Greywander
2023-05-09, 08:29 PM
This really shouldn't have surprised me, but sometimes when writing a story in a world that runs on game logic you can end up with an actual game system that sounds kind of fun to play and could be made into a real game. Take for example Yu-Gi-Oh, which was a manga before it was a card game. In order to write the story, the mangaka had to come up with the basic mechanics of how the card game worked, things like cards having attack and defense values, life points, playing cards in attack or defense mode, sacrificing monster cards to summon a stronger monster, trap and spell cards, and so on. Now, obviously you don't need to create an entire game system, only the parts that end up interacting with the story. But before the mangaka could sit down and draw the first page of Yu-Gi-Oh, or at least very early on in the series, he had already set up almost a complete system, the only thing that was really missing was the cards themselves.
I seem to have found myself in a similar situation. I got pulled in by a dungeon core story I listened to a partial reading of on YouTube, and ended up falling into a rabbit hole of fiction largely comprised of "gamelit" or "litRPG" genre. This naturally got me thinking about ideas for my own stories I could write. Probably the biggest inspiration for the subject of this thread is a story called Saintess Summons Skeletons (https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/62087/saintess-summons-skeletons-a-holy-necromancy-litrpg), ironically one of the few stories I'm reading right now that isn't an isekai. One of the story concepts I had I've given a tentative title of I Died, So I Put All My Points Into Defense, a proper isekai title if you ask me. This concept isn't ready to be put to ink and paper just yet, though; while the premise is interesting enough, it doesn't really have a clear idea of where it's going. Maximizing defense is not an end to itself, merely a means to an end, and I don't currently have a compelling reason why the MC would take up the life of an adventurer rather than just settling down for a farming or potion shop sim. Regardless, I spent some time thinking about the system mechanics that this story would run on, and as I thought about it I realized it could actually convert rather elegantly to a tabletop game.
TL;DR, I invented a game system to write a story, then decided it would work as an actual game.
Before I get into explaining my ideas for the system, I think it would help to show you all a mockup of a status screen/character sheet for a hypothetical character. Just by looking over the mockup, you can intuit a lot about how the system works, and then read on to get a more detailed breakdown. Putting the mockup under a spoiler so it doesn't hog space.
Name : Chadwick Strongpants
Level : 25
Next Level : 5673 / 12000 XP
You have 3 unspent feat points.
Next purchase : 7 points
Attributes
Hit Points : 112 / 112
Stamina : 132 / 132
Strength : 26
Dexterity : 10
Constitution : 30
Intelligence : 14
Wisdom : 26
Charisma : 22
Skills
[Sidearms] Rank 3 [||||.....]
[Polearms] Rank 3 [||.......]
[Horsemanship] Rank 2 [||||||...]
[Literacy] Rank 3 [|........]
[Theology] Rank 2 [|||||||||]
[Stealth] Rank 1 [|||......]
[Underwater Basket Weaving] Rank 4 [||.......]
Classes
[Knight]
[Priest]
[Divine Protection] [Priest/Boon] Rank 2 [|||||||..]
Your faith protects you from harm. You are immune to minor curses (scales with rank). Once per day, you can cause a serious or lethal wound you sustain to deal you no damage, instantly closing the wound.
[Apostate] [Priest/Bane]
If you break the commandments of your faith, you lose access to your priest boon and priest feats until you seek atonement through the means prescribed by your faith or you convert to a different faith.
[Class Feats] (3 / 5)
[Gallant Charge] [Knight/Lv 1] Rank 4 [||.......]
30 Stamina
Increases your speed by 8 (2 * rank) and adds 4 (0.05 * Charisma * rank) to the attack power of your next attack.
[Sworn Protector] [Knight/Lv 12] Rank 3 [||||||||.]
10 Stamina
Exchange places with an ally immediately before they are hit with an attack or effect. The ally must be within 9 feet (3 * rank) of you. Reduces all damage taken by 15% (5% * rank) for 1 second after activating.
[Lay on Hands] [Priest/Lv 8] Rank 3 [|||......]
40 Stamina
Touch a target to restore 32 hit points (Wisdom + 2 * rank).
[General Feats] (2 / 3)
[Toughness] Rank 4 [|........]
Reduces all damage taken by 8% (2 * rank).
[Traveler]
Negates stamina penalties caused by traveling long distances.
You spend XP to level up. (Groundbreaking design choice, I know.)
Leveling up gives you points to spend on attributes, as well as 1 feat point.
Attributes are your innate abilities, yada yada. I haven't given much thought to what attributes this system would use. While it's important, it doesn't actually matter much what the attributes are when it comes to explaining generally how the system works.
Skills are how good you are at a given task. Everybody has access to all skills. Skills have different ranks, and rank up by use. This means your skill rank is independent of your level. This is a bit tricky to do in a tabletop system, but I'm thinking I'd go for a system where you have to first pass a skill check, then reroll the check and if the new roll is a failure it adds one point of progress towards the next rank. Unfortunately, this means more dice rolling, but otherwise it's pretty elegant.
I'm not sure if I want to come up with an exhaustive list of skills. I may opt to let players create their own, and broader skills would require more progress points to rank up, while narrower skills would require less.
Feat points are spent to acquire classes, class feats, and general feats. The cost is equal to the number of classes + the number of feats you have. So your first class or feat is free, the next one costs 1 point, the next one 2, etc. When you level up, you can choose to forgo the level up to instead purge one known class or feat, refunding the feat points spent on it. This allows you to get rid of classes or feats that are no longer useful to you so you can spend those feat points on something else. Purging a class will also purge all class feats for that class.
Classes do not have levels or ranks. You either have a class, or you do not.
Classes primarily do one thing, and that's give you access to class feats. Some classes, mostly the more advanced or esoteric ones, will also come with both a boon and a bane. A boon is a benefit, and acts like a free class feat, whereas the bane is a penalty that balances out the boon. This could potentially open the door to "monster classes", like a vampire class with a bane that makes you take damage from sunlight in exchange for a comparable boon, not to mention vampire class feats.
General feats are available to everyone and don't require a class.
All class feats are level locked, though usually a class will have one or more level 1 feats. General feats are generally not level locked.
Most active feats, and some passive feats, can be ranked up, just like skills. Again, this means their strength is independent of your actual level. It also means that merely acquiring a high level feat doesn't immediately make you powerful.
There is a limit to how many class feats and general feats you can have, and these limits are separate from each other. These limits increase by leveling up.
That said, I wonder if this isn't redundant with the sparse feat point growth. I feel like both limit the actual number of feats you can have, so either you'll have plenty of feat points and run out of slots, or you'll always have empty slots while you wait to accumulate enough points for your next purchase. I think it would probably be better if I either axes the feat limits entirely, or moved feat point acquisition to some method other than leveling up. What do you think?
In the story I was planning to write, classes would have requirements to unlock them. This would explain why many of the classes are relatively unknown. For example, if the MC is maximizing defense, I was thinking his first class might be something like a Martyr, a rare class designed around losing HP (e.g. big HP bonuses, casting from HP, reflecting damage back on enemies, etc.), with the requirement being that you have to die for a greater good to unlock access to the class. Since most people haven't done that, they can't take the Martyr class, and those who have usually won't get the chance. I'm not sure if unlock requirements make sense for a tabletop game, or if it might just lead to really janky player behavior to satisfy the unlock requirements for classes their character shouldn't know about.
Anyway, that's about as far as I've gotten. A lot of the nitty gritty details are missing, but the general skeleton of the system is there. What do you think of it so far? I'm also open to suggestions on what to use for a core resolution mechanic, and which attributes and skills to use.
I seem to have found myself in a similar situation. I got pulled in by a dungeon core story I listened to a partial reading of on YouTube, and ended up falling into a rabbit hole of fiction largely comprised of "gamelit" or "litRPG" genre. This naturally got me thinking about ideas for my own stories I could write. Probably the biggest inspiration for the subject of this thread is a story called Saintess Summons Skeletons (https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/62087/saintess-summons-skeletons-a-holy-necromancy-litrpg), ironically one of the few stories I'm reading right now that isn't an isekai. One of the story concepts I had I've given a tentative title of I Died, So I Put All My Points Into Defense, a proper isekai title if you ask me. This concept isn't ready to be put to ink and paper just yet, though; while the premise is interesting enough, it doesn't really have a clear idea of where it's going. Maximizing defense is not an end to itself, merely a means to an end, and I don't currently have a compelling reason why the MC would take up the life of an adventurer rather than just settling down for a farming or potion shop sim. Regardless, I spent some time thinking about the system mechanics that this story would run on, and as I thought about it I realized it could actually convert rather elegantly to a tabletop game.
TL;DR, I invented a game system to write a story, then decided it would work as an actual game.
Before I get into explaining my ideas for the system, I think it would help to show you all a mockup of a status screen/character sheet for a hypothetical character. Just by looking over the mockup, you can intuit a lot about how the system works, and then read on to get a more detailed breakdown. Putting the mockup under a spoiler so it doesn't hog space.
Name : Chadwick Strongpants
Level : 25
Next Level : 5673 / 12000 XP
You have 3 unspent feat points.
Next purchase : 7 points
Attributes
Hit Points : 112 / 112
Stamina : 132 / 132
Strength : 26
Dexterity : 10
Constitution : 30
Intelligence : 14
Wisdom : 26
Charisma : 22
Skills
[Sidearms] Rank 3 [||||.....]
[Polearms] Rank 3 [||.......]
[Horsemanship] Rank 2 [||||||...]
[Literacy] Rank 3 [|........]
[Theology] Rank 2 [|||||||||]
[Stealth] Rank 1 [|||......]
[Underwater Basket Weaving] Rank 4 [||.......]
Classes
[Knight]
[Priest]
[Divine Protection] [Priest/Boon] Rank 2 [|||||||..]
Your faith protects you from harm. You are immune to minor curses (scales with rank). Once per day, you can cause a serious or lethal wound you sustain to deal you no damage, instantly closing the wound.
[Apostate] [Priest/Bane]
If you break the commandments of your faith, you lose access to your priest boon and priest feats until you seek atonement through the means prescribed by your faith or you convert to a different faith.
[Class Feats] (3 / 5)
[Gallant Charge] [Knight/Lv 1] Rank 4 [||.......]
30 Stamina
Increases your speed by 8 (2 * rank) and adds 4 (0.05 * Charisma * rank) to the attack power of your next attack.
[Sworn Protector] [Knight/Lv 12] Rank 3 [||||||||.]
10 Stamina
Exchange places with an ally immediately before they are hit with an attack or effect. The ally must be within 9 feet (3 * rank) of you. Reduces all damage taken by 15% (5% * rank) for 1 second after activating.
[Lay on Hands] [Priest/Lv 8] Rank 3 [|||......]
40 Stamina
Touch a target to restore 32 hit points (Wisdom + 2 * rank).
[General Feats] (2 / 3)
[Toughness] Rank 4 [|........]
Reduces all damage taken by 8% (2 * rank).
[Traveler]
Negates stamina penalties caused by traveling long distances.
You spend XP to level up. (Groundbreaking design choice, I know.)
Leveling up gives you points to spend on attributes, as well as 1 feat point.
Attributes are your innate abilities, yada yada. I haven't given much thought to what attributes this system would use. While it's important, it doesn't actually matter much what the attributes are when it comes to explaining generally how the system works.
Skills are how good you are at a given task. Everybody has access to all skills. Skills have different ranks, and rank up by use. This means your skill rank is independent of your level. This is a bit tricky to do in a tabletop system, but I'm thinking I'd go for a system where you have to first pass a skill check, then reroll the check and if the new roll is a failure it adds one point of progress towards the next rank. Unfortunately, this means more dice rolling, but otherwise it's pretty elegant.
I'm not sure if I want to come up with an exhaustive list of skills. I may opt to let players create their own, and broader skills would require more progress points to rank up, while narrower skills would require less.
Feat points are spent to acquire classes, class feats, and general feats. The cost is equal to the number of classes + the number of feats you have. So your first class or feat is free, the next one costs 1 point, the next one 2, etc. When you level up, you can choose to forgo the level up to instead purge one known class or feat, refunding the feat points spent on it. This allows you to get rid of classes or feats that are no longer useful to you so you can spend those feat points on something else. Purging a class will also purge all class feats for that class.
Classes do not have levels or ranks. You either have a class, or you do not.
Classes primarily do one thing, and that's give you access to class feats. Some classes, mostly the more advanced or esoteric ones, will also come with both a boon and a bane. A boon is a benefit, and acts like a free class feat, whereas the bane is a penalty that balances out the boon. This could potentially open the door to "monster classes", like a vampire class with a bane that makes you take damage from sunlight in exchange for a comparable boon, not to mention vampire class feats.
General feats are available to everyone and don't require a class.
All class feats are level locked, though usually a class will have one or more level 1 feats. General feats are generally not level locked.
Most active feats, and some passive feats, can be ranked up, just like skills. Again, this means their strength is independent of your actual level. It also means that merely acquiring a high level feat doesn't immediately make you powerful.
There is a limit to how many class feats and general feats you can have, and these limits are separate from each other. These limits increase by leveling up.
That said, I wonder if this isn't redundant with the sparse feat point growth. I feel like both limit the actual number of feats you can have, so either you'll have plenty of feat points and run out of slots, or you'll always have empty slots while you wait to accumulate enough points for your next purchase. I think it would probably be better if I either axes the feat limits entirely, or moved feat point acquisition to some method other than leveling up. What do you think?
In the story I was planning to write, classes would have requirements to unlock them. This would explain why many of the classes are relatively unknown. For example, if the MC is maximizing defense, I was thinking his first class might be something like a Martyr, a rare class designed around losing HP (e.g. big HP bonuses, casting from HP, reflecting damage back on enemies, etc.), with the requirement being that you have to die for a greater good to unlock access to the class. Since most people haven't done that, they can't take the Martyr class, and those who have usually won't get the chance. I'm not sure if unlock requirements make sense for a tabletop game, or if it might just lead to really janky player behavior to satisfy the unlock requirements for classes their character shouldn't know about.
Anyway, that's about as far as I've gotten. A lot of the nitty gritty details are missing, but the general skeleton of the system is there. What do you think of it so far? I'm also open to suggestions on what to use for a core resolution mechanic, and which attributes and skills to use.