just can't make them switch which is greater.

When you gain a new skill, make sure to give it at least one die from another skill.

When you control Thomas Jefferson, if you attempt something unsure or that would be fun to fail at, roll the dice belonging to your most relevant skill.

• If you roll a 6 on any die, you succeed magnificently. Say how fantastically it goes.
• If you don't, it goes terribly. The GM will say how awfully it goes.

When you don't control Thomas Jefferson, offer suggestions or dares to the controlling Tom; if they accept your suggestion, you both gain an extra die to assign to any skill.

GM:

Do your GM thang, bruh. Describe stuff, make Thomas Jefferson's life exciting, say yes.

Occasionally, give them a challenge that requires skills no one has. They'll still switch to the most appropriate Tom, and he'll probably take a skill to help with the new challenge. If a wide breadth of knowledge is required, the players will grow out to fit Thomas Jefferson's skills to the action. If the session is pretty specifically one type of action, the players will grow in and get more and more specific in their particular wheelhouses.

Notes:

Notice that players acquire new skills after being switched into a situation they were already the most competent player to deal with, and that this new skill must also be relevant to the situation. This should cause players to develop clear purviews over time; not necessarily separated from one another, but clear.

The rules are also designed to pace the game in a particular way. Ideally, the session looks like this. In the beginning, there are few skills on the table, so control of Thomas Jefferson switches relatively infrequently. There's lots of dice in the few skills, so success is quite common. As more skills are acquired, control switches more often, which gives players more skills, which causes control to switch more often...all of which is accompanied by an increasingly dilute pool of dice. That means lots of horrible failure, unless players mitigate it with frequent and enthusiastic suggestions.

If the game works like I hope it does, the session gets more and more hectic in the fiction, and the table gets more and more hectic with the suggestions.

--Karaktakus, the Real Slim Jefferson

Prompt/cover photo: Wikimedia Commons