The Gaming Den

Recently I was wrangled into running an RPG over facebook by a friend of mine. I foolishly said yes and began to look for a good system. Two of my players however, have never played any sort of RPG (or really any games since childhood) before and one has only played CRPGS. I figured I'd whip up some rules lite system and it wouldn't be a problem...

The two requests made by the newer players were interesting because they were so antithetical to what the people I'm used to playing with want in a system. Rules opacity and a complete lack of numbers on their character sheets.

Of course I realize that because of those two factors I could totally MTP the whole thing and they'd never be the wiser, but that'd be a dick move.

The skeleton of the system that I've worked out is that the characters each have a number of adjectives (we're calling them traits) and moves on their character sheets. So, Reilly the Dwarven engineer is Tough and Charming and (in addition to basic moves everyone can do) can Mend and use Blueprints.

When taking an action the players describe their task and intent then say which (if any) of their traits should give them a bonus. Yaay! Now I just have to decide how big a bonus and on what kind of dice I'll be doing the rolling.

There will also be complex actions in which multiple players describe how they're taking part and list which moves and traits they're utilizing. Combat rounds and preparing for/making a journey will be complex actions.

The setting is a blatant rip off of Earthdawn except that the people who sealed themselves away were all part of the same doomsday cult and instead of Lovecraftian Horrors the civilizations were harvested by the Sheeda from Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers. The PCs are all from the same bunker and are exploring the new world that has basically crawled back up to a feudal system.

I was thinking about using a dice pool mechanic solely because I have a sweet set of Mouse Guard dice (D6, 4 or better is a success, a 6 lets you reroll one of your failing dice). Is having new dice a sufficient reason to choose a mechanic?

Help.

If the players actually want to not have numbers on their sheets, why not play a FATE variant? You give out a series of Aspects like these:



And then you could either give the Aspects relative values like "Strong" and "Weak", or give them numbers, or just say fuck it and have all the Aspects contribute as much as the players are willing to spend Fate Points on and no more.

So if someone wants to have an Aspect like "Is a Minotaur" they can request negative events like pointing out that they are a literal bull in the china shop and have you shower them with Fate Points and then they can activate their trait to get bonuses to trample a dude by spending Fate points into it.

Fate doesn't do character advancement well, but I guess your players don't really care. And it lends itself to freeform, which is what you'll be doing anyway because of the whole Facebook thingy.

-Username17

I'd say re-skin Danger Patrol, but I always say that when someone asks for rules-lite.
Upsides are that it supports anything that it supports everything magic tea party does, and it encourages players to come up with consequences themselves. Also it's multiplicative: since there are eight adjectives and eight nouns, that's 64 classes you could play from the base rules (before any re-skinning/expansion).

The mechanical half of character creation looks like:
- Choose the left half of your character sheet.
- Choose the right half of your character sheet.
- Arrange these seven dice (the eighth is fixed).
- Pick two crayons for your uniform color (may not be appropriate for your game).

Also, its a free beta at the moment.

It occurs to me that I should probably be more explicit about how that works in case you aren't familiar with fate. So here it is:

Frank Trollman's Slapdash Fate-Based Ruleslight RPG for Facebook

Character Generation:
Put your character's name and title on a piece of paper. Underline that. Twice. Then write six important things about them under that double line. It is suggested that the first two things be positive traits. The second two should be goals or strongly held beliefs. The last two should be limitations or dubious things about the character.

Sample Character wrote:Stremvard the Ox
-------------------
Really Strong
Good With a Hammer
Loyalty is Important
The Strong Should Protect The Weak
Kind of Stupid
Stubborn

Each of these traits can come into play both for and against the character, and may be invoked by either the MC or the player. You start play with 3 Fate Points, and you get more of them by having your traits activated in a way that hurts you. You can spend Fate Points to advance the plot or to activate your traits or your surroundings in a beneficial fashion.

Basic Mechanics
When you want to do something that carries with it a chance of failure, the MC rolls 4d3 against a Target Number based on how difficult the task seems. The generic target number is 8 for a "normal" task. You get a bonus of +1 if your circumstances or your traits seem to be helpful, and +2 if your circumstances or traits seem very well suited to your task. You can also invoke Fate Points to activate a trait to get an additional bonus. Spending a Fate Point gives you +2, but you can only do this if your trait is somehow relevant to the task at hand.

Combat is handled as simple tasks against Mooks. There is a TN to "wound" a Mook. A Mook that is wounded twice is out. If you beat the TN to wound the Mook by 2, you take them out in one hit. The TN for a basic enemy thug is 8. Draconian Legionaires are TN 10. Against major characters, it's a bit different. You declare that you want to do something to them, and then a check is made. Then they say what they want to do about it, and make a check in return. If their response gets at least as good a TN as the attack, nothing happens. Otherwise, they are wounded or in some other way inconvenienced. In any case, it's called a Strike. Major characters are out if they get Three Strikes.

The PCs are Major characters. So is the BBEG.

-Username17

Well, not to seem like a square. But the old roll d20, compare to DC resolve action. Is a favorite of mine. The lack of modifiers is only a small inconvenience. Just scale the RNG down to account for it. DC 20 might become DC 10 for example.

It's not fancy, and I'm sure it's not the most elegant solution. But it is simple and quick.