Sunday, October 16, 2016

With Some Inspiration, I Built an RPG Engine




+Christian Lindke's post from his Advanced Dungeon and Parenting blog, where he incredibly mixes the Black Hack, FASERIP, and the Cypher System using an idea from +Zak Sabbath 's DnD With Pornstar's twist on the FASERIP mechanic immediately inspired an idea for a RPG engine. I really need to emphasize that I find Zak's idea brilliant. I hope neither Christian nor Zak mind me taking their thoughts and running with them.

Character's have three Traits: Mind (their base rating for Mental skills), Body (their base rating for Physical skills), and Health (their hit points). You can assign a rating of 3 to one of them, a rating of 2 to a second, and a rating of 1 to the third.

Your Mind and your Body are the number you have to roll at or below on d10's.

Your Health is 10 hit points for a rating of 1, 20 hit points for a rating of 2, or 30 hit points for a rating of 3.

For the moment, I'm going to use the Skill List from the Basic Role Playing RPG. Combat and Physical skills all have a base rating equal to your Body. All other skills have a base rating equal to your Mind. You spend 27 points amongst any of those skills. 

The central mechanic is to roll three d10 and see how many of them can roll at or below your skill. Bonuses or penalties to the roll would probably be to add a d10 for a bonus or subtract a d10 for a penalty.

In combat, each level of success would increase the amount of damage done.  I'm leaning toward having the player's roll all of the dice, so if they are attacked they would roll an appropriate defense, such as Dodge. 

I'm fleshing more stuff out, but that is the kernel of my idea.

Right now, I'm looking at using it as a system for my Grave New World setting, just trying it a fantasy game, or a modern paranormal investigator game.

Feedback?

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Monster Monday: Obstrevoi for Shadowdark

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