How Does Any-System Work With Risus?

You can match Any-System skill and difficulty descriptors to corresponding values and stats in your favorite roleplaying game. With the permission of S. John Ross, we’ve used his Risus: The Anything RPG in this example; but porting Any-System Key material to your favorite game is just as easy.

Assume characters have the average rating in most skills, with several rated at the level of a competent professional, a few considered expert in their field, and sometimes one signature skill for which the character is renown. These correspond to numbers of cliché dice in Risus.

Most Any-System Key skills have related skills in your game. For instance, a character stat might show the Expert skill of marksmanship; translated to your own game it might read firearms, blaster, or shooting. Any-System skill names convert to other games’ skills. To translate a character’s Expert melee skill to Risus requires one to fit the skill within an appropriate cliché, such as knight, swashbuckler, or cantankerous chef. Since a competent professional in Risus might have a cliché with 3 dice, someone of Expert level should have 4 dice. An orc in the Any-System Key might have an Expert melee skill; in Risus this could translate into a cliché of Orc (4), or Eager Fighter (4) as part of a more complete orc character.

Any-System publications use four levels to describe the degree of difficulty for tasks undertaken by a person with professional training and proficiency in relevant skills. These correspond to different target numbers in Risus.

The same adaptation works for difficulties. Examine the difficulty descriptors and find a corresponding difficulty level or value for your game. A character facing a Hard task as described by the Any-System Key -- an undertaking with a exceptional chance of failure -- would have to overcome a task with a target number of 20 in Risus.

   "This is called a Griffin because it is a winged quadruped. This kind of wild animal is born in Hyperborean parts, or in mountains. All its bodily members are like a lion's, but its wings and mask are like an eagle's. It is vehemently hostile to horses. But it will also tear to pieces any human beings which it happens to come across."