The first RPG I bought this year was 3DEEP by Parts Per Million. I’m not sure why I bought it, to be honest, but right after buying the Mythic GM Emulator (2nd Edition), this was the first actual RPG of 2023.
3DEEP is something I had bought, flipped through on the iPad, and then forgotten about. I took a fresh look at it this morning and smiled as I realised why I would probably not run this game. I think the appeal back in January was that it is a generic RPG aiming to deliver a simple-to-run system for any genre.
What appealed?
The core of the game operates on rolling regular six-sided dice. I think the title of the game might have been mistaken for a 3D6-based system and that would have appealed. The idea of a simpler d6-based game system was probably the draw.
The addition of a solo system for playing 3DEEP alone is also part of the appeal of the system. To be honest, I find the stripped down approach to solo roleplaying presented in this game to be perfectly reasonable and suitable for most people’s needs.
It’s worth commenting that I’ve bought a fair number of PPM products over the past year or two because the author is a prolific solo roleplayer who prints lots of game-specific solo adaptations. As I like to support authors whose work I enjoy, I probably bought into 3DEEP in that spirit too.
Where did it fall down?
3DEEP uses a 2D6 core mechanism that is reminiscent of Mongoose Traveller. It also uses the same stat bonuses and skills-as-bonus approach as Traveller, a mechanism that I grew tired of because I don’t like adding up values to then add to the dice. I find the “roll low” and “roll under a value” mechanism of GURPS easier at the table.
The other things that put me off are is most common problem I encounter with generic or rules-lite games, namely a blandness and sameness about the stuff that I feel should be more evocative. Magic, for example, is a list of pretty predictable abilities that we’ve all seen in countless other games.
Finally, and this is perhaps odd to say, but the layout and design of the .PDF is hard to read. Two-column black on white text with a weird heading font and lots of tables that are not justified, a mix of art that feels quite random, and an overall sense that it was laid out in Word is somewhat disappointing.
Having said all that…
I am a neophile who is curious about “new” RPG products and has collected thousands of games. To get me to play a system would require something that excites my jaded soul into action. That I don’t gel with a game is not a reason for others to reject it.
3DEEP might be just up your alley if you want a mid-to-low crunch system designed to cover all the bases with a vaguely cinematic tone. It blends mechanisms from Traveller with ideas from many other sources, notably Speed and Initiative that reminded me of HERO.
On the solo front, the reality is that when I got this game I was on the cusp of making the radical decision to cull my gaming collection and declutter my hobby. Arriving at the realisation that I would just always use my Mythic GM Emulator Deck for ease was a big shift in early 2023.
Simplifying my own hobby bandwidth is not a reason for others to reject a game.
Game on!
Roleplay Rescue’s Blog 
Like you, I’ve looked at many games (hundreds, not thousands) trying to find one that ‘clicked’. I never did. Along the way, though, certain ideas from certain games really stood out and I kept coming back to them when trying design my own game-system. This is a round-about way of saying that sometimes, the value of the game is in a single idea extracted from it. I think ‘narrative gaming’ (versus ‘stats gaming’) creators are generally more useful for extracting ideas. Why not make the players create their own spell incantation? Why not give them a ‘bonus’ on using the spell if it rhymes?
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Looking at my records, it seems that the first game I bought this year was Basic Roleplaying, on 11 Jan. That happens to be one of the four games that I am still trying to decide between for my next campaign: BRP, Traveller, AD&D, and GURPS. I’m leaning slightly to BRP over GURPS simply because of the more open license, which would give me greater latitude should I ever decide to do something semi-commercial with whatever campaign I end up running. On the other hand, much of how I want to handle magic is mostly already worked out in GURPS terms while I’d have to write my own magic system from scratch, nearly, for BRP. I’m leaning slightly toward AD&D just for the simplicity (though I keep finding myself questioning some fundamental elements of AD&D’s assumptions, so I also find myself leaning away from it; leaning both toward and away is an uncomfortable position, let me tell you). Traveller (in the form of crossing ideas from Sword of Cepheus with MegaTraveller) is probably in last place due to all of the homebrew writing I’d have to do, but not out of the running by any means. I guess I’m also playing with the idea of writing homebrew material for Delving Deeper and Swords & Wizardry: White Box and running something that mixes in ideas I like from AD&D, while also doing things like stripping classes down to the very original idea of “does your character use magic or not?”, though possibly with a few wrinkles like “is your character a Shaw Brothers martial artist?” and the like. Again, though, that would require a lot of homebrew writing.
Sorry, didn’t mean to babble quite so much.
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