Creating your own PnP rules system

[Kaftan Barlast]

Im right now n the proces of designing my own PnP ruleset as a kid of semi-school thing (im studying computer game design/development) and Im wondering ow many of you have tried this and what your experiences were?

 

 

Right now my rules have these basics

• Made for modern campaigns focusing on firearms
  
• Percentage/decimal, d100 based
  
• No classes
  
• No levels, experience earned can be spent at any time your character is idle.
  
• Damage levels instead of hit points
  
• Rules rely on attributes(like intelligence) skills (like flying a helicopter) and derivates (like D&Ds will or fortsaves) in equal measure. Often games wont fully use attributes for anything else but to calculate AC etc. In this game youll make rolls based on your attributes like you would do with a skill or anything else.
  
• You have a "roof" that youll have to roll under instead of a "waterline" that youll have to roll over. If skill X is at 46% 23 will mean a success and 57% will mean failiure.
  
• Difficult or beneficial circumstances either subtract or add to your skill. Shooting at a moving target will lower your chance to hit by giving you f.ex -10% on your weapon skill so youll have to roll under 30% instead of 40%. Shooting a target at point blank range will add maybe 20% to your skill insted.
  
• A weapons damage is based upon the ammunition it fires and not properties of the gun itself.
  

Right now this sounds very similar to SPECIAL or CoC 5th ed but I wont go into the unique features right now... furthermore I have to eat diner now so Ill BRB

[Judge Hades]

Sounds workale. I am currently trying to refine a classless/levelless d20 System variant.

[Kaftan Barlast]

I had set up some objectives before I started working on the system (yes I love lists)

• Gameplay should be fast, actions shold not take lnger to reslve than the time it takes to roll the dice and declare the result.
  
• You should be able to get as much info from a single roll of a d100 as possible. Since everything is decimal based, Ive come a long way in this and I even have some mathematics that I have yet to assign a game function yet.
  
• The rules had to be realistic and use as little abstraction as possible.
  
• The rulesystem should have a basic fast system and then the option to add increasing layers of rules to allow for more tactical gameplay to those who prefer it. Not just a collection of random rules for this and that but by having "rule packages" so players can learn and implement the rules gradually basic>experienced>advanced
  
• The system has to be translatable to a computer enviroment
  

Currently Im tryig to see if there is a way around the two basic systems for handing rounds. D&D-ish actions per round or SPECIAL-ish action points.

 

I have decided that Ill allow for things to happen at the exact same time because this is realistic. Two gunmen firing at eachother at the same moment for instance.

Edited December 28, 2005 by Kaftan Barlast

[Ewen Brown]

well, in my journey along the road i made separate experience for each skill, which basically allowed adding as many skills as one wanted makng it flexible to various settings

 

i suppose the major problem is finding balance between making it too simple which makes it boring and too complicated which makes it too burdensome to actually play

[Kaftan Barlast]

In the RPGs that I have played separate experience for skills is used to reflect that you only get better in those skills you actually use. I dont quite understand what you mean with "allowed adding as many skills as one wanted"?

 

 

I have solved that balance by dividing the rules into three separate sets: basic, experienced and advanced. If it was printed they would be separate chapters so that a player wold only need to read the basic chapter to be able to play, then he could easily move on once hes learnt those.

I remember a swedish game called EON that advanced optional rules but the problem was that they were thrown in with the rest of the rules, hey were marked but it was still bad because it made them harder to look up and they also made the basic rules harder to comperhend because all of a sudden it would be this "Optiona rule: How to calculate the ballistic properties of an unladen swallow" text thrown in all of a sudden.

[Loof]

Im right now n the proces of designing my own PnP ruleset as a kid of semi-school thing (im studying computer game design/development) and Im wondering ow many of you have tried this and what your experiences were?

 

 

Right now my rules have these basics

• Made for modern campaigns focusing on firearms
   
  
• Percentage/decimal, d100 based
   
  
• No classes
   
  
• No levels, experience earned can be spent at any time your character is idle.
   
  
• Damage levels instead of hit points
   
  
• Rules rely on attributes(like intelligence) skills (like flying a helicopter) and derivates (like D&Ds will or fortsaves) in equal measure. Often games wont fully use attributes for  anything else but to calculate AC etc. In this game youll make rolls based on your attributes like you would do with a skill or anything else.
   
  
• You have a "roof" that youll have to roll under instead of a "waterline" that youll have to roll over. If skill X is at 46% 23 will mean a success and 57% will mean failiure.
   
  
• Difficult or beneficial circumstances either subtract or add to your skill. Shooting at a moving target will lower your chance to hit by giving you f.ex -10% on your weapon skill so youll have to roll under 30% instead of 40%. Shooting a target at point blank range will add maybe 20% to your skill insted.
   
  
• A weapons damage is based upon the ammunition it fires and not properties of the gun itself.
  

Right now this sounds very similar to SPECIAL or CoC 5th ed but I wont go into the unique features right now... furthermore I have to eat diner now so Ill BRB

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Yeah I have started developing my own ruleset a few times, but dont think i have ever finished it all the way from scratch. I have heavily modified existing rulesets though.

 

My coments on each of your points:

Setting:

Well not much to say here...

 

Precentile sytem:

They are fast and simple so if thats a main focus its a good choice. But personaly I prefer targetnumber systems instead of roll under systems partly because I feel that its easier to asign varying dificultys. Another thing I dislike about precentile rolls is that the random factor is linear as oposed to a curve, but thats probably because I want the standard deviation of my random factor to be small (although I dont mind the range of posible outcomes being large... hope that wasn't to statistical an explanation).

 

Classless:

Definetly the way to go in my opinion, so no comments.

 

Levelless:

Good choice.

Experience being spendable whenever the character has "downtime" is good. How are you planing to hand out experience? Personaly I dislike the gain by useing skill system, even if it is teh most realistic way. The reason that I do is because I feel it encurages rolling for the sake of rolling. In other words in PnP players tend to use skillrolls to solve problems that could be roleplayed without dice because they want to increase their skills. In crpg's you instead get the hit the wall to become a great warrior problem.

 

Damagelevels:

If this is good or bad depends alot on what kind of feel you are aiming at for the setting. They generaly tend to result in deadlier more realistic feel, where even "warriors" think a time or two before atacking someone. So if thats what you are aiming for its a good choice.

But I have never seen a damagelevel system translated to a computer game and I instinctivly feel that it might be a bit bothersome to get right (hp systems are easier to tweek I think).

 

Attributes-skills-derivates:

This is pretty much standard. Just one question: Do atributes affect skills or how easy they are to learn or are skills independent of atributes. If this is the case how do you represent differing levels of talent for a skill?

 

Roof/waterline and varying difficulty:

See coments about precentaile rolls.

 

Weapon damage based on amunition I agree with. Personaly I prefer having weapon damage as a fixed number and varying this based on the random factor of the tohit roll instead of having radnom damage factor for the weapon/ammo.

 

Action system:

One alernative to AP or actions per round that i have seen is to lett initiative determin number of actions. Example: if your starting initiative was 22, and you fired yoru pistol that has an attack cost of 4 your next action takes place at 18 an dso on untill you reach 0 and can take no more actions that round.

Which is basicaly a modified AP system where where everyone has simultanious turns , which I think you said you wanted...

Haven't realy seen any other good alternatives to the problem. One downside of the above system is that it can be pretty slow untill all the players know it by heart. I have also never seen it in a computer game, but in principle I think it shoudl work.

 

 

Hope atleast some of this was helpfull =)

[Walsingham]

So far it sounds pretty simiolar to other systems I've played. Not necessarily a bad thing, but why not try something at least slightly wacky?

 

1) Damage

 

Make a couple of silhouettes of people, one standing and one kneeling. Cut the backs off some cereal packets, and glue the silhouettes into the interior of the rest of the packet, so they sit inside the box.

 

When your characters shoot they make a roll against %age. If they get under the goal roof, then they move to the silhouettes. Here they drop something like a dice from a specified height like a foot above the box. Wherever the dice land is where the round hits.

 

Use common sense and or a medical textbook to determine what gets munged by the round when it hits. Take into account body armour quickly and intuitively by cutting out some dinky little cardboard vests. If the thrown object falls outside the silhouette then count it as a graze/near miss/catch splinters and have the target be supressed for one round.

 

If you wanted to get really cleevr you could drop the whole throwing objects thing and use a crosshairs and some normal distribution tables. But unless you are a freak you probably won't.

 

2) Characters get rated on high or low stress preference and risk taking. High stress and risk characters get penalised when trying to do any skill in a low stress low rsik context, like building a house or working in a library. Low stress characters get penalised when the bullets start flying. Players may all opt for high stress characters, so you could have high stress people standing a chance of starting with a criminal record.

 

3) Characters have to include their notion of a 'perfect day' in their profile.

 

~~

 

Any good?

[Kaftan Barlast]

1. Although quite amusing, the system currently works like this. You roll % from which you can also derrive where you hit, if that part of the target is not wearing body armur or is behind cover, its a hit. You roll another die to determine how serious the wound is. 1 is a scratch while 10 is quite detrimental to the general health status of the person concerned.

 

2. All that really does is limit your character in a way that doest enhance the game experience. Its a fun idea but it fills no function except to impose retrictions.

 

3. Hehehe, thats good. The GM should be able to give out bonus EXP for sucessful avoidance of clich

[Archmonarch]

I was once helping this guy I knew test a system he was developing and he came up with something that might fit your needs. He had a basic and advanced system: the basic was pretty much the standard rounds, but the advanced divided time into what he called Impulses (IP), each representing 250 ms, the amount of time necessary for the human brain to perceive information, make a decision, and respond. Each type of action was assigned a certain cost in IP. So, if, for example, a skill cost 40 IP, it would take ten seconds to complete. However, the faster the character, the fewer IP he would need to perform that action due to increased reactoin time. The really interesting thing is that other characters are acting simultaneously. Whenever the amount of time necessary to do their decided action passes, they also act. And yet, characters (or enemies) can react to their opponent's moves and change their actions for a small IP cost, as they refocus themselves.

 

If two characters actions finished on the same IP, then the faster character (as determined by initiative which in his system was a derivative of Agility and Perception) would act first.

 

If you would like more information, I have it in .pdf form. However, he is Dutch, so his English, while understandable, is not the greatest.

[Kaftan Barlast]

Thats interesting but its just a rewrite of the old "action point" round system. Maybe there is no escape from using either actions or action points?

 

 

At his point I just going to go with standard round with a number of actions that character can perform based on their "speed" value (I havent decided if speed wil be an attribute or a derived value yet)

[Judge Hades]

Just remember K.I.S.S..

 

Keep it simple, stupid. If you make it overly convoluted then no one will want to play it. Keep it streamline, keep it simple, but engaging. Unncecessary complexities slows down the game.

[Walsingham]

1. Although quite amusing, the system currently works like this. You roll % from which you can also derrive where you hit, if that part of the target is not wearing body armur or is behind cover, its a hit. You roll another die to determine how serious the wound is. 1 is a scratch while 10 is quite detrimental to the general health status of the person concerned.

 

2. All that really does is limit your character in a way that doest enhance the game experience. Its a fun idea but it fills no function except to impose retrictions.

 

3. Hehehe, thats good. The GM should be able to give out bonus EXP for sucessful avoidance of clich

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

When you've got something workable togeather, pass it along! I'll check to see how implementable it is with the rest of my engine.

[Weiser_Cain]

Levelups are satisfying.

[J.E. Sawyer]

When I was designing a pen-and-paper Fallout game, the rules went through heavy revisions. I started out with something similar to the SPECIAL rules used in F3, but those proved to not be that great in a pen-and-paper environment.

 

In particular, combat felt very clunky and dumb. At the suggestion of Dave Maldonado, I switched the combat system over to a phase-based system like the one used in Necromunda: Move > Charge > Action. AP went away, but sequence was still very important. I reduced the overall damage range of weapons and made character skill more important. This allowed characters with thematic weapons (like revolvers) to be a little more viable. Ranged weapons, guns in particular, had their ranges severely truncated. The ranges weren't realistic, but they actually became meaningful on the hex mat.

 

The results were terrific. Combat went a lot quicker, people understood it more easily, and when people replayed the actual events of a battle, they seemed pretty sensible. I was very skeptical when Dave suggested it, but going phase-based helped a lot.

[Shadowstrider]

I created a rules system. Its new hotness. Combat is fast paced, and strategic. Slow downs only occur after a battle, when people tally up all the XP. The system was actually made for CRPGs, but testing it in PnP actually made me believe it was better for PnP. The system is fairly straightforward and characters end up entirely unique from one another.

[thepixiesrock]

So I was playing StarWars Lego one day, and I worked out this whole system using six sided diie. Regular characters (soldiers, un-important characters) got one die, upper level characters and first stage jedi got two, main non-jedi characters and Jedi Knights got three, and Jedi Masters got four, and ultra powerful Jedi get five. I was thinking about fleshing it out more though, you know, make it a little more in depth.

[Shadowstrider]

Thats actually not a terrible way to go. My system only uses 2 type of die; d20 and d6. Damage is determined by rolling a d6, and adding the bonuses (These can be size, damage type, magical bonuses if you have magic weapons).

 

 

Originally, when I was designing the system simply to be used with CRPGs, instead of d6, the random number gen. would roll the dice type, then I eliminated dice in favor of a "1 or 2" system, where weapon size/power level determined how many "2 sided dice" you got. This is what the old system looked like.

 

EDIT: Table didn't work.

Power

Level / MP Cost / AP Cost / Damage

1 / 2 / 4 / 1d2

2 / 4 / 6 / 2d2

3 / 6 / 8 / 3d2

4 / 8 / 10 / 4d2

5 / 10 / 12 / 5d2

6 / 12 / 14 / 6d2

7 / 14 / 16 / 7d2

8 / 16 / 18 / 8d2

9 / 18 / 20 / 9d2

10 / 20 / 22 / 10d2

 

EDIT II: This time its personal.

 

So, essentially, the highest tier of damage attainable with a single attack (before modifiers) is 20, which is approximately half the maximum attainable health at character creation. Weapons would only get as high as level 6 in terms of dice rolling, but with all the special maneuvers and "magic" bonuses you could easily trump a level 10 spell in terms of damage, you would just fatigue incredibly fast. If your endurance runs out and you continue attacking, you begin to lose health if you continue attacking. I use a form of phase-based combat, as well.

Edited January 15, 2006 by Shadowstrider

[Kaftan Barlast]

For now Ive decided to use a simple round based system like D&D or Fallout uses. You determine initiative, then all invovled in combat will take turns to move and take actions. I didnt want to split it up into phases because that will create more fuss and slow things down.

 

 

 

So, essentially, the highest tier of damage attainable with a single attack (before modifiers) is 20, which is approximately half the maximum attainable health at character creation.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

So only a Lvl10 character would stand a chance to dispatch even a lvl1 enemy with a single attack? How much does the health increase per level?

 

I dont know how your modifiers are constructed, but it seems like the system would make last combat a very long time.

[Shadowstrider]

For now Ive decided to use a simple round based system like D&D or Fallout uses. You determine initiative, then all invovled in combat will take turns to move and take actions.  I didnt want to split it up into phases because that will create more fuss and slow things down.

 

 

 

So, essentially, the highest tier of damage attainable with a single attack (before modifiers) is 20, which is approximately half the maximum attainable health at character creation.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

So only a Lvl10 character would stand a chance to dispatch even a lvl1 enemy with a single attack? How much does the health increase per level?

 

I dont know how your modifiers are constructed, but it seems like the system would make last combat a very long time.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Characters do not gain levels. Skills progress through usage. Health does increase a few different ways, but the maximum you can gain following creation is 15 health. I misspoke when I said 40 was the maximum HP at creation, that is the maximum health prior to picking race or traits. Race can increase it by up to 4, and traits can add another 4. So 48 would be the maximum hp at creation.

[Kaftan Barlast]

Ive been working on my damage/health system lately and I came to the conclusion that a level-based health system(like in WW's VtM) was not right for this game as it oversimplified things and also took away alot of the fun about combat.

 

 

So now Ive come up a hybrid system )

 

 

 

you now have HP like every other RPG but they are divided into intervals who decide what the consequence of that damage is, just like a level-based health system would. You also dont scratch HP but write up the damage recieved, this makes it simpler to handle.

Edited January 19, 2006 by Kaftan Barlast

[Lancer]

I created a rules system.  Its new hotness.  Combat is fast paced, and strategic.  Slow downs only occur after a battle, when people tally up all the XP.  The system was actually made for CRPGs, but testing it in PnP actually made me believe it was better for PnP.  The system is fairly straightforward and characters end up entirely unique from one another.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Why do you need to tally the XP after every battle? Why not at the end of every session? Is it because you want to allow the option for skills to improve during the session?

Edited February 9, 2006 by Lancer

[Jediphile]

Why do you need to tally the XP after every battle? Why not at the end of every session?  Is it because you want to allow the option for skills to improve during the session?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Yes, I think that's a fair question. Though I run AD&D 2e, I never give out xp to the group - ever! I just record it myself and then tell the players who can advance in levels when there is appropriate downtime in the game. That takes a lot of annoying focus on xp away from the game, especially if you're used to players who will hunt down every last little orc just because he's worth a few xp...

 

Except in my game - I don't give xp for a non-threat like that. I do, however, give out massive story goal xp awards, which helps emphasize the focus on the actual role-playing experience. I do recommend not letting the players tally up their own xp, since it's my experience that this helps to make campaign evolvement feel much smoother.

[Jediphile]

2. I agree that it adds restrictions but no worse than, say, the class system in D&D.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

A pretty big restriction. In fact, I find that the fixed class-system is probably the biggest and most annoying game mechanic of D&D altogether these days. It's ancient, inflexible and limits role-playing. It is also founded on principles now more than three decades old, and it shows. It should have been abolished long ago IMHO...

[Lancer]

Why do you need to tally the XP after every battle? Why not at the end of every session?  Is it because you want to allow the option for skills to improve during the session?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Yes, I think that's a fair question. Though I run AD&D 2e, I never give out xp to the group - ever! I just record it myself and then tell the players who can advance in levels when there is appropriate downtime in the game. That takes a lot of annoying focus on xp away from the game, especially if you're used to players who will hunt down every last little orc just because he's worth a few xp...

 

Except in my game - I don't give xp for a non-threat like that. I do, however, give out massive story goal xp awards, which helps emphasize the focus on the actual role-playing experience. I do recommend not letting the players tally up their own xp, since it's my experience that this helps to make campaign evolvement feel much smoother.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Word. That is exactly how I handle XP too. First, I as the DM, handle all the XP after the session as one of my responsibilities. Second, not only do I hand out story XP awards, but Ialso grant XP awards for good roleplaying. The contribution from these two together tends to be greater than the XP gained from combat alone. This is actually a great way to enforce a non-combat game and get your players to think creatively instead of resorting to combat as a first instinct.

 

And with that said.. This is probably a valid point to make in jorian's thread... If you don't mind Jediphile I am copying this and posting it there.