Homebrew RPG systems

[SandyAndy]

Has anyone here tried their hand at making a homebrew system? I personally like grittier, low-level games so I'm trying to make a game with that has the tension and squishiness of warhammer type games but keeps the simplicity of D&D/Pathfinder. I know you can tell those stories with other systems but I also wanted to try out making a system. Anyone else take a shot at this?

[Anonymouswizard]

I have a couple of attempts on my hard drive, a lower powered fantasy game using a point buy system and a rules light game based on science fiction of the 60s (primarily Doctor Who, secondarily Star Trek). The main issues I've found are in ensuring clarity and keeping motivation up.

The first is on indefinite hold because it's essentially a Fantasy Heartbreaker, but point buy! The second is coming along slowly but surely getting written. The actual rules are looking like they'll take up maybe 15 sides of A4, with a planned high level setting taking up most of the rest. It really is a matter of just adding a paragraph or two a day until it's done at this point (and includes, among other things, a ripoff of the Cybermen with the gold weakness as originally shown*). Most of the important rules are written by this point, it's just Technology and Space left to fill out.

* Yeah it's 70s, but works better than 'weak to Radiation'.

[SandyAndy]

That sounds really interesting. Are you including spaceship combat or no? I'm really interested in a good vehicle combat system. Mounted combat is something that feels missing in most TTRPGs as well.

My, very WIP, system has 3 stats ranging from 1-10. 1 being barely functional and 10 being like a god amongst men. You roll 2d4 for each stat and get 2 or 3 skills based on your backstory. From there, levelling up is just acquiring more skills or increasing your stats. I'm working on a system to have you lose skills that go unused. That way you can clean up your character sheet a bit and incentive you to use skills. I haven't playtested it yet but hopefully soon it will be ready.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I have, yeah (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/268061/STaRS-The-Simple-Tabletop-Roleplaying-System). It's a journey, for sure.

The number one piece of advice I'd offer is "read." Read and play every system you can get your hands on. And not just ones you think would be similar to your vision. Read the crunchiest messes you can find, and the lightest piles of fluff. Read award-winning indie games and legendary piles of trash. Look at simulationist games and pure narrative tools, generic systems and tightly focused ones. The more sources you can draw from, the better your game will be.

[SandyAndy]

Grod_the_Giant you are amazing. I'm reading your stuff now. I've been playing everything from 5e and Pathfinder to 3.5, Warhammer, and I'm trying to find a game of King Arthur Pendragon. The only thing I won't waste time on is F.A.T.A.L. because as much as I love dumpsterfires, I don't feel like diving into Tartarus.

[ngilop]

I've made 2.

One is rules lite. 14 pages long and the system is 2d6+ skill/stat with bare bones weapons attributes (like explosive for an AoE or stun for well.. stunning etc) and barebones powers (whether those be magic, psychic, or super power) depending on what the roll is for. It is encouraged for the players and the game master to work together to add more substance for their own games

to sum up. you get your 4 stats, Strength, Agility, Mind, & Appeal which to compared to d20 is Str+Con , Dex, Int+Wis, and Charisma. Then you have your melee, ranged, initiative, and defense skills THEN your 'skills' which can range from fireball as a magical spell to salty sea dog for actual skills. You get anywhere from -4 to +6.


I also got a much more in depth rules set that again uses d6s (so that if I ever do decide to get them published people only have to spend a buck or 2 on dice instead of like 12) Cannot really sum it up in a short form though.


Grod has it right, read and play as many RPGs as you can, the best of them have horrible and atrociously thought out rules whilst the worse of them sometimes have amazing little mechanics and well thought out rules. The more experienced you have with RPGs and the more you expose yourself to different RPGs the better it will be to create your new own personalized set of rules, Heck... you might even find that there is a system out there than is 90% of what you want just needs a dash of this RPG rule and a sprinkle of that.

I am sure than if I looked hard enough, my rules are probably very similar to already existing ones honestly.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Grod_the_Giant you are amazing. I'm reading your stuff now. I've been playing everything from 5e and Pathfinder to 3.5, Warhammer, and I'm trying to find a game of King Arthur Pendragon. The only thing I won't waste time on is F.A.T.A.L. because as much as I love dumpsterfires, I don't feel like diving into Tartarus.
Thanks. Hope you like it! :smallredface:

"5e to Pathfinder to 3.5" is a very narrow range, though, and Warhammer is barely any farther. I'd point you towards...

Fate and Apocalypse World, for an example of games built around narrative logic rather than trying to be simulations.
GURPs and Mutants and Masterminds 3e, for two very different approaches to point-buy systems.
Risus and Fiasco, to see just how light games can get.
A GUMSHOE game like Trail of Cthulu, for a unique take on how skills can be used.
Exalted, for an example of non-combat superpowers and setting/system integration. (And for how a rules-heavy system looks if you're coming at it cold)

I could list off more, but those are the ones I've taken the most from.

(I would add weirder stuff like Microscope, Nobilis, Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, Riddle of Steel, Don't Rest Your Head, and Dread, but since they're all still sitting on my "to-read" que that would be a bit hypocritical of me. Some quick googling would be time well spent, though)

[akma]

...but keeps the simplicity of D&D/Pathfinder...

I don't consider those systems simple.


Anyone else take a shot at this?

I'm currently building one, but unlike most systems, this one is meant for only combat.
It's diceless. For each action, you pick a result from 1 to 10 to which you add your modifiers, and you cannot pick the same result twice until you've picked all of them. To negate an enemy's action towards you, you can use a result which is at least 1 higher than the result he chose, as long as it's 6 or higher. Higher results means greater success, like hitting the enemy in the head instead of his legs. If you suffer damage to a region, you suffer a penalty to actions made with that region (like -2 to attack with a sword if you suffered 2 damage to your hands region). High morale allows you to ignore some amount of damage. -5 to a region neutralizes it.
The initiative system is heavily plagiarized based off of Nechronica's initiative system, which means that different actions take different time, and if you have enough time, you could even act more then once before your opponent.
There are many small rules and I haven't finished building it, but the core remains stable. I want a system that encourages a lot of strategy, and in that I think I succeeded.

For out of combat, I would likely use a different system (or no system), but I could use the same principles, but it would require a very different approach to running things, or simply share the same result poll.



(I would add weirder stuff like ... Nobilis, ...

I haven't played it, but I've read the core rulebooks for the second and third addition. I would advise you to only read the third edition book, as most of the core mechanics are the same, but the system is much more streamlined. It is a bit problematic as a reference for RPG mechanics, as the book only gets into the mechanics after a 100 pages. About the system:
1) It is diceless, you have stats and spend miracle points to perform greater miracles.
2) It is an extremely high powered game, a character could easily wreck a nation, an immortal would survive an atomic explosion and the excrucians (villains of the setting) seek to destroy creation by destroying all of its abstract notions. Fluff wise, it is the best handling of extreme power levels I've ever seen.
3) It's much more abstract than most RPG systems.

[JeenLeen]

I've tried a few times, as has a friend of mine, with varying success. A few things I've learned:

1. Be willing to consider a play session as a beta test, and if something is broken mechanically (in the "doesn't work" sense or "way overpowered" sense), to change it.
2. If you have any sort of insanity or corruption system, intended to balance 'evil' power with penalties... probably best not to try. It can (in theory) be done well, but I've never seen it. It seems you always either make it so the downsides can be ignored with enough system mastery (and thus it's overpowered) or the penalties are so bad nobody would reasonably try to use it (so it might as well not exist.)
3. Think of your system's goal and how that impacts the mechanics. The vision for a superhero game that mirrors classic comics should be different than a cyberpunk game. You can make a setting-agnostic system, but it can be easier to narrow-in or have a theme/feeling you want the mechanics to express. (Consider the high power of starting characters in Mutants & Masterminds or Exalted, for example.)
4. Think of how closely you want the mechanics to mirror the in-game realities/metaphysics. It's okay if it is close OR not, but that changes how you want to do things.

And I agree with Grod's Law:
Grod's Law: You cannot and should not balance bad mechanics by making them annoying to use

[noob]

I you want to make a rule light system avoid doing more than 10 pages.
By keeping the amount of rules low you will not only keep the system simple to learn but also make bugfixing and redesigning parts of the system much easier.
For the setting feel free to have as many pages as you want.
But if your objective is just making a system similar to dnd but with much higher squishiness you can make it be a D20 game.
The recipe for a D20 game is the following: pick the D20 base then make a setting, a list of interesting things you will see and of metaphysical rules (that can be "something really close to real life" if you want to keep it simple) a skill list, a bunch of classes, actual mechanical representations of the things you made and it is over your D20 system is finished.
Please note that if you want a consistent squishy feeling you should also sharply cap maximum level.

[SandyAndy]

"5e to Pathfinder to 3.5" is a very narrow range, though, and Warhammer is barely any farther.

Warhammer, especially the 40k ones, feel very different but that might be due to limited experience. I've tried to get in on a GURPS game, Call of Cthulhu, and World of Darkness games but I've been able to find one that lasts more than a session or two. I'll definitely take a look at some of the things you recommended. I'm trying to read as much as I can.

[noob]

Warhammer, especially the 40k ones, feel very different but that might be due to limited experience. I've tried to get in on a GURPS game, Call of Cthulhu, and World of Darkness games but I've been able to find one that lasts more than a session or two. I'll definitely take a look at some of the things you recommended. I'm trying to read as much as I can.

they are extremely similar in terms of crunch amount, resolution mechanics(roll dice) and so on

[Grod_The_Giant]

Warhammer, especially the 40k ones, feel very different but that might be due to limited experience. I've tried to get in on a GURPS game, Call of Cthulhu, and World of Darkness games but I've been able to find one that lasts more than a session or two. I'll definitely take a look at some of the things you recommended. I'm trying to read as much as I can.
As noob said, even the 40k ones are relatively high-crunch combat-focused systems with races and classes, where magic is a sort of bolt-on subsystem only available to certain characters, where advancement involves getting new abilities which are (generally) from a list of finicky options, where rules follow the logic of in-universe physics and the GM has ultimate control over everything.

Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine is My Neighbor Totoro: the RPG. There are no dice. There's no health. You get XP for following for doing things like inspiring a particular emotion in other players or performing genre-appropriate actions... such as going for a nice picnic in a pastoral game. Players have some ability to override the GM. Character creation involves almost no time spent on, say, skills--instead, you're picking thematic character arcs and personal quests.

Microscope isn't about characters at all--it's about playing a setting, where the narrative is the broad arc of history, and you don't even have to follow linear time if you don't feel like it.

Fiasco is a Coen brothers movie in a can. The game sets you up with a precarious stack of characters and relationships and starts egging you on to make things worse. It's the only game I've ever played where I wanted bad things to happen to my character.

There's a lot out there, is what I'm trying to say. (Also, I really want to play a game of Chuubo's right now)

[SandyAndy]

Dang! I didn't realize there's games that can go diceless! Those other systems sound really interesting. I'll have to check those out.

I am trying to make a less combat focused RPG system but it is still gonna be a lot like D&D. I guess because that's where all my experience is. For now, that's where I'm headed. I'm definitely going to try and play some of those other ones, now. Those sound really fun.

[Maat Mons]

I've given some thought to one, but never got very far.

It's kind of a take-off of oWoD games. In those, you had Attributes (9 of them) and Skills (27 or so). And every roll was an Attribute + a Skill. But a single Skill didn't go with just one Attribute. You used whatever Attribute/Skill paining made the most sense for what you were trying to do and how you were trying to do it.

My homebrew has 4 Attributes (Strength, Finesse, Wits, and Magic) and 3 Skills (Offense, Defense, and Utility). Though I'm not keeping the terms "Attributes" and "Skills."

I think in nWoD games you now add your ranks in Disciplines to some rolls? (Or whatever the equivalent of Disciplines are in WoD games other than Vampire: the Masquerade.) I don't know. I'm an old person and haven't played that system in 20 years.

I've gone back and forth quite a bit on resolution mechanics. ... Maybe I'll start another thread on this.

[Adamantrue]

I'm currently working on a card-based RPG (D&D meets M:tG), trying to strip down a lot of the complication and math to make it friendlier to kids like my grand-daughter. But, I still want to keep depth and flexibility for seasoned players, that would enjoy a different approach. I have the side-goal of speeding up combat, though not making it boring or 2-dimensional.

It could be played as an arena-style game, against other players. It can be played alongside friends, against a "Dungeon Deck" (a sort of Automatic Dungeon, somewhat replayable due to random card draws), and it can be played against a GM constructs and plays a "Dungeon Deck" more deliberately.

I still have a long way to go with it, before I even consider playtesting. And I have to come up with a name eventually.

[Amdy_vill]

Has anyone here tried their hand at making a homebrew system? I personally like grittier, low-level games so I'm trying to make a game with that has the tension and squishiness of warhammer type games but keeps the simplicity of D&D/Pathfinder. I know you can tell those stories with other systems but I also wanted to try out making a system. Anyone else take a shot at this?

I have been working on my own system for a long time now and have found that it's a fun hobby but you need a table who is willing to playtest it often. if you really want to make your own game you should start with the base rules, ie combat skill ect playtest those rules with your table then move forward.

[lightningcat]

I have been working on my own system for a long time now and have found that it's a fun hobby but you need a table who is willing to playtest it often. if you really want to make your own game you should start with the base rules, ie combat skill ect playtest those rules with your table then move forward.

This is so true. Life moved me away from my old group, but we had a lot of fun playtesting my Transformers game, and when things went wrong (and they occasionally did) I was able to get feedback to make the game better. Heck, one of the first things we got done was a grappling system that didn't make you want to tear your hair out, and could be used by everyone. It might not be perfect, but it is much better then what we started with.
In my case the system started off as a hack of the Exalted 2e system, but has evolved a lot since then, blending in a lot of CoD ideas. As well as a chase system which is a blend of ideas from Savage Worlds and Spycraft.