Need a good system for a musical-based campaign

[Randalor]

My girlfriend is wanting to make a one-shot or campaign game based on musical and opera characters (players would be playing villans from operas and musicals), but we're not sure which system would be good for running it. We want something with a flexible character creation system, and is fairly simple for beginners to learn. One of my friends suggested GURPS or BESM for the character creation, but I wanted to see if there were any other good systems.

[reddir]

Have you looked at the Spirit of the Century and Savage Worlds systems?

They give characters capabilities based on qualities. Using with the iconic themes and characters of music and opera might be a perfect fit.

The systems are also very easy to learn and run.

[erikun]

HeroQuest appears to be very good for your needs. Character "stats" and "skills" are simply whatever they decide to make them, and the GM determines how appropriate they are for the situation. Combat is nothing more than an extended contest, and so you could easily stage a 'duel' between competing orchestras just as easily as getting into a fight.

Do note that HeroQuest runs off of dramatic convenience, and the target difficulty values are provided to encourage successes/defeats based on the direction and mood at the table. You could certainly set your own difficulties, in order to make the world more organized, but you'd be doing a lot of the work yourself if you wanted to.

[Grail]

If you're going to use GURPs, use GURPs lite for something like this.

But this sounds like it would work with an almost non-existent system... something like (off the top of my head).

Each character has a number of "Traits", determined by the GM (say 5 for example).
Singing, Dancing, Oration, Brawn, Agility etc are all examples of Traits.

Each Trait is ranked according to the character's ability - Average, Good, Exceptional.

Roll 4d6 against your Trait each time you need to use it. For a Trait check to be a success, you need a certain number of achievements.
Untrained = 4
Average = 3
Good = 2
Exceptional = 1

An achievement is a roll equal to or above a certain number on each die.
Difficult rolls require a 5+
Moderate rolls require a 4+
Easy rolls require a 3+

If a character is attacked by someone, they can dodge against Agility, but dodging is difficult.

If someone takes damage, they suffer 1 wound and all die rolls are -1
A character can take 3 wounds.

Different attacks might do more or less damage.

There's your system, but for the most part, it's freeform, and dice are only rolled when you really want to know the outcome of something.