REDD Judge

Back in August I released a new RPG over on Big Geek Emporium. The game evolved out of a requirement for a certain style of play. I wanted a game that I could referee at any time with any players who turned up.

Obviously a campaign game with an ongoing story was not going to suit, I needed a story, or stories that would be simple to grasp so the new player could jump right in, and of course jump right out when the kids wake up or whatever. That was the real problem. Sure someone might not turn up to the session, and we've all dealt with that, but I was thinking of running a two hour session where one player might be there throughout but other players would drop in and out at random.

Further, I wanted the game to be open to strangers I haven't played with before. That meant there might be new players, people who've not role played before. So that meant the system needed to be really simple too. Thus 5e, CoC, and FATE like systems were waaay too big for anyone to get their head around quickly enough.

I started with the genre, asking myself how can I have players dropping in and out? A dungeon delve didn't really make sense, how would PCs pop in and out while underground? Even overground a party with PCs yoyoing in and out didn't make a lot of sense. In the end I remembered running game in the world of Judge Dredd using FATE a few years back. I know Judges are always coming and going, handing work off to other judges, dropping in to assist and so on. That settled my theme. Sadly FATE was too heavy a system, and the Mongoose version of Judge Dredd was likewise too burdensome for newbies or people in a hurry, 

Thus was born my game "REDD Judge". The background similar to Judge Dredd but set long before Dredd himself, before Lawgivers, Lawmasters, Stumm grenades, and block wars. But similar enough to Dredd, and similar enough to modern cop-dramas on TV to be approachable to pretty much everyone.

The system used in the game is entirely 1D6 based, which made it about as approachable as any game could be. The skills sets available are limited and deliberately vague, and players just choose the four they like the sound of. So players can be given a character sheet throw together a Judge in a minute, and then that PC rides into the scene being played. If the player has to leave, HQ calls their PC over the radio and diverts them to another job. Thus players can come and go without destroying the fiction.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, well if so, its also the mother of REDD Judge.