Making up a new Simple System

YaYa

My friends are both poor and afraid of anything new, so I've made up a really simple system, and I'd like criticism/suggestions for it.

Character creation/Stats

4 stats, each rolled up using a D6

Strength: Doing Damage, Brute Force activities

Dexterity: Hitting in combat, bow/gun skills, crafting if needed.

Agility: Anything athletic/dodges.

Intelligence: Crafting, conversation.

Any time they want to do something, they roll a D10 and add the applicable Stat.

E.G

Player: I wanna punch through the wall.

DM: *makes up a difficulty number, in this case 15* Okay, roll Strength.

*player rolls a d10*

Player: 6, plus my 5 strength.

DM: Sorry, you don't break through it.



Levelling

Every level one point is added to each stat, and the player can choose to add an extra two points. Additionally, each second level, the player can pick to have a +2 specialization in any activity. The specializations stack, so for example a level 6 character could have +6 in Lockpicking.

Health

Each player starts with 10 hitpoints + Strength. Armor adds life points. Common sense/stereotypes decide if a character can wear certain types of armor or not.

Combat

This I need help with. Right now I'm just making up stats for monsters of the top of my head, and rolling for their actions. If the player tries to block or counter, they need to outroll the mob. It's missing something, I think. Standard level weapons subtract one hitpoint for a hit, better weapons take off more.


That's about it. Thoughts?

Remember, the key thing I'm shooting for is to keep it simple, but not constricting.

Unearthly Stew

That's sounds like it would be pretty fun.

Another idea (if you want to have beyond human powers) is to make up table of powers and randomly roll for them. Some friends of mine once did this for an X-Men style game. They had 36 abilities so they just rolled 2d6 to create a character. Come to think of it, it was more like 6 tables of 6, but you get the picture. It made for a pretty good time, and you could have a character in less than a minute.

YaYa

Well, I was thinking of like 3 classes to use...How did the tables work, exactly? I might try something like that.

Unearthly Stew

This was from a while ago, so can't remember all of the details but it went something like this:

Table 1
1 Power A
2 Power B
3 Power C
4 Power D
5 Power E
6 Power F

Table 2
1 Power G
2 Power H
3 Power I
4 Power J
5 Power K
6 Power L

Etc.

The first d6 you rolled pointed you in the direction of the table you would get your power from, and the 2nd determined the exact power from the 6 on that table. The downside of this method is that people can get really un/lucky and get a character whose powers don't work so well together or be ridiculously over powered just by chance. It seems like you could make some of the powers plus to stats. Again, they were thinking X-Men when they did it, so they had laser eyes, adamantite skeleton, magnetism, flying, etc.

If you get unlucky with your dice rolls the problem tends to resolve itself, and you'll be making a new character in not too long. If you get an over powered one you may want to consider putting a limit on how many sessions they can use that character. (We chose 5 because that seemed to be about the right amount to not shaft the player for rolling good and it let the new characters take shots at him.)

This was mainly a pvp game that we played. I think they also rolled a d6 for hp and actions number of actions we could perform in a round, and some abilities affected those. It's been a while so I can't really remember the details on that.

delroland

Too much randomness in your system. I would suggest checking out Savage Worlds. It's very simple and yet has rules to cover many character types.

The fundamentals:
Stats are rated: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12
All stats start at d4, and you are allowed to raise your stats a limited number of times, so for example if you wanted to raise your Strength from a d4 to a d10, you would spend three stat build points.

All skills are linked to a stat, so if you have a skill, you roll the associated stat versus a target number. Heroes (and named villains) also get to roll a "Wild Die": an additional d6 rolled alongside the stat roll. This represents the ability of heroes to do dramatic things and to have a better chance of success at difficult tasks. For example, if you wanted to punch through a window, the GM might set the difficulty at 5. You then roll your stat die, a d10, and your Wild Die, a d6, and take the highest roll. If you roll less than 5 on your d10, you still have a chance to succeed on your Wild Die.

Experience is used to raise stats, raise skills (for example, if the character has Brawling, a Strength skill, and they raise it to Brawling+1, they roll a d12 instead of a d10), or buy new skills and powers.

The game has a list of powers in the main rules, allowing for pulp, fantasy, scifi, or hero type characters.

There are some more powerful abilities that you can only choose when you reach a certain heroic "level", determined by the amount of experience you have collected. 20xp+ is Veteran, 40xp+ is Heroic, etc. An example would be the Veteran power of rolling a d8 for your Wild Die.

delroland

If you want a more random system, however, I would suggest throwing out the pass/fail system, because otherwise characters die too quickly. A better choice would be a pass/do something the hard way system, where failure doesn't mean the character actually fails, but rather it leads to other, longer actions they have to take.

YaYa

delroland wrote: »

If you want a more random system, however, I would suggest throwing out the pass/fail system, because otherwise characters die too quickly. A better choice would be a pass/do something the hard way system, where failure doesn't mean the character actually fails, but rather it leads to other, longer actions they have to take.

Interesting...Can you elaborate?