The Gaming Den

Confluence of random ideas and influences led to me wanting to run a game where the players are a rock band in D&DLand pursuing fame and fortune. So I made some rules.

Right now they're just on my Google Drive, and I'll transfer them over here a bit later.

If anyone could look through and give me some feedback on any glaring mechanical problems, that'd be great. I definitely need to go through a second draft on these.

The game is probably going to be 5e, but I might do 3.X, and the rules *should* be usable for either. Yes, I use Advantage and Disadvantage in places, but... I mean there's no reason you can't use those in 3.X. They're a good shorthand, especially for non-d20 rolls.

Edit: I'm going to keep editing the rules in the original doc. For reference, here's the first draft.

Not that you need to be serial killer to enjoy and understand vanilla D&D, but speaking as someone who has been onstage in a variety of situations and watched many more bands in an even greater variety, this seems really arbitrary to me. Not a lot of verisimilitude- at least as far as I understand the premise. Is this a story of a scrappy bar band ending up world's greatest rock stars? Or garage band progressing to battle of the bands then American idol? Or something else? I think those call for very different approaches. Or is this about the development of modern musical conventions in a fantasy world (like Pratchett's "Soul Music")? That's a story I'd like to see told well, but it brings up a whole other set of questions. Are the amps magical? Does a samurai shred on his ancestral biwa better with a higher dexterity or higher wisdom? Do halfling technical death metal bands consider using Haste as cheating?

As far as mechanics go, I think the main two that stick out at me are the "Verses" and the disposition slider. Verses are going to get boring as hell if that is the only scale that your music combat things occur on. Add choruses, bridges, codas... whatever, and maybe those are the places where you can attempt other actions, like grandstanding is only allowed during choruses and codas. That can at least emulate something like a real performance. I have literally thrown an object at a bandmate during a gig because I could tell by the way he was breathing that he was about to solo again during a chorus. With the disposition slider, a linear slider is not going to cut it because different settings have factors that matter more than just a band's renown or whatever. Venue matters. Day and time matter. Headliner vs opener matters, playing order matters.

Anyway, just my impressions. As it stands I'd play this if it was a pixel art mobile game, but if someone asked me to sit down at a table and roleplay it I'd laugh and excuse myself.

So, the way I see the game I want to run is more the garage band progressing through battle of the bands. In general, I'm looking more at stuff like Pick of Destiny, Scott Pilgrim, and Blues Brothers as source material, where there's an overall theme of performances on a sort of ladder of fame, but there's also heists/fights/shenanigans in between performances.

Definitely open to suggestions on the performance rules. For the disposition slider, I was going to handle factors like that by altering the initial audience attitude. Like "the venue charges two gold for a beer, the opener sucked, and no one here's heard of you. They're going to start Hostile. Good luck!"

My read of this was that it was a lot of fiddly, idiosyncratic, and repetitive rolling that didn't let you make many decisions. That's a shame, because there are glimmers in the rules that suggest you want players to be able to care about their individual performances in really interesting ways. It also seemed almost entirely unmoored from D&D-specific abilities and spells, which is a lost opportunity to ask what troll regeneration does to guitar calluses.

I'd start by getting rid of the mechanical fiddliness: no rolling the same number or trying to avoid boxcars. It's hard to remember and die rolling shouldn't ever be the main event in an RPG. I think borrowing from the D&D combat round would make for a less confusing system. Players act in some kind of initiative order, which could be determined by d20 + a weird skill (maybe diplomacy lets you read the other bandmembers?), and then select among a suite of actions. The actions probably all require perform checks, but allow you to accrue bonuses and audience favor in various ways.

As Jigoku suggests, making each round mechanically distinct seems cool. You could borrow the idea of an escalation die from 13th age and you could have player abilities interact with that, eg: let a player kill the song's momentum in order to receive a larger bonus for their solo. Maybe the band leader can also pick songs which make rounds different from one another: I like the idea that you can pick a song which has a high or low degree of difficulty to curry favor faster.

Performances should have a finite length and a win condition that you are racing toward during them. Allowing players to take actions which use character abilities in a performance is also a plus: pyrotechnics, illusions, dangerous feats of strength, all of that seem suitably rock and roll. Think carefully about your groups patience for rolling perform checks when you design the system, and also think carefully about how many performances you want to simulate in this detail per campaign; I think more than 3-5 performances (about one per act in a 3-act campaign) and this will lose its shine.

pragma wrote:My read of this was that it was a lot of fiddly, idiosyncratic, and repetitive rolling that didn't let you make many decisions. That's a shame, because there are glimmers in the rules that suggest you want players to be able to care about their individual performances in really interesting ways. It also seemed almost entirely unmoored from D&D-specific abilities and spells, which is a lost opportunity to ask what troll regeneration does to guitar calluses.

Note: I'm focused on getting the basic system tack-on down, I'm going to at least write up some musical archetypes for classes, and the idea is kind of begging for a a "Multi-Instrument Performance" feat so races with more than 2 arms (or with tendrils) can rock out with two+ guitars.

I'd start by getting rid of the mechanical fiddliness: no rolling the same number or trying to avoid boxcars. It's hard to remember and die rolling shouldn't ever be the main event in an RPG. I think borrowing from the D&D combat round would make for a less confusing system. Players act in some kind of initiative order, which could be determined by d20 + a weird skill (maybe diplomacy lets you read the other bandmembers?), and then select among a suite of actions. The actions probably all require perform checks, but allow you to accrue bonuses and audience favor in various ways.

Ok, so, Initiative. I had initially been thinking about including that just for Grandstanding, and it sort of got dummied out. But just Jigoku's post made me think about putting it back in so that players can at least react to others trying to grandstand.

The 5x5 was kind of a hanger on from my early consideration of basing things on the One Roll Engine system (d6 dice pool, highest number and number of dice matching mean different things for your success). Given how much difficulty I had it making it particularly meaningful, without being too important for such a bullshit roll, you're right. It's cute, but that doesn't exactly recommend keeping it in.

So, what about basic Performance rolls that are sorta equivalent to "I hit it with my sword" and then there are also special moves, like special attacks? I'm not sure how much I want magic to be an in-performance thing, at least for the actual band members. I think magic and similar is more like pre-performance set up and stage effects. That said, having a Wizard PC who's the band's pyrotechnics guy isn't a bad idea in the slightest.

As Jigoku suggests, making each round mechanically distinct seems cool. You could borrow the idea of an escalation die from 13th age and you could have player abilities interact with that, eg: let a player kill the song's momentum in order to receive a larger bonus for their solo. Maybe the band leader can also pick songs which make rounds different from one another: I like the idea that you can pick a song which has a high or low degree of difficulty to curry favor faster.

Yeah, the idea of harder to perform songs getting more favor (and maybe easier songs losing you more points if you fail a roll) was definitely intended when I included the song DC part, and then... forgotten when I got to Crowd Favor like a week later.

Performances should have a finite length and a win condition that you are racing toward during them. Allowing players to take actions which use character abilities in a performance is also a plus: pyrotechnics, illusions, dangerous feats of strength, all of that seem suitably rock and roll. Think carefully about your groups patience for rolling perform checks when you design the system, and also think carefully about how many performances you want to simulate in this detail per campaign; I think more than 3-5 performances (about one per act in a 3-act campaign) and this will lose its shine.

Yeah, I'm dumb, and it literally didn't occur to me that I had not included any cutoff for performance length, allowing players to just... keep performing. So that definitely needs to be fixed. I was planning on something like 1 performance per session, maybe 2 per 3 sessions, but I also haven't actually planned out the campaign yet, so that sort of thing is still pretty nebulous. I definitely want the performances to basically fill the combat role in the campaign, I just need to figure out this tack on system

If "battle of the bands" is going to be a thing, you'll need to handle iy within the context of the combat minigame.

Bands need HP, AC, Saves, a Proficiency bonus, and class features/special attacks.

Also, given how it's likely not everyone will want to play a bard, and will still want to stab things in the face, growing your band's level should grant each class different bonuses/extra class features that help them stab things in the face. By the same token, each class should bring different potential class features to the band (barbarians should bring to the table some rage-fueled riffs worthy of dueling the devil in Tenacious D).

Finally, since you're establishing Jem And The Holograms is your game's base concept, all PCs get the performance skill FOR FREE and should be linked to each PC's highest attribute so players don't feel punished for not playing a bard or sorcerer or warlock or paladin.

Dogbert wrote: Also, given how it's likely not everyone will want to play a bard, and will still want to stab things in the face

I was just reminded of the dude in The Commitments who goes from being a Fighter-type as the band's "security" to their drummer (because hit things hard with stick) and eventually taking a level or two of Bard.

Yeah, ideally, there will be a Fighter archetype that is music based, and yeah, I'm going to give everyone Perform for free.

I already gave bands hp, ac, saves, etc for the combat performances, Dogbert. Did you mean something else?

Prak wrote:I already gave bands hp, ac, saves, etc for the combat performances, Dogbert. Did you mean something else?

What kind of special attacks does each class grant the band?
Drop the bass?
Quasi-real FX?
Summon Vic?
100 undead guitars line?

Kinda been waiting for the basic "Rock performance minigame" rules to get sorted before going and writing class stuff.

Ok. So, I need to make the performance part more interesting. I need to have something that says when a song performance is done, so a band can't just say "we're just going to play this one song for 24 hours, and grind crowd favor." And I need to make the crowd favor mechanic a bit more interesting.

What if songs have something like hitpoints, based on difficulty? And those HP are split up into verses, choruses, etc. Then the amount by which a band member's performance roll fails or succeeds affects the crowd mood?

I need to work out exact numbers, and how those numbers interact, but conceptually?

I'd rather avoid reputation rules, because then the PCs would get ROLFstomped by Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus.