Good Boxing TTRPGs?

[Melville's Book]

So far, the only TTRPG I've seen that lets lends an appreciable amount of depth to boxing as a combat style is GURPS, but even GURPS mainly treats boxing as a martial art among many (where being a boxer is in itself meant to be a distinguishing trait from the rest of the cast), so while it does a decent job of letting you play a character who really plays like a boxer, it doesn't seem like it provides nearly enough ability to individualize on that front to run an entire game around boxing, which I'd like to do. So I'm looking at other options before I try something like making my own needlessly convoluted mess of a system or taking the cudgel to GURPS.

I'd definitely prefer a crunch-heavy or at least medium system. Fate is great and all, but I want to get a lot more focused in on the nitty-gritty.

Got any recommendations?

[Mr Beer]

The big issues with GURPS and boxing is that a) the damage system will see someone reliably KO'd in 10 to 20 seconds and b) boxing rounds last 2 minutes.

The GURPS forum in the Steve Jackson Games site is an excellent resource and there are a number of alternate damage systems which could be usefully applied to a boxing-themed game e.g. reduced damage for realistic ST; fractional HP damage.

I think you'd need to go further though and use something like 10 to 30 seconds per Manoeuvre instead of 1 second, otherwise you get 120 Manoeuvres per 2 minute round, which goes back to either having very short boxing matches or an impossibly tedious game.

Once you get to that point, you then change some basic assumptions about the combat system, you'd then want to have something more strategic and less tactical as an action e.g. player tries to pepper the enemy with light shots in order to score points; player fights defensively using reach advantage in order to gas them out and deny opportunity for powerful body shots; player attempts to close and land knockout blows etc.

All in all, you might be better off starting off by considering exactly what you want from the game and maybe homebrewing something.

[Melville's Book]

Well, for whatever it's worth, the GURPS book actually has some solutions to each of those particular issues (there is a sidebar for boxing matches in the martial arts book). Boxing gloves shave off some of the damage and the round setup is abstracted a bit to involve 2d seconds of fighting interspersed with 4d seconds of circling and sizing things up and the like that isn't played moment by moment.

My biggest concern is that I feel like with GURPS the boxers will be pretty samey. There are a lot of intricate factors that go into making boxers fight differently from one another in actual boxing, but since GURPS only gave enough attention to each individual fighting art to make a representative feel authentic rather than to accommodate an entire cast of users of a particular style, I'm worried the players won't be able to feel different enough from each other and their opponents in the ring.

[AMFV]

Well, for whatever it's worth, the GURPS book actually has some solutions to each of those particular issues (there is a sidebar for boxing matches in the martial arts book). Boxing gloves shave off some of the damage and the round setup is abstracted a bit to involve 2d seconds of fighting interspersed with 4d seconds of circling and sizing things up and the like that isn't played moment by moment.

My biggest concern is that I feel like with GURPS the boxers will be pretty samey. There are a lot of intricate factors that go into making boxers fight differently from one another in actual boxing, but since GURPS only gave enough attention to each individual fighting art to make a representative feel authentic rather than to accommodate an entire cast of users of a particular style, I'm worried the players won't be able to feel different enough from each other and their opponents in the ring.

I think what you're looking for is pretty niche, and is likely to require a lot of homebrew. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But really like a boxing roleplay where boxing is the main focus is not something that is liable to come up, and it's something that is likely to require a level of detail that is typically excluded from most combat systems.

Generally "do I hit and do damage" is the most important question. Whereas in a boxing match it matters how tired you are, how worn your opponent is, how much you're controlling the match, whether you're slipping in dirty shots or not. There's a lot of factors that might not matter as much for other games and therefore be excluded for simplicity's sake, so I'd look at reintroducing them.

[Fri]

If you want to have a game that revolves around boxing, you'll need a specific game/homebrew for that. It's like my idea of having this RPG about cooking duels, it's a niche thing that if you want to have a campaign revolving around it definitely can't be replicated on dnd or gurps where it's just skill roll checks and such.

[AMFV]

One of the advantages in boxing or sports however is that there is copious statistics available. So it's much easier to figure out what details you might need to model than it would be for say regular combat where there's a lot more chaotic elements present. Also because boxing has standardized rules it might be easier to formulate how the players are going to interact and act.

[Lacco]

How realistic should this be?

Also, are we talking sports boxing or bare-knuckle-back-alley boxing?

[Melville's Book]

How realistic should this be?

Somewhere between "as realistic as I can get" and Hajime no Ippo.

Also, are we talking sports boxing or bare-knuckle-back-alley boxing?

Sports boxing.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Somewhere between "as realistic as I can get" and Hajime no Ippo

And on a scale from "can't tell if that was a right jab or a left hook" to "long term career stat for accumulating brain damage"?

[Melville's Book]

And on a scale from "can't tell if that was a right jab or a left hook" to "long term career stat for accumulating brain damage"?

Hmmm. Okay, long term career stat for accumulated brain damage seems like going in a little too hard. I really care most about realism during the bout itself, but I'm definitely willing to let other stuff like long-term damage be dealt with more cinematically rather than with mechanical precision.