Let’s Look at Ten Million HP Planet

10 Million HP Planet is a game created by Sandy Pug Games, an independent creator who can be found on Twitter and Itch.Io (links at the end). It’s a game about retaliating against an Apocalypse in which the Planet has killed everyone in the world except for the players. The players are all impossibly powerful masters of reality who have survived that apocalypse, and are hellbent on killing the planet for daring to harm the lives of those around them.

It uses a unique system consisting of two phases of play: A combat phase called the Beatdown Phase that is focused on chaining together multipliers so that you can roll obscenely high numbers for damage, and a freeform narrative phase called the Ghosts of the Past phase in which players progress the story by answering a series of questions to figure out why things have gotten to the point where the planet decided to kill everyone. Players alternate between these two phases of play by clearing certain Damage Milestones, until they have finally shown that planet what-for and avenged their fallen civilization.

Now, we’re going to look at this from two different angles: Mechanical and Thematic. First, we’ll break apart the Mechanics and Narrative to figure out how they influence play, and then we’ll do a deep dive into how those mechanics and narratives interact to form the theme of the game. Once we have the full picture of the Mechanics and Themes, we’ll come to a conclusion and break down what I think of the game as a whole.

So first things first, let’s take a look at those mechanics, and I think the best way to do this is to just go ahead and make a character. Character Creation is the way most players are going to first interact with the rules, so it’s important that it gives players enough context to reasonably understand what they’re supposed to be doing and how they’re supposed to go about playing.

Character Creation in 10MHPP has 5 steps.

1. Pick a cool name. Alright, easy enough. Let’s go with Grabnock. The rules suggest giving yourself a sick title, so let’s just go ahead and say it’s The Destroyer. So our character’s full name and title is Grabnock, The Destroyer.
2. The second step is to pick a power type. The game let’s you decide on anything you like to be a power type, but it does give you a few suggestions such as Magic, Inventions, or Physical Strength. Since we have complete freedom to make whatever we want, let’s go ahead and make their power Nuclear Fusion-Fueled Sick-Nasty-Wrestling-Moves.
3. Alright, next we need a single word motivation. Once again, the game gives us a few suggestions such as Revenge, Ego, Fury, or Love, but let’s go ahead and say Grabnock’s motivation is Thirst. Grabnock just wants a drink of water, but maybe the planet boiled it all away or something.
4. Now for step four we need a Power Trigger, and this is the first part of character creation that actually has a mechanical influence on play. Power Triggers let us generate Power, which we use to access different Abilities during combat. There are a few suggestions, like Firing a Beam of Power or Helping a friend, but for Grabnock we’re gonna say it’s eating a chunk of unrefined plutonium. Gotta fuel that Fusion process somehow. So every time Grabnock eats a chuck of unrefined plutonium, they get a power of their chosen color. What’s a chosen color?
5. It’s the fifth step of character creation! This is the second part that has a mechanical influence on play, and the only step that has limited options. We have to pick a color out of Red, Green, or Blue. Whatever we pick will determine some of the multipliers we have access to, and what influences our power generation. Since we want to make an informed decision here, let’s go take a look at what types of multiplies we can do with the different colors.
6. We’ll talk more about this in depth in a minute, but Multipliers are a key point of dealing damage in 10MHPP. There are a lot of things that can influence your multipliers, but Power points in your selected color can be used to activate specific Resource Multipliers. Resource Multipliers add an extra dice to your damage roll, and multiply your full roll by a given number. Looking at this list of possible multipliers, Red seems to fit our melee focused Fusion Wrestler, so we’ll go ahead and take Red as our color.

Alright, so now that we’ve made our character, what do we know about the rules? Well, we know that we have to use our Power Trigger to build up Power, which lets us use abilities and resource multipliers, and we know that certain things can influence our Power Trigger based on the Color we chose. That doesn’t sound like it’s a lot to go off of, but the rules are simple enough that these actually cover pretty much all of the mechanical aspects of play, and the things that don’t influence the mechanics of play will influence the narrative aspects of play.

From here, we move on to playing the game, starting with the Beatdown phase. During the Beatdown Phase, players make a series of moves to deal damage to the planet. Like most of the game, this aspect is also very freeform, but there are a few hard and fast rules we need to pay attention to. First, while there is no initiative order, doing multiple actions without letting other players make an action starts to diminish how much damage you do. The first action you take will be at full power, but if you take another action after that your damage is halved, and any actions you take after that can only do one damage, so they are effectively worthless.

Taking an action in 10MHPP is simply describing something awesome that your character does, rolling 5D6, and then adding and multiplying the damage based on the aspects of what you described and what Resource Multipliers you purchase (Multipliers stack, so you want to get as many of them in one action as you can). So, for example, if we say that Grabnok, after taking a large bite out of a chunk of plutonium he keeps on hand to generate 1 Red Power, calls the planet an asshole before suplexing a mountain by bringing his Fusion Reactor to Critical Mass, then we would hit the conditions for Verbally Insulting the Planet, using a special move, and striking the planet, as well as buying the Resource Multiplier Break A Mountain with the Red Power we generated, meaning we would add 1D6, 2D8, and 1d10 to our initial 5D6, and multiplying the result by 10, for a maximum possible damage of 620. This number could go even higher, because those initial 5D6 can benefit from Exploding Sixes, which lets you reroll any sixes you get, and add whatever you get to the total roll. Sixes continue to explode even after the first re-roll, so you can potentially get massive damage in a single action. Not a bad start on our first Damage Milestone of 10,00 HP. We’ll also gain 2 Red Power and 1 Green power that we can use on future actions, like adding abilities to your rolls to add multipliers or even change how dice Explode. There is also a Mook mechanic that adds one damage per player action, which any player can increase by paying power into them. Each point of power doubles the damage of the mooks, which can make that one initial damage exponentially higher, turning them into a valuable source of constant damage.

Personally, I think the multipliers are the most exciting aspect of the mechanics so far. Getting to bloat your damage numbers to ungodly proportions is really exciting, and the narrative value of tying them to descriptions of your actions is just inspired. I’m a little bit less excited about the Mooks. Their description is basically a footnote to the main combat rules, and while I’m sure they could ramp up pretty wonderfully over time, they just aren’t a particularly interesting mechanic.

After a few rounds of everyone kicking the shit out of the planet and hitting the Damage Milestone, we go into the Ghosts of the Past phase. This is our downtime and storyline phase. This phase lets us examine how the last phase went, as well as answering some of the bigger questions about how and why things have come to this point. The decisions we make at this point decide how we advance our character and increase our power, and gives us a good stopping point to take a break if we need it. This is all determined by how we decide the last combat round went. If we decide that the last round ended on a Hopeful note, then we can get a new item, or upgrade an item’s current level. Items do things like double or power gain, or manipulate our dice rolls in some way, so this can be a huge benefit. On the other hand, if we decide that the combat round ended in Tragedy, then we get to make one major adjustment to our character. What that means isn’t really explained at all, but I assume it let’s us change how our powers function by changing what color of power we generate. Since the different colors offer different types of powers, this could let us do a lot of fun things with the narrative. Speaking of the narrative, we advance it in this stage by answering 3 of the Big Questions: Who, What, When, Where, and Why. Since we don’t need to worry about linearity, we can basically bend and twist the narrative in any way we like, which is a lot of fun.

Honestly, I love the idea of all of the story being dependent on how the players want the world to work. It makes everything more engaging when everyone has to input a bit into the story. That said, the Hope and Tragedy mechanic is… odd. A lot of that just comes from how vague the Tragedy benefits are. Since character creation is so freeform in the first place, making a major adjustment to a character feels a little… weak. While it’s a good opportunity to have the story make exciting twists and turns, it just doesn’t feel like a suitable alternative to “exponential power increase.”

Now that we have the nuts and bolts out of the way, let’s talk a bit about the Themes at play here. Honestly, I think the Themes for 10MHPP are pretty obvious at first glance: Triumph. While the crux of the story is about an apocalypse, the players are never put in a position where they can fail, and they are encouraged to explain how they succeed with extravagant damage numbers and bombastic combat scenes. Even the downtime phase gives you the most benefits for ending the last combat phase in the most hopeful way possible, and there’s a certain rush to describing the way your nuclear fusion powered super luchador managed to wreck the planet. While the elements are there to tell a story about tragedy and loss, in the end it is impossible to fail with the rules as written.

So what’s the final verdict on 10MHPP, what do we think of it? Well, first and foremost, the mechanics are awesome. Rolling fistfuls of dice is already a blast, but multiplying the outcome by extreme numbers adds a second layer of juicy goodness to the proceedings. The story is pretty fun and interesting to play around with, but getting the most out of it will require a bit of work that may be daunting for some players. That said, the Triumphant theme makes for a really fun narrative environment to play around in. Knowing that no matter how dark the story gets the players will still come out on top is strangely refreshing after a lifetime of games where victory is uncertain.

I really wouldn’t recommend playing this game with people who are new to TTRPGs, or even people who casually play them. The freeform nature of the game doesn’t have enough structure for the inexperienced to latch onto, and a lot of the rules seem to have been written for the express purpose of pushing the envelope of what a TTRPG’s rules can handle. In fact the game outright tells you that multipliers were designed with that in mind. That said, I don’t think the rules are so esoteric that only other game developers can latch onto them, as can happen in games that want to press against boundaries. As long as the players have some experience with role-playing under their belt, it shouldn’t be too hard to get a good game out of it.

As for me, I think this game is pretty cool. Playing this with my usual playgroup as we drink and goof off will be a blast, especially for those of us with short attention spans. Being actively involved with everyone’s actions will do a lot to keep people focused, and seeing what people think is awesome when they’re drunk is always hilarious. Definitely something to keep in the back pocket for parties, but probably not something I’ll pull out for a regular RPG night.

Sandy Pug Games can be found at https://twitter.com/SandyPugGames, and you can purchase their work over at https://sandypuggames.itch.io/