Thoughts about a (pen and paper) Game System

Jan 12, 2009 10:09

For the first time in a few years, I find myself getting that itch to run a Role Playing Game ( Read more... )

fiction, games, geek

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Comments 8

elbales January 12 2009, 20:13:50 UTC
Have you ever looked at GURPS? My husband likes some things about it--it's good for non-supers, for example (their supers book sucked), though it's also much more lethal than Hero is.

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johnkzin January 12 2009, 20:21:39 UTC
GURPS is somewhat in the middle, when compared to FUDGE and DreamPark at the low end, and Hero at the higher end... but I'd really rather have something even lighter than GURPS. (the guy who created FUDGE did so as a reaction to GURPS being too heavy; he had previously been an actual/official/employed-by-Steve-Jackson-Games author of GURPS supplements)

Though, maybe that IS where I should be looking. I hadn't thought about GURPS in years. I'll have to think about that. Thanks :-)

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johnkzin January 12 2009, 20:23:05 UTC
Actually, re-thinking it, GURPS isn't so much "lighter than Hero", as it is "has lots of pre-made material" that Hero doesn't really have. It's slighlty lighter than Hero, but not by a lot. It solves on of my problems with Hero, but not the other.

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skellington January 12 2009, 22:22:09 UTC
If you want rules for everything, I'd say GURPS. Lots of rules, in as much detail as you care to use, and plenty of source material so you don't have to create spells, etc. from scratch ( ... )

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beergeek January 13 2009, 02:15:43 UTC
Ahhh, isn't that what my Willem Jeffson character was for?

I do miss the variety and richness of games we had in SCruz with you and Jason running, and the occasional Joe or even Geoff games. We're finally hitting stride up here I think.

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johnkzin January 13 2009, 02:32:29 UTC
yes, Willem (you), Coop (Izzy), Dricken/Dunbar (Jason), Nickel (Eric), Falith (Gerald), and I forget the names of Joe and Lisa's characters.

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Mutants and Masterminds uxmal January 13 2009, 06:30:17 UTC
You might want to take a look at M&M. When you look at M&M, you must also look at M&M Ultimate Power - the core book is DC Heroes/GURPS Supers/Villians and Vigilantes - straight binaries. Ultimate Power publishes the underpinning source. The first half of the book is Hero-lite, and the second half reinterprets much of the core book in terms of the newly-introduced primitives. It's working for our group playing a supers game. Like Hero, I think it's got some issues scaling down to pulp-ish/sestern-ish scale (maybe even slightly worse), but we haven't tried. On the upside, most of the mechanics in M&M are pretty d20-esque - though I admit I frequently miss the clarity and detail of Hero ( ... )

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Re: Mutants and Masterminds johnkzin January 13 2009, 13:49:45 UTC

While looking up Mutants and Masterminds, I found that that company took some of their M&Misms (the damage system, a few other things), and made a d20 based system called True20. The system preview they have looks very promising.

1) The damage system is VERY much like FUDGE's damage system.
2) The spell/power system is fatigue based, which is even better than power points/mana.
3) Their website for True20 has conversion notes for pulling things over from d20.

That could have a lot of promise. Unfortunately, M&M isn't actually a True20 game, but it was the starting point for True20 ... so between that and the conversion notes, I wonder how hard it'd be to sort of complete that loop. I also wonder if there's any True20 character generator software out there. Since it's d20 based, I wonder PCGen has a True20 mode...

Could be promising, in several different ways. Thank you!

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