Roll for Shoes

Roll for Shoes is one of the best roleplaying systems that I’ve ever played. No, really. Unironically. It’s brillaint. Yes, I know it’s less than a hundred words, but I really urge you to try it.

The Rules, In Far Too Much Depth

Let’s dive into it a bit. Everyone starts the game with the skill Do Anything 1. This means you can try to do anything you want, within reason, and roll one d6 to try it. The GM will roll between 1 and 4 d6 based on how difficult whatever you’re trying to do is, and you have to beat their total to succeed. Alternatively, if you want to streamline it even further, the GM can just pick a number that seems about right.

Obviously, a single d6 isn’t going to get you very far if the GM is rolling 4d6 against you. However, if all the dice come up sixes when you roll, you get to pick a new skill at 1 higher than whatever you were rolling for. The only condition is that it has to be related to whatever you were trying to do.

For example, in one memorable game, an unarmed character grabbed a towel and used it to wrestle a giant spider off their friend. Since they were using Do Anything 1, the player rolled and got a six. They decided to add a new skill, Towel Use 2, and could now roll 2d6 for anything involving towels.

This kept happening, by the way. That player finished the session with Towel Use 2, Towel Combat 3 and Ranged Towel Combat 4. He could flick a towel with such precision and force that he could break a security camera lens the size of a coin from six feet away.

“But Doc,” I hear you say “how did he get enough sixes to get to 3 and 4? Rolling double sixes is unlikely, but triple sixes would take forever!” You would be right, dear hypothetical reader. However, when you fail a roll, you get 1 XP. You can spend a point of XP to raise the number on one die by one. For example, if you roll a 6 and 3, you could spend 3 XP to bring the three up to a six, and thus get a new skill. It’s only for advancement though; it doesn’t change the actual result you rolled for the purposes of success or failure.

Playing the Game

I’ve run two games with Roll for Shoes now, and both were wonderful. It gives just enough structure to tell a story, while doing an excellent job of getting out of the way. I enjoy improvising, so I started both games with only a very rough idea of the world and just ran with it.

It works best with a good, pulpy, B-movie style. It helps if you can start with a reason why people wouldn’t know what they’re good at, so you might need to roll out the old video-game chestnut of “you all have amnesia”.

I started one group as having just been dumped out of a cloning tank with no memories on a spaceship, which was a bit cliche but did the job nicely. They weren’t so much learning new skills as recovering their memories of how to do stuff. One of them turned out to have been an elite towel fighter as detailed above.

In the other game, players started out as office workers in a cyberpunk city who were framed for a robbery and were forced to become criminals to survive. They already had a bunch of skills before the game started, but they were now useless; instead, they were forced to work out how to use what they knew for crime, really fast.

A lot of fun with the system comes from both discovering what people come up with, and having players try to game the system. Depending on how serious you want your game to be, you can be more or less strict on this. One entertaining example from a podcast I heard was a player taking Ignition as a skill after hotwiring a car, and then later using the same skill to set something on fire.

Let’s Try to Bring All the Rambling to a Close

Roll for Shoes absolutely deserves a space in the back pocket of your roleplaying trousers, for those moments when you want to have a quick game, or you need to fill a session but half your group didn’t show, or you just feel like some joyous silliness with very few resources and even less prep. It’s great for new GMs given how little there is to remember, and there are lots of fantastic additions to it on the website if you fancy making it a little more complicated.

Give it a go, and why not see if you can actually roll for Shoes 2?