What’s so cool about?

The “What’s so cool about…” system is derived from Jared Sinclair’s What’s so cool about outer space?. The mechanical inspiration for the game comes from Traveller.

Characters

Character creation is straight-forward. You are mostly trying to envision a character that you are very excited about playing.

Generally as part of the creation process the player describes: a background or high concept for the character; two traits that represents the character’s talents and any equipment or signature items they possess.

Subtle changes to this formula is what gives hacks and skins of this system their flavour.

Mechanics

Roll 2d6.

The GM adjudicates or applies any modifiers that are deemed relevant:

• Add one for each advantage you have: a relevant talent, piece of equipment, character history, narrative positioning.
• Subtract one for every disadvantage such as: an opponent with better equipment, conditions, narrative consequences or lacking resources

An 8 or more is a success.

This add and subtract element is flaw in an otherwise interesting system as the modifiers can just net out to the default roll. The limited qualities of the character also means that players can spam the same qualities or try to force every situation into the things their characters are good at.

Guidance around how to handle some of these areas and how to judge the consequences of failures and successes makes a big difference to how the game “feels” in play.

Game preparation

The other aspect of WISCA games are inspiration tables or lists the facilitator of the game can use to inspire themselves in creating scenarios.

These typically aren’t fully zero-prep but they do mean you can bring again to the table quickly.