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View Full Version : Looking for a specific type of system.



Angry Bob
2011-09-07, 08:40 AM
I'm planning to run a campaign which, upon examination, looks like a combination of The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, House of Leaves, Homestuck, BlankIt, and Erfworld. And maybe a pinch of HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

As is to be expected, I find myself in need of a system not only capable of doing any genre with relative ease, but also capable of doing every genre at once. I realize that falls mostly on my back as the DM, but having a system well-suited for it wound not be a bad thing.

Further complicating the matter is my group. We've been playing 3.5/PF as long as I've been with them. I initially wanted to run it in HERO system 5e, but the group's initial response to that has been lackluster, mainly about the 3d6 roll mechanic(weird thing to complain about, but if it's that big of a problem for them... Who am I to judge?). I don't like GURPS(ocd would require me to acquire all of the sourcebooks before playing), and I feel Fudge is poorly-suited for a serious campaign, especially with this group. So I'd like to get opinions on d20 derived systems that might work as well. I've been pointed at Mutants and Masterminds in particular.

To summarize:
I need a cheap or free available in PDF d20-based system that can do every genre at once. So far Mutants and Masterminds looks like my best bet. Any other recommendations? And if not, what are the important differences between editions of M&M?

dsmiles
2011-09-07, 09:22 AM
RISUS is good at everything (and FREE!), but it's not d20.

Angry Bob
2011-09-07, 09:36 AM
RISUS is good at everything (and FREE!), but it's not d20.

I have RISUS, I agree that it could easily do this concept(but see below), and have plans to run a oneshot involving zombies, aliens, and a robot zombie ninja hitler as the final boss with it, but do not believe it would make a satisfactory long campaign for my current group. Not enough rules to play with. They are about optimization and wargaming at least as much as they are about the story, and the main reason RISUS is so good for low-prep one-shots is because it's light on that sort of thing.

Jude_H
2011-09-07, 09:40 AM
Honestly, I wouldn't use any d20 system if I were trying to do "everything" - it can be solid for certain genres (see Spycraft 2.0), but it breaks down for just about any game where you'd expect conflicts to be resolved without violence (either by having rules to trivialize the fiction - like games of social intrigue or investigation - or by just having a huge cumbersome and unnecessary wargame tied into it), where the game isn't supposed to come with some zaniness (the variance on the core die is huge; you can expect to be surprised by chance a couple of times per session) or where you want the fiction to be more engaging than the metagame (there are too many small modifiers that need to be tracked for players not to spend time tracking them).

That said, from what I've heard about True20, it might fit - it's supposed to be a generic d20 system at a generally lower powerlevel than M&M and without all the wonkiness Modern carries. I haven't used it, so I couldn't tell you how it succeeds, but it might be worth looking into.

EvilDM
2011-09-07, 05:07 PM
How soon do you need this?

Angry Bob
2011-09-08, 01:14 PM
How soon do you need this?

No rush, I plan to run it after the end of my current D&D 3.5 campaign. I got sick of trying to hand balance 3.5/PF, so I'm blowing up my setting and running this new thing as a sequel.

sdream
2011-09-08, 01:30 PM
I just ran my first test of my new universal homebrew system that's sort of a cross between Risus and Fudge on the fly, and it went very well.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1doSbKuGYvlTMfbzHq5KvYlxJ_DTLAAHX7j-wvvPHfQA/edit?hl=en_US&pli=1

I have low DM experience, and my group had low RPG experience but they caught on quick and the session went smoothly.

If you want a lot more crunch and tactics, savage worlds seemed interesting and sort of genre in-specific (but I hear it can have balance issues, and it's not big on d20s either).

I also looked at the True20 someone suggested and it looks like a great fit your very specific needs.

- It uses d20 as the sole die
- It uses a relative of the SRD rules
- It is designed for and includes widely different settings
- The revised edition PDF is cheap ($10)

http://www.greenronin.com/store/product/grr1714e.html
http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=55402

I've never read it, and I'd still love you to test out my system (free PDF from google docs) and let me know how it goes, but I would have to say True20 seems your closest fit.

EvilDM
2011-09-08, 01:55 PM
No rush, I plan to run it after the end of my current D&D 3.5 campaign. I got sick of trying to hand balance 3.5/PF, so I'm blowing up my setting and running this new thing as a sequel.

If I manage to find some play testers and things work out I'll post my world on a wiki. It might have the flexibility you're looking for.

Angry Bob
2011-09-08, 10:00 PM
I just ran my first test of my new universal homebrew system that's sort of a cross between Risus and Fudge on the fly, and it went very well.

I'm looking at the Dream system right now. Are you still making changes to it, or is it in a fixed form until you get playtest results?


If I manage to find some play testers and things work out I'll post my world on a wiki. It might have the flexibility you're looking for.

I have a setting already planned out, see spoiler. All I need now is a suitable system.

Your wake up in a vast, blank white expanse. The last thing you remember is your own death, and the death of your entire world. You either caused it, failed to stop it, or were the last to die. As you get up and walk around, you find others, perhaps like you, perhaps not. They share stories like your own.

You and your new companions travel across this realm, called The Canvas. You cannot tell for how long, before you begin seeing things. A stray item here, perhaps a hat or a playing card, something out of the corner of your eye there. After perhaps a day, you cannot tell here, you encounter an orb, made of the same white material the ground or floor here is made of. It follows you for several hours, before winking out of existence. Soon afterward, you come across a circle of archways. Coincidentally, there are as many archways as there are members of your group.

When a member of the group travels through an arch, they are transported to a place that loosely resembles their dead world. The party works their way through it however they deem necessary, whether by rp or combat, until they come across an item that the locals venerate. If you somehow die, you find yourself alive again within seconds, though far away.

This process repeats for each gate, and each one leads to a new world, corresponding to each member of the party. When all of the items are retrieved, they are placed in a niche that appears at the center of the circle. When they are placed, the local area of the Canvas mutates into its next form, The Collage. At this point, you may have run into a revenant, a dark version of yourself intent on slaying you. One revenant spawns each time you are resurrected.

The Collage is a stitched-together mockery of a world made of bits and pieces of each of the remnant's worlds. Strange creatures that are amalgamations of the inhabitants of the worlds creep out of the woodwork and begin harassing the remnants, no matter how benign or hostile whatever they are based on was. If you have been slain by a revenant before, you may begin encountering shades, which spawn whenever you are killed by a revenant. A shade is stronger than a revenant, and if you are killed by a shade, you are permanently slain, and the shades and revenants turn their attention to everything else that moves.

This new realm contains yet more gates, each leading to yet another world, more detailed and more dangerous than the ones from the Canvas. These gates are concealed and well-guarded. These worlds must also be traversed in order to proceed(still fuzzy on how to distinguish them from the last set). The Collage will also have some creation/construction aspects, such as base defenses and so forth. More importantly, the circle gathers other elements of the other worlds for their genesis artifact, a device which they are assured will somehow rebuild their worlds.

After that is the Coliseum, a stark wasteland with each circle of remnants being transported to a tower. In the basement of each tower is a gate leading to a land unrelated to the remnants, containing a creature of immense power, called the titan. In order to proceed, a piece of every titan attached to the Coliseum must be procured, whether by force or by rp.

The next gate leads to The Masque, a labyrinth of incredible danger, which finally leads to...

YGGDRASIL. Yggdrasil is an abomination that takes on the traits of every surviving remnant and is joined by every surviving revenant and shade. At this point, your goal is simple. Slay Yggdrasil and plant your genesis artifacts in its corpse. Yours and other circles' genesis artifacts spawn the tree named after the creature it uses for mulch, and a new multiverse is born. The canvas is cleaned up, leaving nothing except the tree and its fruit.

There's other stuff that isn't strictly linear: Throughout this setting, there are secret gates leading to what are essentially bonus levels that are insanely hard, but contain powerful artifacts, for example:

A black magic artifact, which powers up the user to absurd levels, but spawns two shades whenever its power is used

A custom genesis seed, which may be carefully shaped into a world the remnants can inhabit, instead of being cleaned up with the rest of the Canvas.

A temporal isolator, which may once and only once irrevocably and unavoidably remove someone from reality.

There are also complications. Primarily, the prismatic dragons in the 3.5 campaign I'm running now carved a spell of summoning into the material of the Great Wheel itself. When the Wheel fragmented, the spell activated, summoning an unbeatable demon into the Canvas for the remnants to deal with.

Second, perhaps some of the remnants are disappointed by the Canvas' purpose and seek to kill any hope of resurrecting the multiverse.

Third, a character called The Maimed Princess has immense psychic powers. If slain, her revenants and shades will be immensely powerful. If left alive, Yggdrasil will be invincible.

Malfunctioned
2011-09-09, 04:31 AM
You could try Don't Rest Your Head, just ripping the system out of it. It works really well for this kind of thing.

EvilDM
2011-09-09, 09:08 AM
I have a setting already planned out, see spoiler. All I need now is a suitable system.

The system will be a part of it when it's up, which can be used for pretty much any setting (unless testing goes horribly wrong). I did kinda imply that the world was the important part didn't I? For me they are so ingrained I don't tend to separate the two in my mind.

Angry Bob
2011-09-09, 09:38 AM
The system will be a part of it when it's up, which can be used for pretty much any setting (unless testing goes horribly wrong). I did kinda imply that the world was the important part didn't I? For me they are so ingrained I don't tend to separate the two in my mind.

Okay.

No implications were made that the system and setting were packaged together, though.

sdream
2011-09-09, 11:58 AM
I'm looking at the Dream system right now. Are you still making changes to it, or is it in a fixed form until you get playtest results?




I'm pretty comfortable with it... I made some changes right before posting it as we tweaked some stuff the first time we used it.

I wanted to fluff out the play examples, as lots of people learn best from examples, and I might perhaps do some more editing. The only other rule that came up was assisting another, which I had not figured out at the time.

I just added the rule on that (add half the effective skill of your assistant).