Tiny Tikus Adventures is a game in which you play children in the style of Pulp 80s movies and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Think the Goonies or Rugrats and you wont go far wrong. It’s a light hearted game; so it’s not the sort of rules to use if you want to run Stephen King’s IT.
Tiny Tikus Adventures has nine skills and three defensive Pools.
To create a character you allocate each skill with a number from 1 to 3. Starting characters have three skills at level 1, three at level 2 and three skills at level 3.
Tiny Tikus Adventures – It’s a bit like Rugrats
The Skills
- GADGET: The Gadget skill covers your engineering and tech rolls. It allows you to build and repair technological items
- SMARTS: Your smarts are how good you are at knowing useful trivia. It also allows you to make leaps of logic and reasoning
- SHOOT: Shoot is the skill you roll when trying to use a ranged weapon. It is also useful for gauging distances, throwing objects, figuring out trajectory and using catapults.
- BREAK: The Break skill covers brute strength and smashing things. It is also your stat to roll if you are using a close combat weapon.
- HIDE: The hide skill covers sneaking; but also be used for stealing and sleight of hand.
- INSPIRE: The Inspire Skill is rolled whenever try and get somebody to do something they do not want to do. You can also use it to repair damage to your MIND Defensive total (see below)
- SEEK: The Seek skill denotes how perceptive you are; it also covers detective type skills.
- HEAL: The Heal skill allows you to heal your wounds – it also allows you to heal the wounds of your allies. Essentially you can use it to repair damage to your HEALTH Defensive total (see below)
- LIE: The Lie skill allows you to tell convincing falsehoods. Incredibly useful when talking to grown ups.
Rolling a skill check is simple. To use a skill you pick up the number of D6 equal to your skill level. For example a character with a Gadget of 2 would roll 2 dice. Make sure one of these dice is a different colour than the others – this is the wild dice (if you only have one dice to roll; then that dice is the wild dice). Roll all the dice together and add up the total.
In normal circumstances if the total of all the dice you roll is more than 6 then you have succeeded; if you get more than a 12 – you have two successes and if you get more than an 18 you get three successes (and so on).
- If you roll a 6 on the wild dice you can roll that dice again and add both numbers to the total. If you roll a 6 on your second roll; keep rolling
- If however rolling a 1 on the wild dice means that something has gone a little awry and you have a complication. You may still succeed; but it might not go completely according to plan.
- Items and situations may allow the GM to add flat numbers to your total; the GM will tell you when this is appropriate.
The Defense Pools
From these nine skills; you work out your three defence totals. Add up your dice in all the Skills that correspond to it and note this number next to:
- HEALTH [Shoot, Break, Heal]: Physical Injuries are mostly taken from the Health pool
- MIND [Gadget, Smarts, Inspire]: These can be mental attacks; Jedi Mind tricks, exhaustion, scary things.
- EVADE [Hide, Seek, Lie]: When you are asked to roll against the above two pools; you can instead take from the Evade Pool. Unlike HEALTH and MIND – EVADE can only be healed after a night’s rest.
These Pools show you how happy and healthy you are; the consequences of attacks are taken directly from these pools. If you take more hits than the number of dice in any of your pools; you are tired and want to go home. Your adventure ends here.
If you are called upon to roll from these Pools; roll the number of dice equal to your current total.
You are looking for 6s. In combat each 6 you roll on your defense dice takes away a success from your attacker. Each success that remains takes one dice from subsequent pools.
Special Abilities
Each character has something special that they can do that makes them special. Tikus for example is an emergent Jedi; he might be able to tap into the force. Roy is a Droid; he might have an attachment just for this situation.
These are represented by Special abilities. Each character will have 2 chances per adventure to us this special ability.
These abilities are not determined before the game starts; can be spent on anything that fits your character archetype. They can change the game world in some minor but significant way.
Example of Play
Tikus wants to fire his catapult at the mean bully. He has a shoot of 2; so he rolls two dice; one of which he decides is the wild dice. He rolls a 3 and a 6; making 9 (so one success) but has rolled a 6 on the wild dice; so rolls again and gets a 4. His total is 13 – so that’s two successes. The GM give his catapult a +2 to his roll – meaning his total is 15 – so that’s two successes.
The bully has a health defence pool of 6 and a Evade defence pool of 3 – He decides to roll defense against his health and rolls 6 dice; 3,2,2,5,6,4. He got one six so cancels out one of Tikus’s successes. So takes one damage.
If he is hit again; he will have a health defence pool of 5 and an Evade defence pool of 3.
Force Majeure 