About

For questions about Roll for Shoes, a super-minimal game designed for immediate play and light-hearted improvisation.

Originally called “Roll to See if I Have Shoes On,” this game consists entirely of seven bullet points in this blog post by DWeird. It uses a d6 pool mechanic for determining success, with both high and low rolls providing opportunities for advancement through the acquisition of “skills” associated with higher dice pools.

• Say what you do and roll a number of d6s.
• If the sum of your roll is higher than the opposing roll (either another player or the DM), the thing you wanted to happen, happens.
• The number of the d6s you roll is determined by the level of skill you have.
• At start, you have only one skill: Do anything 1.
• If you roll all sixes on your roll, you can get new skill one level higher than the one you used for the action. The skill must be a subset of what happened to you in the action (Say, Athletics 2 if you were climbing a wall, or Teeth of Biting 2 if you were eating a cake).
• For every roll you fail, you get 1 XP.
• XP can be used to change a die into a 6 for advancement purposes but not for success purposes.

Note: When you gain a new skill from an action (bullet point 5), it won't necessarily have any relationship to the skill you used to perform that action.

For example: Alice uses Jump 3 to try to jump a wooden fence, but fails and instead just crashes through it. Alice spends XP to get Breaking Things Embarrassingly 4 because it's a subset of what happened to her in the action (even if it has nothing to do with jumping).

Bullet point 5 is often misread as saying the newer skill must be a specialisation of the previous skill, probably because we're prepared to see skill trees even when they're not there. This game doesn't have skill trees and is fine with weird new skills coming out of the blue.