What combination of features would make your ideal system and why?

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Nobby-W

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I've got a soft spot for some features of older systems and some from newer systems. My ideal 'eclectic' system would combine the following features:
  • FATE point economy from FATE. It's a great tool to bribe your players to stop being paranoid and allow their characters to get into trouble.
  • Clocks from the PBTA family: Rather than (for example) just fail your stealth check and alert the guards you can build tension by ticking down a clock based on how well the party does.
  • Flashbacks from the FITD family: Retconning past events makes a nice way to do heists. It's largely a story gaming feature but being able to retcon bribing a guard or something is a nice way to put together the narrative for an Ocean's 11 style heist.
  • 2D6 dice mechanic (or D6-D6): Simple mental arithmetic and about the right kurtosis. 4DF is too thin in the tails and D20 with its even distribution means the effects of modifiers can be a bit strange in the fringes. Having said that, I don't mind the heavier tails of a D20, it makes extreme effects more common.
  • Free-form aspects and stunts from FATE: Negotiate their effects with the DM as you build the character. It's also a good way to add specialisations to skills (e.g. master safecracker).
  • Small ship universe: If you're doing sci-fi, mile long dreadnoughts make for good cinema but they're too big to be much use in an actual campaign. Small ships are (a) not too big to map out deck plans and (b) accessible and usable in the context of an ordinary game.
  • Contacts, enemies and other life-path events: IMHO Cyberpunk 2020 did this better than Traveller.
  • Twilight:2000 1e damage system: or something similar. Weapons had an armour multiplier, with lower multipliers meaning your armour was less effective. This let you have weapons that could penetrate heavy armour without necessarily being an insta-kill on unarmoured characters. Few games do this well.
  • Battle magic from Runequest: i.e. magic powered from some pool rather than Vancian spell slots.
  • Blowing off stress mechanics: For example, FITD where you need R&R to de-stress your character. Barbarians of Lemuria has a mechanic where you have to spend all your money on partying to gain experience.
  • No super weapons: Not looking at anyone in particular *cough*Traveller*cough*. If (as a DM) you find yourself making excuses as to why your players shouldn't have access to something fairly mundane, it's probably time to consider nerfing it.
Someday I might make up a SRD for this hypothetical system but the world needs more indie publishers making minor variations on established game systems like ... never mind. In practice it would be a mashup of existing ideas with a smattering of original content.

I'm not rapt with class/level systems, although I'm quite happy to play D&D. I prefer a character generation system where you can build a character from a concept, although Traveller characters can be quite fun to just roll and run with. Too much crunch can get in the way, but Rolemaster's critical tables were fun.

So, what are your favourite game system features, or what combination would make your ideal system?

Why do you like those particular features?
 
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My ideal systems are clear, succinct, and elegant rulesets that can represent a wide variety of situations with a little imagination. I also prefer a low barrier of entry for people who are new to the hobby. Barbarians of Lemuria is the best example of this kind of game that I can think of at the moment.

I've been interested in Dungeon World and her variants for years but have never played. I can see it becoming one of my ideal systems but I'd need to play and run it before making my final decision.
 
Mmm, this is a tough but fun question! I don't think I have a singular ideal system, but I definitely have some preferences. Lesse...
  • My ideal system definitely is not a class/level system (some light classing may be there, but definitely not "Advancing in a class by level")
  • There is some type of gambling built into the resolution system, where you can invest a resource to improve chance of success, but could also just lose it. Examples include DC Heroes' Hero Points, Marvel Super Heroes' Karma, possibly Endurance in early Champions. To a lesser extent, Willpower in Street Fighter. Possibly something like the stones mechanism in the Marvel Universe RPG too. As a player I like the ability to have my character "try harder" because he cares, or ego, or whatever, but also for a gamble to not pay off sometimes. This kind of thing has to be a mechanic in my ideal system.
  • I generally prefer my ideal system have "game". If there is an important area the mechanics get invoked, I want those mechanics not only to decide success, but to play as a fun game, much like you might play other non-RPG games for fun. That means I want there to be some strategy, for it to be possible to be bad or good at the "game" kinda independent of whether or not you are good at the "role playing." Would I use these combat rules just for fun if I wasn't playing an RPG? Would I consider these chase rules fun to play as a stand alone game? I realize an RPG can't do this for every area it covers, but I do want there to be at least one area where the game is fun like this. RPGs I feel do this a bit include Street Fighter, The Riddle of Steel, The Fantasy Trip (all for combat), and maybe the system a friend of mine is working on for magic (It allows for quite a bit of player creativity & gambling!)
  • My ideal system also finds a way to pull players into the world/fiction. Good life path systems can do this. Character creation or advancement systems that reward players for creating the kinds of challenges they want to face in play (be it XP for reaching player defined goals, or so-called "Disadvantage" systems that give players points for having an arch-villain or other RP ready good complications that they are choosing for themselves, or "Passions" or "Keys" as found in some other games, etc.)
  • My genre target is "Modern/Near-Future Action" generally, but a system that can satisfyingly handle more is great too.
  • Solid tools to help the GM create material. This includes the ability to easily whip up plausible NPCs, in addition to Kevin Crawford-style tools to generate locations, situations, organizations, etc.
  • When it comes to action, I like the idea of a system that has ways to meaningfully operate at time scales outside of the round. For example, the 10 minute turn structure of old school D&D seems like it could be well adapted to modern facility infiltration style games, with some fun mechanics (not unlike some of the Clocks PbtA material, for example). Golden Heroes has an interesting XP system based on "Daily Utility Phases" that seems like another potentially cool avenue. In Kevin Crawford's games he'll have organizations operating on a month-length time scale. I like this kind of stuff so long as it doesn't get too heavy.
  • My ideal system knows where to focus mechanics and where to scale them back, to avoid going for "universal" or "generic". A bit of an example here is in DC Heroes. The game has a small number of skills, really. They are all focused on super hero comic relevant stuff. Somebody might have a concept that includes something like "I'm a brilliant mathematician!", but DC Heroes has no "mathematics" skill. Still, there is an Advantage called "Scholar" which makes you +2 CS better whenever whatever subject you're a scholar of comes up. Thank you for not having a skill list with 200 skills of variable utility. Here are a few that provide focus on what the game is primarily about, and an Advantage that can fill in for the rest.
  • While not super-strict, my ideal system assumes players kind of immersively playing characters & not collaborating in the moment of play OOC about the directions they think the story should go, etc. My ideal game shies away from some of the "story-game" stuff.
So... I don't know everything about my ideal system(s), but these preferences are pointing towards it. Kind of assumed is that I also prefer my ideal system achieve this in as light a manner as possible, but who really wants a system that is heavier than needed to do what you want it to do? :-)
 
I can't say. It entirely depends on what I'm trying to do in the game you know. It always depends on the genre I'm going for. I like rules that reinforce the mood I'm going for.
I'm with the Emperor. My ideal rules set would reflect the genre, so it will vary. For instance, I like the West End d6 rules for Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and probably other fast and loose situations, but I wouldn't want them for the Wild West or Angolan Border War mercenaries. I've yet to find the "universal" set of rules that does everything well. I've seen some that do certain things very well, other things mediocrely, and a few things poorly.
 
I'd like to see someone make a d10 dice pool system that took the combat system from Riddle of Steel and greatly streamlined it and combined it with the social mechanics from Exalted 3rd edition (and greatly streamlined that as well).

I'd also like a D20 class based system that was all non-magical sword and sorcery classes but with a bit more tactical depth than most OSR games (something like Iron Heroes but functional and a bit simpler - perhaps more like 13th age level of complexity)
 
Been thinking about this question for the last couple of months.
I'd need to think a bit more before replying:smile:.
 
You have to have a clear idea about what the purpose of the game is, and then judge the rules as being built to support this purpose. The rules for Toon may not be effective for running Pendragon, for example.

Beyond this, having rules that are naturally intuitive - without a list of rule stipulations that you need to refer to in game - is a big plus for me. This doesn't necessarily mean 'rules-lite', but rather that the rules hang together in a rational way that just allows you get on with the game.

The most efficacious rulesets also have elements that are vestigial to older rulesets being ironed out. For example, Delta Green is related to BRP, but made a decision to remove SIZe removed from the Characteristic list. While some may prefer this, it actually represents somebody thinking about it's use and realising that it really doesn't add much utility to the genre it's being used for. It may have a lot more utility in RuneQuest (as it's system ancestor) where hand to hand combat simulation is important, but that doesn't follow that it's as useful in a modern genre. So, this pruning process makes me feel that the Delta Green rules as a whole have been designed with some efficacy.
 
I can't say. It entirely depends on what I'm trying to do in the game you know. It always depends on the genre I'm going for. I like rules that reinforce the mood I'm going for.
I wonder if you could think of some examples of game mechanics and how they have effectively enhanced the mood for a particular campaign?
 
I favour simpler games, the sort you can just pickup and play with much of a learning curve or having to waiting a few sessions to get the hang of it.

Systems that only "sing" under ideal conditions kind of miss the point for me. Conditions are rarely ideal. What I seek is the sort of game that will still support me in the muddy trenches of actual play even when I am tired, unprepared and, weeks into the campaign, the players still haven't bothered learning the rules Or in other words the roleplaying equivalent of traditional Russian military tech; not as fancy as the Western toys but it never lets you down.
 
Well, it'd be percentile roll under, with doubles indicting critical success and failure. Singles from 1 - 9 would represent marginal successes. Character creation would use a balanced life path and you'd need to increase skills to improve attributes, your Endurance goes up because you swim. Points would be linear and interchangeable so there'd be one cost and one number per stat or skill to simplify book keeping. Ideally I'd want modifiers to be percentile modifiers because they scale properly but I could bow to additive ones due to the difficulty of applying multiple percentile multipliers in play. Vehicle movement and design would be physics based and damage would be scaled levels rather than hit points because damage point accumulation always breaks down for big and small targets when you have an exponential scale for ratings and not having an exponential scale for ratings is a bit insane but it means damage gets an exponential creep that makes automatic and volley fire weapons excessively effective against large targets. There would be rules for political campaigns, legal battles, scientific research and the game would function as well as a wargame as it does as a roleplaying game.

Galaxies in Shadow is about 95% of the way there, but sometimes I despair of ever completing it. I also thing smaller, more focussed products would be more successful in the marketplace.
 
What I seek is the sort of game that will still support me in the muddy trenches of actual play even when I am tired, unprepared and, weeks into the campaign, the players still haven't bothered learning the rules Or in other words the roleplaying equivalent of traditional Russian military tech; not as fancy as the Western toys but it never lets you down.

I share your requirement for a robust system that takes a lot of flex before it breaks. You might enjoy this description of a Soviet mortar from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon:

An unlettered tundra farmer with bilateral frostbite could get this thing up and running in ten minutes. If he'd stayed up late the night before celebrating the fulfillment of the last five year plan with a jug of wood alcohol maybe fifteen minutes. Shaftoe consults the instructions. It does not matter that these are printed in Russian, because they are made for illiterates anyway. A series of parabolas is plotted out, the mortar supporting one leg and exploding Germans supporting the opposite. Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.
 
My work with my own original non-D&D system have been falling into a particular pattern.
  • 3d6 roll high
  • Attribute are bonus
  • A skill system with each skill having a bonus and the list limited to no more than 3 dozen skills. Preferably less.
  • Aspects from Fate to represent talents and abilities. Although written a little more concretely.
  • Harnmaster injury system but a low number of hit points will do.
  • Armor as damage reduction
  • AGE style critical/stunt system
  • Individual initiative within reason.
  • You can do a move and attack during a round of combat.
  • Every mechanic ties back something that characters can do within the genre/setting. I.e. No metagame mechanics.
I got two implementation
Based on Fudge/Fate

However 4dF has issues with adding bonuses in. Even a +1 is way generous. So I abandoned this. Then later I played the AGE system and really liked it.

Leading to this for science fiction (I did this before Modern AGE or the Expanse RPG was released)

But Green Ronin never did a 3PP program so I dropped it.

If I revist this I will merge the two and turn what I did in Fudge/Fate into a 3d6 based system and borrow some ideas from AGE and Harnmaster.

But if GURPS 3PP continues to improve I may go that route.
 
Nobby-W Nobby-W , what is FITD? (are you sure it's not to BITD ?).

About the thread proper, I'm with Emperor here: can't tell specific mechanics without knowing the scope of the game we're playing. What I can say is that I prefer simple, fast and intuitive rules over crunchy ones.

And I agree that Pendragon is one of the most elegant uses of rules to fit a theme I've seen.
 
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Nobby-W Nobby-W , what is FITD? (are you sure it's not to BITD ?).
Forged In The Dark. It's the system used in Blades in The Dark, Scum and Villany and the various other games in the family. The people who made Blades In The Dark made the system available to third parties to produce games from.

forged_in_the_dark_logo_large.png

About the thread proper, I'm with Emperor here: can't tell specific mechanics without knowing the scope of the game we're playing. What I can say is that I prefer simple, fast and intuitive rules over crunchy ones.
Maybe you can pick one or two interesting examples and write something about why they work well and what you liked about them.
And I agree that Pendragon is one of the most elegant uses of rules to fit a theme I've seen.
Well, I've never seen another game with rules for writing a mocking poem or buying a gross of unusual dogs. The whetstone of Tydwyl Tyclyff was pretty cool, though.

In unrelated news, I wonder if the T5 weapon builder has rules for doing this:

10086
 
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Well, examples of what I mean of mechanics reinforcing the mood/genre are like the flashback rules in Leverage or Blades in the Dark. They work well in a heist game, but I don't think I'd want those mechanics outside of a heist game.

Tenra Bansho Zero's mechanics for wounds/death are perfect for that game, where you can tell the GM basically "This is what its worth my character dying for" as that fits into the theme of the game.

There was a game I read recently called Tears of a Machine (good game, terribly edited book), is an "Eva with the serial numbers filed off" had mechanics for the emotional state of the pilots, including depression, as well as mechanics for the violent urges of the machines they piloted, and a kind of interplay where you had to keep your control by constantly keeping your characters emotional state at the center of play, or the machine could take over and go berserk. It is perfectly designed for what it IS, but would make little sense outside of it.
 
I wrote mine for the most part. One of them is for sale. It's called High Valor. The other is free or PWIW, and 2E is done mostly. (I really, just hope that my earnest writing is appreciated since I don't like dull dry technical writing.) Although I can do that. I want a game to be a conversation between the writer, GM, and players. Helping them get what they want out of a game. I admit I'm strange that way.
 
I've got a soft spot for some features of older systems and some from newer systems. My ideal 'eclectic' system would combine the following features:

  • 2D6 dice mechanic (or D6-D6): Simple mental arithmetic and about the right kurtosis. 4DF is too thin in the tails and D20 with its even distribution means the effects of modifiers can be a bit strange in the fringes. Having said that, I don't mind the heavier tails of a D20, it makes extreme effects more common.
  • Twilight:2000 1e damage system: or something similar. Weapons had an armour multiplier, with lower multipliers meaning your armour was less effective. This let you have weapons that could penetrate heavy armour without necessarily being an insta-kill on unarmoured characters. Few games do this well.
  • No super weapons: Not looking at anyone in particular *cough*Traveller*cough*. If (as a DM) you find yourself making excuses as to why your players shouldn't have access to something fairly mundane, it's probably time to consider nerfing it.

I have come to appreciate bell curve systems (2d6, 3d6) although I find d20, and % to be more intuitive with their linear progression. Always a toss up for me. Rolling a 9 on 3d6 may be 37%, but 37% is easier to visualize. I do like the effect of a bell curve on skill progression with rapid gains at low levels, and nearly imperceptible increases at high levels. Rolling 2 or 3 d6 also has a pleasant feel in the hand.

T2000s armor multiplier was a good idea but also shows the perils of adopting a new idea without adequate play testing. This resulted in the G11 assault rifle being able to perforate some armored vehicles, while some of the smaller cannons were unable to penetrate body armor... x1/2, x2, x3, x4 multipliers are easy math but makes for large steps.

I am always leary of items, talents, skills that every player takes becasue it is too useful not to use. Experience has shown me that they often result as a lack of play testing of the specific rules or exceptions to rules applied to them. When the rules are tweaked to make an item fit into the authors image, super weapons often result. There are exceptions, sometimes they really do match up to a real world dominance of the type.

Often super weapons also come down to the rules not taking everything into account. This frequently is encountered with real world "super weapons" that aren't. Germany would have won WW2 if all of their super weapons lived up to the hype. They often dominate in games where cool stats like gun power, armor thickness and speed are at a premium but trifling things like logistics (cost, ease of construction, supply, repair, reliability, maintenance, transport and ergonomics) are ignored. Thankfully in the real world these things matter and took their toll.

Caseless weapons are very popular in sci-fi, but while the tech has existed for more than 100 years, in the real world they just can't beat the brass cartridge case for boring but very practical reasons.


I'm with the Emperor. My ideal rules set would reflect the genre, so it will vary. For instance, I like the West End d6 rules for Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and probably other fast and loose situations, but I wouldn't want them for the Wild West or Angolan Border War mercenaries. I've yet to find the "universal" set of rules that does everything well. I've seen some that do certain things very well, other things mediocrely, and a few things poorly.

I was a whole sale adopter of generic systems when the concept was trotted out in the 80s. Over time I have recognized that there really is no perfect game suitable for every genre. The feel of a game is just as important as the mechanical bits. Something like HERO can theoretically cover just about any genre, but it can't provide the light and fast play of a simple game system, and sometimes a "lesser" system intended for a certain style of play is just a perfect fit for a certain genre / setting and no amount of tweaking and bending a larger set of "can do anything" rules can match the fun of just using the right set of rules.
 
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For me, the ideal system has the following characteristics:
  • Dead simple, with a small number of stats that are intuitively named
  • Easy to teach but runnable by the GM alone
  • A flexible universal resolution mechanic (URM)
  • A willingness to depart from the URM when special cases threaten to over-complicate it (Heroquest fails miserably at this aspect)
  • Mechanics that add color to the intended setting without being too tightly tied to it
  • Should be possible to play without:
    • The rulebook
    • Miniatures, cards and special counters
    • Polyhedral dice (yup D6 only)
  • No metagaming or player narrative control
The system that best achieves this standard in my eyes is Over The Edge 1st and 2nd editions aka the WaRP system. If I had to improvise a session on the spur of the moment, I wouldn't think twice before going with it.

Barbarians of Lemuria is another fantastic system. They've overdone it a bit with all the editions and I'm not a huge fan of universal systems, so Everywhen isn't quite as amazing.

I'm also pretty fond of my recent invention, Lark Fantasy. It's the closest I've been able to come to that ideal after many attempts over the years. It's not quite the Platonic ideal that is OTE, of course.

Dragon Warriors is an older system that does remarkably well at meeting my standards. It's so easy to run when you use the material from the original six books - Serpent King has done a good job of restoring the old materials and adding some new stuff of their own. Sadly, it's been a while since I've seen any new content for this system. I bet it could blow up big time if they went OGL.

There are more complex systems that I admire and enjoy. Everyone's favorite bastion of simulationist mechanics - Mythras - deserves the love. Everyone knows how much I enjoy DCC, which is more baroque than complex, but still.
 
Ideal system...
  • No mechanics that the player engages with OOC (or if so, 100% optional and not core)
  • Not D&D style class/level unless the setting can justify it (like Earthdawn)
  • Wounding system, not abstract hit points, with some method of critical hits/one-shot kills
  • Lifepath Chargen
  • Enough advancement complexity so that characters can continue to grow over a long campaign
  • Enough combat complexity so that characters tactical choices matter
Other stuff will depend on type of campaign/setting.
 
I think about this a lot and it has been my quest for the last 35 years... I thought I had found it with GURPS, and that comes close but it isn’t perfect. The niggles are maybe for another thread.

What would my ideal game be like?

It would definitely use a non-linear dice mechanic. Maybe classic 3d6. Maybe (3d20 use the middle value). I really dislike the d20 system where there is too much variability in the dice rolls for my taste. In my group we call it ‘the tyranny of the d20’. The random component overpowers the skills and stats component.

It would be generic, with a special nod towards heroic fantasy. That is the genre we play most often, but it is nice to break out of that periodically, so a game that is strong for heroic fantasy and good for others would be excellent.

Point buy as default. I don’t like random stats. We tend to play moderately long games and aim to keep the same characters throughout. If our group play-style featured a higher turnover of PCs then this would be less of an issue.

It would have interesting sub-systems that make playing out different kinds of activity enjoyable at the table. Many game systems have rich and detailed combat systems but all other endeavours are all to often overlooked or boiled down into a simple skills roll. I would like detailed subsystems for things like:

Combat: naturally. Miniatures will probably be used, but the option to forego is useful.
Pursuit / chase / race: Many games are really poor on this, I find. I like action, and action in books and films often includes chases. Most RPGs have zero rules focussed on this in my experience.
Investigation: Looking for clues and using character knowledge to help the players decide what they mean with out simply giving them an answer based on a single roll. Consideration for the structure of mysteries (though this can be handled by the GM if necessary with the 3-clue approach).
Construction / invention: Another area woefully under represented in most RPGs in my experience. These rules could lead to some very interesting plots around community building, world changing or simply spurring adventure plots on through building the tools needed to address the challenge at hand (be that a specific weapon or a tool or a transport etc.). You would think sci-fi games would have good rules for this, but I have yet to find them myself.
Fast talking / deception: Most groups will engage in this at some point, and having a more complex system than just having one character with a sky-high fast talk skill would be great.
Influence / debate: Changing hearts and minds with longer form interactions, to build longer term impact.
Relationship management: Different from the above, once someone is your friend or ally how do you maintain that relationship whilst still being an adventurer. In an action RPG context, friends are patrons, allies and possibly dependents who need to be rescued periodically. It would be nice if there was some kind of mini-game to reflect the status of that friendship over time and how you may be more or less in favour with your friends. It could be used to measure the depth of enmity a rival or enemy feels towards you are well. How much are they willing to invest in subverting your plans at this moment in time?

I firmly believe in the maxim ‘if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.’ Most RPGs focus on combat in their rules and so table play tends to match that in my experience. By giving people a wider range of fun game elements to engage with I think they will look for a more diverse range of options to solving their problems.

In short, we like the ‘game’ bit of RPGs just as much as the ‘role playing’ bit in my group. So a more diverse game would be great. But universal mechanisms tend to make these things bland, for us. Fate didn’t work for us and this was one of the factors.
 
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Maybe you can pick one or two interesting examples and write something about why they work well and what you liked about them.
Okay, let's see... Being enamorated for some time now by emulation of specific stuff, my picks are:

  • Archetypes intimately tied to setting/theme. Like what The Spire do: The Azurite is a follower of a merchant god known to bargain for anything with gold, including the cosmos itself and the ability to go back a minute in time... if you have the cash to spare; or the Vermissian Sage, a historian with access to a defunct elven planar transit system that's now used as a vault, with abilities like Back Door that allows him to enter it from anywhere, or Unspeakable that allows him to teleport away entire concepts from existence (and bring them back from the vault later). Of course, the fact the setting is super tasteful and idyosincratic helps with these specific concepts... but you get the point.

  • Mechanics intimatiely tied setting/theme. PbtA overall excel in this, but to pick one example it must be Masks: a New Generation. I've read this only recently and I'm amazed at how closely this emulates teen supers fiction, in special the part I find most interesting: the personal drama (instead of simulating the distance in kilometers Hulk can jump or the strenght of Cyclops beam in newtons). The stats are "labels" of how each teen sees himself (Dangerous, Freak, Savior, Mundane) and they're constantly changing thanks to a mechanic called "Influence" - if someone has influence over you (all adults have, by default) he/she can shift those stats around. So when uncle Ben speaks to you about the responsability that comes with power, you will surely listen (and this will raise your Savior stat). Besides, each archetype is a narrative, like the Spider-like "divided between two lives" hero, the "so much destructive power that I hurt people I care" one, or the "delinquent who's a disruptive prick but deep inside just wants to belong". Each with thematic stuff built-in - the Spidey there has to manage his mundane everyday life like studies, work, family, etc - a mechanic only he gets. And eventually all them teenagers will grow up and crystalize their own self-images and personalities and become adults... and then the game ends (for real, there are preset endings to each archetype - ie: the Spidey can abandon the mask altogether and embrace the mundane life to become an adult professor or whatever). I'm not even a fan of the Supers genre, and I'm crazy to play this. (Thanks Caesar Slaad Caesar Slaad for showing me this)

  • Fast resolution that makes the narrative move on, frontloaded to the players. Again, PbtA. It's simple 2d6 roll with 3 ranges (fail > success with a complication > success). Everytime the dice hits the table, something interesting happens, and happens fast. No more "you fail and nothing happens. Try again?". And all you need to play is a 2-pages Moves sheet and a handful printed playbooks for players to pick. Voilá. No books to consult, no complex procedures to memorize, etc. This allowed for a 4-hours session of (The Sprawl) Shadowrun to have 3 missions plus downtime stuff, when the norm for our group with the original SR rules was 1 mission broken into 2 sessions. As an married adult with chidren, I've never seen such an optimized use of my time by a tabletop RPG.

Eventually my love of genre-emulation and simple stuff will pass. Until then, those are my picks. ;)
 
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* Mapped dangerous tactical combat system that's a fun and interesting game in itself where the terrain, situation, and positions of characters and their skills and equipment all determine appropriate chances for what happens in ways that intuitively make sense from natural language descriptions (rather than levels or fate points or other abstract or meta-game mechanics).

* Logical simulationist down to earth rules with logical cause and effect that players can relate to and see reasonable results from without knowing the game system.

* Focus on logical cause and effect, and on dealing with situations and consequences in logical ways.

* No particular interest in genre emulation, telling a story, delivering player expectations from movies or video games or other RPGs.

* Characters survive by doing logical things to avoid injury, and not by shrugging off or magically healing serious or mortal wounds.

* Absence of tropes from games like D&D or storygames. No levels, alignments, classes, fate points, immersion-breaking meta effects, healing clerics, physically embodied god boss monsters, pseudo-Judeo-Christianity, overly codified morality, or excessively steep power hierarchies.

i.e., I still like TFT & GURPS.
 
Twilight:2000 1e damage system: or something similar. Weapons had an armour multiplier, with lower multipliers meaning your armour was less effective. This let you have weapons that could penetrate heavy armour without necessarily being an insta-kill on unarmoured characters. Few games do this well.

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A weapon would have a damage rating. Say, for argument's sake it was 4D6 (this would vary with range). It would also have an armour multiplier, typically x1-x4. Lower armour multipliers were better. If you had armour with an AC of (say) 5 then you would multiply this by x1 for a weapon with a x1 multipler (typically a rifle) or some other value. For a weapon with a x1 multiplier, the armour would absorb 5 points of damage. With a x2 multiplier it would absorb 10 points, x3 would absorb 15 points etc.

This let you have weapons that were good at penetrating armour without necessarily having excessively high damage against unarmoured foes.

Contrast this with Striker where a high tech weapon like a laser rifle or gauss rifle had a high penetration bonus. The damage roll was 2D6 + penetration - armour, looked up on a table that would return 'light wound,' 'serious wound' or 'death' as a result. Even without the exploding rounds rule (never mind what this is), a hit from a laser rifle against an unarmoured character resulted in 'Death' on 3+. There were rules that mapped light wounds to 3D6, serious wounds to 6D6, and some folks house ruled Death results to 9D6. I saw a gauss rifle deal 36D6 damage in a single attack once.
 
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What would be the armour multiplier for an unarmed attack (punch, kick)?
 
What would be the armour multiplier for an unarmed attack (punch, kick)?
x4 I should think. Unfortunately my Twilight:2000 rules didn't survive my great purge of 2000-ish so I haven't got them to hand to look up. T2000 also had a hit location system a bit like the one in the BRP family. In many ways the system had similarities to BRP and its offshoots.
 
I especially liked the grappling rules in T2000. Reminded me of GURPS: Technical Grappling, except preceding it by decades:grin:!

(To be clear, I doubt there's any connection between the two, but they are in the same vein, IMO).
 
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