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View Full Version : The Omni-System RPG [Crazy Ideas and the Impossible]



Mr. Mask
2015-03-06, 06:13 PM
Sometimes in an RPG, I've felt that certain roles were less interesting than others--buy they were more interesting in other RPGs. Like driving a car in one system might be a single roll, but in other systems it might be a reasonable simulation with tire spikes and all sorts of possible moves.

I got to thinking it'd be neat if you could mix and match such systems together. Where the combat is like X, and the driving is from Y, and the medicine is like C.

It'd even be sort of cool in a weird way if the driver player has to learn his own set of rules, almost like earning a driver's licence, while the characters who don't know how to drive have players who probably don't know those rules. Maybe I'm just very strange, where the fact DnD wizards required you to learn, consider and plan a bunch of stuff fighters didn't have to seemed really cool to me, so no one else probably feels that way.

Of course, while this idea would totally get rad points of its mad skills, I can't see it having enough players and GMs willing to tackle it to be worth the effort. And some of the design would get tremendously bogging, if gunslinging had different rules from melee and you had to look up how they work together, etc.. Or when the game is focusing on the driver part of the rules and the driver player has a great time, but later he has to use a gun for an extended period and doesn't get to drive and so he's bored.


This is a totally weird, unusable idea. But I thought it was interesting, so I put it up here for no particular reason. I apologize.

Kid Jake
2015-03-06, 06:26 PM
It's not a bad idea necessarily, but it's similar to what makes Shadowrun a pain to learn. The guy that hacks, the guy that drives, the guy that shoots/beats people up and the guy that goes on trippy astral quests all have their own unique rules governing them; which in turns makes life that much harder for the poor GM who's trying to herd them like cats.

Mr. Mask
2015-03-06, 06:37 PM
Yeah, I see your point. I sort of like the angle of it seeming like a real ragtag group of mercs. "Do we have a shadowrun player? Someone who can use these cryptic hacking rules?"

I guess it could work with a system that had a lot of modular rule sets and extensions. GURPS or something probably fits that bill.

Geostationary
2015-03-08, 05:34 PM
Just play Dungeons the Dragoning 40k 7th ed, the somehow entirely real joke rpg.

sakuuya
2015-03-08, 10:41 PM
It's not a bad idea necessarily, but it's similar to what makes Shadowrun a pain to learn. The guy that hacks, the guy that drives, the guy that shoots/beats people up and the guy that goes on trippy astral quests all have their own unique rules governing them; which in turns makes life that much harder for the poor GM who's trying to herd them like cats.

The other trouble with this sort of thing is that if everybody is using different (sub)systems, only one player will be able to contribute at a time, which can be boring for everyone else, who just have to sit around while the GM goes on what's essentially a little solo quest for the hacker (or whatever, but Shadowrun hacking is already a pretty bad case of this).