Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hello everyone, I have a topic I'd like to discuss with you all today. I'm toying with a homebrew system for running an game. The systems that I'm most familiar with are d20 and Fantasy AGE and, as such, I have drawn inspiration heavily from these two systems. I like both systems, but neither of them are the total package for me. I'm looking for a good balance between depth and simplicity. Recently, I've come across a few points I'd like to ask some advice/opinions on. I'll try to categorize them all for you for easier reference.

Character Creation
Classes vs Classless: What are your thoughts on not using classes to build a character? Character's would still have a background, but they would be free to develop from there without any concrete labels.

Combat
Whether they are futuristic or black powder, what is the best way to go about handling firearms?

Combat Resolution: Do you have a particular method of combat resolution that you like the best?

Dice
D&D has a lot of different dice, while Fantasy AGE only uses d6s. What die/dice approach should I take to keep things simple, but also have a decent amount of variety.

Magic
What is the best system to use for magic? D&D has an absolute ton of spells and what not, where Fantasy Age seems like it has too few, but it is also very simple.

What is the best way to have wearing armor affect magic?

In closing, are there any other RPG systems I should look to that could help develop a homebrew system better? Thank you all for taking the time to read and (if you actually do) to respond.

I am a big fan of the d10/d6 system used in R.Talsorian's "Cyberpunk: 2020" game system. It is simple, yet provides sufficient depth for complexity where required, and permits characters to develop their skills however they like, even though it also has "classes".

To address your questions directly...

#1 (Classes): I like the idea of classes that provide a general description of a given character's role/job/background. It is most useful for helping define a character at the outset, providing some guidance on the sorts of skills that the character could focus on, and identifying strengths and weaknesses. I, for one, am not a fan of any system that allows a single PC to be the best at everything.

Of course, this is going to heavily depend on how much design-focus you put on the classes in your game, the skills and abilities associated with each class, and the relative balance of power to those classes. Not every class needs to be perfectly balanced at every stage of the game (though, in "end game" levels, however you determine that, all classes should be more-or-less balanced, though they may go about achieving that balance in different ways... a swordsman, for example, should have just as much opportunity to survive a battle and kill enemies as a magic-user of the same level. Note that this is entirely *not* how D&D 3E/3.5E worked.).

#2 (Combat): I prefer my combat systems to be quick, simple, and allow for a wide variety of tactics and situations without being cluttered with tables, charts, random rolls and hard-to-remember results. I think most combat systems that work on some sort of bonus/penalty to attacks or damage, based on circumstances, work best. Is the enemy in cover? You have a penalty to hit (or they get a bonus to their defense, one or the other). Is the battlefield poorly illuminated? Under heavy smoke/fog? All without some means of circumventing those effects have penalties to both attack and defense.

Firearms are simple: They're freakin' deadly! No matter what setting you are playing in, firearms are designed to do one thing and one thing only: kill living creatures from as far away as possible.

To use Cyberpunk as an example, most firearms did some number of d6 of damage (1d6 to 6d6 being the normal range), mitigated by the target's armor and a "Toughness" bonus. Now, if your armor didn't stop all the damage, but your "Toughness" absorbed the rest? You still took an obligatory 1 damage... and no one had more than 40 HP. Ever. So, yes, against an unarmored person who had only "average" Toughness (little to no damage mitigation via that mechanic) that 6d6 damage assault rifle would kill that person in just a couple hits... which is exactly what an assault rifle is designed to do.

Firearms in any game-setting should be something both feared and respected, because they are incredibly efficient tools of homicide.

Combat Resolution is simple and, for me, breaks down into two broad groups: Ranged and Melee combat. In Cyberpunk, you couldn't dodge a bullet (and, really, you can't. You can simply not be where the firer is aiming before they pull the trigger... once that trigger is pulled, you've been hit before you hear the gun go off).

So, for Ranged combat, Character A rolls a dice, adds to it their relevant attribute/attribute modifier, their relevant skill level with the weapon being used, and any modifiers based on the situation/terrain/environs/miscellaneous stuff. They are attempting to meet or exceed a given target number. If they fail to meet this number, they miss. If they succeed, they hit. Roll damage.

For melee, it works slightly differently. In this case, the dice roll is the same, except it is opposed by a relevant skill of the defending target. So, Character A tries to punch someone, so rolls a dice, adds their stat, adds their Brawl/Martial Arts/Boxing/Make Things Stop Living With Your Fists skill, and the target rolls a dice, adds their Reflexes/Agility/Dexterity/whatever, and adds their relevant Dodge/Block/Martial Arts/Parry skill. Whoever scores higher wins.

#3 (Dice): IMO, keep it simple. D10s and d6 work out well, and are easy to come by. D10s also easily translate into d100s, d1000, or even more, just keep adding an extra d10 to move the decimal another place to the right. Earthdawn was fun for the absolute bucket of dice you needed to roll for certain tests (things like 1d20+2d10+1d8+1d6 were not uncommon)... but it gets out of hand, eventually.

#4 (Magic): While I really like the way the schools of magic worked in Mage: The Ascension, it is an incredibly broken system that is ripe for abuse by imaginative, creative players (it isn't very hard in that game for a relatively-weak mage to turn vampires and werewolves into lawn chairs. Forever.)

Using the Cyberpunk rule system, I came up with a sort of happy medium. There were a number of schools of magic (Arts, as they were called) and, like every other skill in the game, one's talent in those Arts was rated on a 0 to 10 scale. 0 meant you had no ability at all in that Art and could not even attempt to do anything with it, 10 meant you were one of the greatest living masters of that Art, of the sort that would be spoken of for centuries to come.

Like other skills in the game, every 2 points in a skill indicated a sort of "plateau" of ability. At +2, you knew the basics and could bull-gak your way through a conversation at a party. At +4 you were recognized as a competent, valid practitioner. At +6, you were recognized as a veteran, someone who really understood the art and could speak with authority on it. At +8, you were considered a "master wizard", and would be invited to write treatises and give lectures on the secrets of that style of magic. At +10? You were often called "Merlin" or "Gandalf", and your writings on that art were taught in doctorate-level classes.

Beyond the description, though, each rank had an associated game-mechanics effect that defined the limit of the ability. Someone with a +2 in Elementalism, for example, could conjure elemental attacks that did 1d6 damage, and had a max range of 10m, while that same mage, at +10, could conjure elemental effects that dealt 4d10 damage, with a range of 500 meters.

Your own game is going to need to decide on the actual effects on its own, based on the sorts of power-levels you want to permit and how quickly you want characters to get there.

Designing a magic system is *hard*, by the way, easily one of the most difficult aspects of an RPG, especially if you want it to remain balanced and sane.

Armor doesn't affect spellcasting, excepting during certain High Rituals where proper stance and positioning means everything. Of course, some schools or traditions of magic may consider wearing armor gauche... and no one looks good decked out in military hard armor. Good luck getting into the nightclub wearing full carapace hard armor, burnout.

#5 (Other game systems)

Vampire: The Masquerade (and all its spin-offs)
Cyberpunk: 2020
Earthdawn
Shadowrun
Dark Heresy (and its spin-offs)
Mouseguard
Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play (1st Ed)

Dark Heresy and 1st Ed WHFRP are essentially the same system - and it's quite a good one.

I'd also speak well of WHFRP 3rd edition / Star Wars RPG by Fantasy Flight - that's rather 'play aid dependent' in that it uses a lot of special-to-type dice, though.

It ultimately boils down to this; how important is the 'rules crunch' - do you want a tactical board game where you occasionally talk to someone, or a narrative RPG where you occasionally roll dice to resolve a skill/resource check?
People will generally prefer one or the other.


I'm not a fan of 'classes' per se, but (as Psienesis says) PCs need some restrictions to avoid people jumping straight to the 'good' advances and bypassing whatever their min/maxed vision of the perfect character doesn't need - a 'self defined' class using things like Aptitudes from Dark Heresy 2nd Edition can work, or having clear prerequisites for given talents.

Actually, one of the best - or at least most interesting - character generation mechanics is Traveller; you essentially split up your character's history into 'blocks' and gain skills, contacts, and occasionally injuries and debts, depending on what he was doing at the time - military training starts you with a nice bundle of 'level 0' combat-related skills, a warzone would give you one or two (fast) skill promotions but may get you seriously injured, getting into a rivalry with a senior officer ending up in a courts-martial gives you legal/diplomatic skills but you get the officer as a long-standing enemy, etc, etc.

Combat:

I agree guns are supposed to be deadly. Traveller and Dark Heresy both have in common that when someone aims a gun at you, you bloody well duck. An autopistol is still, by modern equivalency, an UZI or MAC-10.

Black Powder weapons are - if less deadly - at least more scary given that fewer people will carry them in combat in a pike-and-shotte era world; you don't have the ability to reload in a brawl or skirmish, but whilst those two double-barrelled pistols are loaded, you have, to quote Hornblower, "four men's lives in your hands".

The dice rules - the key is minimizing how much time people have to spend 'figuring out what they need to roll' and 'what they actually rolled' (mental arithmetic, etc) whilst still leaving in space for the GM and players to easily add modifiers, and for those modifiers to not necessarily cancel one another out.
I'm a fan of D6 games if only because of the ease of getting them

Dice Pool games where a dice generates a 'success' or 'failure' have become fairly popular, because you can edit many things - what roll contributes a 'success', how many dice you roll, access to rerolls, and the total number of successes you need. Plus, a large dice pool - say 4+ dice - means you can be more confident of an 'average' result, meaning that getting really out-of-the-box results requires the kind of dice modifiers that are available to player characters but not generic NPCs.

Magic - D&D has a metric tonne of spells because (a) it has several 'classes' of magic (Divine vs Arcane) but also because each spell has a certain effect. If you want a bigger kaboom, you need a more impressive version of the spell.

Which leads ultimately to "Enhanced Flaming Bolt XVIII" or whatever and a 'spell list' that takes up half the rulebook.

Dark Heresy, Edge Of The Empire and Traveller have a nice way around this - if you have a basic set of 'spells' but make the damage/range/effect/whatever depending on either the 'magic skill' of the caster or the number of successes on the 'magic test', you can get by with a vastly lower number of 'spells'.

In Dark Heresy, for example, Force Bolt remains the telekinetic's preferred attack power, no matter how high a level they get to. A high level telekine, though, will generate so much overbleed that the attack will hit like a lascannon, whilst a low-level sanctionate is only slightly better off than using a laspistol, and has to balance that against the risk of Perils Of The Warp.



Armour affecting magic should depend on the 'story' of your world. If magic is a 'natural aura' soaked in by the skin, or otherwise requires the wielder to be 'in tune with the natural world' or some such, it may. Otherwise; it may not. If you look at traditional mythology, iron was supposed to be anathema to fairies, elves, and similar spirits; hence, if you wield that sort of magic, wrapping yourself in iron (chainmail or plate) would cut yourself off from your power.

It also means that magic wouldn't work properly on someone in plate armour.....another reason that expensive, hard to make plate armour would be worth the associated cost in a medieval-themed world with magic.

Thank you both for the comprehensive responses. I wish I had more time to write a proper response, but I just got to work. I will have to come back to this after I'm off.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Psienesis wrote:
I am a big fan of the d10/d6 system used in R.Talsorian's "Cyberpunk: 2020" game system. It is simple, yet provides sufficient depth for complexity where required, and permits characters to develop their skills however they like, even though it also has "classes".

#3 (Dice): IMO, keep it simple. D10s and d6 work out well, and are easy to come by. D10s also easily translate into d100s, d1000, or even more, just keep adding an extra d10 to move the decimal another place to the right. Earthdawn was fun for the absolute bucket of dice you needed to roll for certain tests (things like 1d20+2d10+1d8+1d6 were not uncommon)... but it gets out of hand, eventually.

I do like d10s for the variety that they can add to a game. That being said, I've never had a chance to play Cyberpunk 2020, but I'll have to give it a look.

#4 (Magic): While I really like the way the schools of magic worked in Mage: The Ascension, it is an incredibly broken system that is ripe for abuse by imaginative, creative players (it isn't very hard in that game for a relatively-weak mage to turn vampires and werewolves into lawn chairs. Forever.)

Using the Cyberpunk rule system, I came up with a sort of happy medium. There were a number of schools of magic (Arts, as they were called) and, like every other skill in the game, one's talent in those Arts was rated on a 0 to 10 scale. 0 meant you had no ability at all in that Art and could not even attempt to do anything with it, 10 meant you were one of the greatest living masters of that Art, of the sort that would be spoken of for centuries to come.

Like other skills in the game, every 2 points in a skill indicated a sort of "plateau" of ability. At +2, you knew the basics and could bull-gak your way through a conversation at a party. At +4 you were recognized as a competent, valid practitioner. At +6, you were recognized as a veteran, someone who really understood the art and could speak with authority on it. At +8, you were considered a "master wizard", and would be invited to write treatises and give lectures on the secrets of that style of magic. At +10? You were often called "Merlin" or "Gandalf", and your writings on that art were taught in doctorate-level classes.

Beyond the description, though, each rank had an associated game-mechanics effect that defined the limit of the ability. Someone with a +2 in Elementalism, for example, could conjure elemental attacks that did 1d6 damage, and had a max range of 10m, while that same mage, at +10, could conjure elemental effects that dealt 4d10 damage, with a range of 500 meters.

That sounds like a pretty good system for magic. How'd it work out for you?

Mouseguard

That isn't, by chance, from the same creator of Mice and Mystics is it?

Automatically Appended Next Post:

locarno24 wrote:

Dark Heresy, Edge Of The Empire and Traveller have a nice way around this - if you have a basic set of 'spells' but make the damage/range/effect/whatever depending on either the 'magic skill' of the caster or the number of successes on the 'magic test', you can get by with a vastly lower number of 'spells'.

In Dark Heresy, for example, Force Bolt remains the telekinetic's preferred attack power, no matter how high a level they get to. A high level telekine, though, will generate so much overbleed that the attack will hit like a lascannon, whilst a low-level sanctionate is only slightly better off than using a laspistol, and has to balance that against the risk of Perils Of The Warp.

This is definitely something I will be looking into further. I really like the way that system sounds as far as magic goes. I have never played either yet, but I've had my eye on Dark Heresy for sometime.

Otherwise; it may not. If you look at traditional mythology, iron was supposed to be anathema to fairies, elves, and similar spirits; hence, if you wield that sort of magic, wrapping yourself in iron (chainmail or plate) would cut yourself off from your power.

It also means that magic wouldn't work properly on someone in plate armour.....another reason that expensive, hard to make plate armour would be worth the associated cost in a medieval-themed world with magic.

This is also something that could be cool if implemented into a game. Thanks for bringing this up.

The whole armor vs. magic thing is a holdover from D&D where wizards could not wear any armor and inspired by the image of wizardly types in robes. In terms of balance, since most fantasy RPGs also follow D&D linear warrior/quadratic wizard model, the no armor as a theoretical balancing measure. I say theoretical because once wizards get protective magic, magic items, etc. it doesn't really matter anymore.

I would say take a strong look at your theme and game balance. "Historical" magic has more to do with augary, oracles, and warding off evil than throwing fireballs and the like. Even the idea of summoning was generally in the context of getting information, insight, or accomplishing some surreptitious task, not calling for the an army leveling juggernaut. Supernatural creatures such as the fae were frightening because they were unpredictable and didn't follow "the rules", not because they were armored tanks throwing napalm. They could suddenly appear, cause havoc by ruining crops, spoiling milk, or taking a child, then vanish. Since all of these directly affected livelihood, that is a big deal.

Even the ur example of a wizard, Gandalf, who was actually an inhuman angel like being associated with fire and possessing a legendary artifact that reinforced this aspect never threw fireballs around. He ignited a small fire, made some annoying acorns, summoned some light, and bound a door shut. He also faced off with a malevolent spirit of great combat in personal combat, largely through a contest of wills.

Magic is usually more of a plot device than anything, and in most RPGs, rather than having it serve as medieval heavy ordnance, should probably be used as such. Those that delve deeply into magic and can actually summon supernatural entities and the like represent and extreme obsession and disregard for effects on the material world and are the equivalent of fictional mad scientists. Trying to equate them with real scientists is a mistake IMHO as magic should be the portrayed as the opposite of science- it is chaos controlled through force or manipulation to break the rules and, as such, inherently unpredictable and dangerous. It represents and erosion or corruption of the natural order. Wizards are not so much experts trained in cause and effect as gamblers trying to push their luck in hope of a huge payoff. The "good" wizards, then , are those who see that risk and seek to contain it, tapping such power only when absolutely necessary.

Unless of course you want a magitech based game. Then magic should be predictable, otherwise you could not build anything off of it consistently.

The magic system we adopted for what came to be called "Cthulhupunk: 2020" worked out very well, though there were tweaks and fixes constantly being added, since it was very much a work-in-progress during the campaign (which was basically designed to test the system we were building, as this was in an era where the only games blending dark future and magic were, basically, Shadowrun and Rifts), and also branched out to Psychic abilities (easier, less personally-dangerous, but more restricted and far less powerful than magics of a similar Skill Rank).

In this setting, magic was only then making a return to the world at large, though certain very-rare individuals had been practicing the arcane arts for a much longer period of time, and certain periods of history had seen much greater use of magic. Thus, while magic made a character powerful, gaining enough XP to actually *get* powerful was difficult (following CP:2020's ruleset, all the Arcane skills started at x3 multipliers, and could be as difficult as x5, for Arts which the PC did not specialize in). It was a path of character development that required focus and dedication, generally to the exclusion of all else, to reach the ranks of arch-mage.

Mouseguard is based on a series of books, and is a rather charmingly-fun RPG.
http://www.mouseguard.net/book/role-playing-game/

For Cthulhupunk, if it follows Lovecraftian themes, I would also assume that a big risk in any magic is succeeding :-)

 jmurph wrote:
For Cthulhupunk, if it follows Lovecraftian themes, I would also assume that a big risk in any magic is succeeding :-)

Indeed. The setting borrowed heavily from the "Simon Necronomicon" for certain elements. It was said that "devoured by Igigi" was the leading cause of death for modern magi.