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Step 7: Classless Utopia

I've been considering making my game "UNNAMED RPG" classless, but I wad conflicted. On one hand in a classless system you can make your character however you want to, and not be limited by rote roles; on the other hand you could have a complete fuster-cluck of useless options, terrible balancing, min-maxing, and rules bloat. But I believe that the risk is worth it to have a better game, so the question becomes how do I mitigate the downsides? In a word, simplicity; by creating a limited number of diverse and powerful abilities, gated by simple criteria, I can give players the power to make whatever character they want without making it an absolute nightmare to try to balance their options, or keep them all relevant. So I'll start by creating three different archetypes, strong, skilled, and magical. Then I'll give each of those archetypes 3 tiers, and then I'll give players 3 attribute points total to allocate to each of the archetypal tiers. This allows players to create either incredibly focused characters, characters who dabble in everything, Or a character who's proficient in one thing and dabbles in another. Then depending on how heavily they've invested in an archetype they'll have access to a certain number of its perks but only up to their investment level. Say for instance you put two stat points in strong, and one in magical. With just that simple selection you've created a Magus, a character who is a competent warrior and uses magic to enhance his martial skill. Reverse your choice and you have a warmage, a magician with reasonable military training. It's my hope that this system works, and that by keeping options limited but robust I can allow people to make essentially any character they've ever wanted, without killing myself writing in the process.

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Step Six: Magic... Mutha-Fucka

We’ve addressed weapons and armor now onto the magic.

Magic has always been a problem in the tabletop games I’ve played, if you bring it into line with options other characters have it’s just another word  for “weapon” or “tool“, but if you keep it amazing it becomes synonymous with “god’s fist“ or “fuck the rules I’m a wizard“.

D&D tried to remedy this with a kind of “earn your power” system where wizards start off incredibly weak and end the game as nigh invincible demigods who can do anything, there are several problems there.

1: Not all games start at low level preventing the build up to power and the “earning“ of it.

2: Not all games get to high level stopping the wizard from ever being able to shine.

3: Their power curve continues on it’s exponential path making them rapidly eclipse other classes at higher levels.

How do I plan to remedy this? By making wizards Batman, not in the “wears dark clothing and punches criminals at night” kind of way but more in the “If you give me enough prep time I can beat anything“ way, but with the caveat that I’ll implement this on a micro scale, rather than a macro one.

Let me explain; say for instance your wizard is in a battle, in my system every round he’ll charge up a number of “mana points“ that he must spend to cast his spells, the amount he gets for waiting one turn give him access to some attacks that would generally be considered weaker than what a weapon oriented character could do.

The next turn his options open up more as his new mana points give him access to more powerful ans diverse spells, and so on up to a cap where his power is maxed out and by burning his Mana points up all at once he can access tremendously powerful abilities.

To prevent the wizard from being stuck at low power levels through fights I’ll have mana accumulation slightly outpace expenditure, until powerful spells are available, giving the wizard options no matter how low his charge is.

In addition wizards will have an innate “mana surge” ability giving them access to mid tier spells in the event of ambushes, to prevent them getting completely wrecked by stealthy characters, while still not allowing them to instantly disintegrate anyone.

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Step Five: A bit of the old Ultra-Violence

Now that I’ve finished droning on about armor let get to the good bit, namely weapons!

One of my issues with weapons in other systems is that they’re largely meaningless to your characters play-style, in fact, aside from flavor or arbitrary limitations on your character like proficiency in D&D, you’re mostly incentivized to just choose the highest damage numbers or best crit modifiers.

I want to change that, and to that end I’ve changed the way weapons work in my rpg, I’ve separated what weapons can do into a few base attributes.

1: Accuracy, or how much of a bonus the weapon gives you to hit.

2: Defense, an evasion bonus granted by the weapon, mostly for shields.

3: Damage, how hard the weapon hits on any non critical strike.

4: Reach, the effective attack range of the weapon.

5: Crit, the damage dealt to core health on a crit; replaces regular damage.

6: Special, any unique ability the weapon may have.

with this system in place we can design weapons with different builds in mind, for instance an assassin might use a weapon with high crit damage but low accuracy to take advantage of sleeping or helpless targets, where an archer type character would favor accuracy, allowing them to land attacks against a foe at ludicrous distances.

I still have to work out proper balancing, but I think this is a good framework to start with.

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Step Four: Mi Armour, Mon Coeur

Sadly I must harp on about armor and equipment more. I know, I know imaginary blog readers; I’m sorry.

In my previous post I discussed how armor would add to hp, as a representation of making you harder to kill, but now I’d like to contextualize that information.

First off I don’t plan on making the armor ablative. damageable, yes, if it is specifically targeted, but every hit on your character won’t push your armor towards uselessness.

Now I have two reasons for this; one is that ablative armor is a huge time, money, and rules space sink, which is directly in opposition to my stated goals of ease of play and simplicity.

The second reason is how my health system works; to explain, in my rpg the vast majority of your hit points isn’t you physical integrity, but your stamina, your ability to evade or mitigate hits and still come up fighting, and to represent this I’ve separated health into two categories, Core health, and Stamina.

Core health is your characters actual physical well being, or to put it bluntly, how un-stabbed they are, this health is a very small portion of your total hp and is only affected after your stamina points are worn down, or on a critical hit.

Stamina is the majority of your characters hp, and it represents their ability to dodge, block, and mitigate damage through effort and physical skill, armor will add to this type of hp as a flat number multiplied by character level, filling the mechanical roll of damage reduction without making characters immune to harm.

A small caveat to this armor system is that stamina damage is constant, if you change, or take off armor, the amount of stamina damage you’ve taken is always subtracted from your current max stamina, but stamina damage is never converted into core damage by taking armor off.

Stamina can go into the negative in this manner but for all intents and purposes other than determining your total stamina when you put armor back on, it is simply treated as having zero stamina.

Geez that was mechanical and dry, I’ll try to be funnier next time.

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Step the Third: ARMOR SYSTEMS ENGAGE

I’ve hit a bit of a snag considering item design, specifically Armor.

I’ve never like the abstraction of heavy armor making people miss their attacks against you more, it makes some sense for light armor, but not heavy.

So I did some research and came across an idea, armor as damage reduction it fits more with how heavy armor works and it’s simple to implement;

Yet there was still a problem, what about sources of low damage, or if someone tries to game the system to become invulnerable, or how about if a enemy is so far above the players he becomes mechanically invincible?

I couldn’t let that happen, no matter how powerful someone is a cat scratch still hurts, no one is truly invulnerable, and skill makes you harder to kill but not indestructible. But then it hit me, HP is an abstraction! It’s a representation of how hard your character is to kill not necessarily their actual physical well being!

In fact until you lose your last HP your perfectly fine, so I found my solution! Armor make you harder to kill, armor adds to your HP It’s so simple I couldn’t believe I’d never seen it before, but now I have somewhere to work from.

I still have to find a way to balance evasion and tanking to be equally viable, and to integrate this mechanic into the class, combat, and stat systems, but damn if I don’t feel clever for coming up with it.

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Reblog this if you think Table Top Games are Awesome!

Because the best gamers are Table Top Gamers!

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Step 2: MORTAL KOMBAT!

Alright, now let’s start getting into the basics of the combat system

Combat: I plan on using 3d6+attribute system becuse the rolls are very stable with something akin to D&D 5.0′s action economy where your amount of movement and number of attacks aren’t connected; but with the addition of two mechanics.

The first one is similar to Edge in shadowrun, a refreshable pool of points a player can use to improve rolls, survive lethal hits, or expand their tactical options briefly allowing for more engaging complex combat.

The second, I’m gonna call the Stack System, and it will allow players to do more awesome things by combining actions together and rolling at a higher difficulty, and then incentivizing them doing so.

For example in lord of the rings Legolas does this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DvBE7Vt7Vg and that’s awesome, but in many crunchy rpgs like D&D it’s either impossible (because picking up the shield and sliding on it uses up your entire turn) or pointless (because good luck hitting anything while balancing and sliding).

Whereas with the stack system combining the actions would raise the difficulty but would also pay off, by either adding damage, regaining edge, leaving enemies terrified of your prowess, or some other benefit depending on gm approval and difficulty of the roll.

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Step 1: ohgodwhatamidoing

For a long time I’ve played tabletop rpg’s and loved every minute of the hobby, but I’ve always wondered, can I do better? Can I make a game that’s faster to get into, more balanced, more versatile, and much sexier than a lot of the ones out there, while still maintaining a solid rule structure? I think I can; and this blog is me trying to prove it. So I’m going to start by laying out my goals.

1: Fast to start /simple to play, a ton of rpg’s require hours of reading just to make a character, I want to make the process faster to get into than your moms sweatpants by streamlining classes, builds and play.

2: Balanced, anyone whose played even a few sessions of D&D knows wizards stomp mud-holes in literal gods when they aren’t even trying, while fighters are minuscule specks adrift in the cosmos that take a bit longer for the wizard to kill than normal, my goal is to make every character class viable by giving them individual flair, diverse roles and not letting classes encroach on  each others territory. 3: Action packed, in some games the book keeping is so damn time consuming you need a secretary and a lawyer on hand to take a minor action, or it’s so rigidly implemented you can barely do anything other than “I swing for X damage”, I want to create a system that lets player combine actions to let them do damn near anything.

4: Better role playing, very often to make a “good character” in an rpg you’re forced to pigeon hole yourself into a single role, like “combat monster“ or “healer” or “diplomat” so to prevent this I want to introduce a mechanic I call “life classes” essentially what the character is outside of combat, made in a way that enhances role play, while still granting some mechanical benefit.

5.Versatility: many games once made can only play their specific game, part of my aim in making this game is to create a core system that can be used to play an incredible diversity of games without diving into G.U.R.P.S. level plurality.

6. A kickass setting: I’m sick of england in the dark ages but with dragons and wizards, so my goal is to make something new and something awesome as hell, here hoping I succeed on both fronts,

And so it begins! I don’t know if anyone will read this but hopefully it’s the start of a kickass journey.