Author Topic: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys  (Read 9365 times)

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Offline chitoryu12

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #15 on: April 06, 2014, 12:37:36 pm »
.....holy shit

Yeah. I'm kinda glad that he only lasted for 5 sessions with our group in total, or someone would have lost their temper on him. It's hilarious in retrospect now, but actually playing with him was grating and really dragged down the fun.

Anyways, I'm actually collecting online players right now on the SJGames forum for a GURPS old west campaign. If you have a working knowledge of the system (at least enough to build a character), feel free to join in.
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Offline fancy_kitten

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #16 on: April 14, 2014, 05:07:01 pm »
That's cool but it helps me in no way.  Does anyone think my ideas are okay, or have anything to add?  Should I do it?!
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Offline chitoryu12

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #17 on: April 14, 2014, 06:31:47 pm »
That's cool but it helps me in no way.  Does anyone think my ideas are okay, or have anything to add?  Should I do it?!

Well, the best way to start would be deciding on a system and a game that people want to play. d20 systems like D&D, Pathfinder, and d20 Modern are probably the easiest to start with if you want a popular system with a ton of support and sourcebooks. GURPS would be second after that (despite its reputation, it's surprisingly easy to use and adaptable to virtually anything).
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Offline lord gibbon

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #18 on: April 14, 2014, 06:53:01 pm »
My biggest issue is access to resources, since I dont'have many game books or anything.
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Offline fancy_kitten

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #19 on: April 14, 2014, 07:53:43 pm »
My biggest issue is access to resources, since I dont'have many game books or anything.

 That can be easily fixed due to the fact that you have internet access.  If we actually do this I can easily make a post regarding any relevant rules.

That's cool but it helps me in no way.  Does anyone think my ideas are okay, or have anything to add?  Should I do it?!

Well, the best way to start would be deciding on a system and a game that people want to play. d20 systems like D&D, Pathfinder, and d20 Modern are probably the easiest to start with if you want a popular system with a ton of support and sourcebooks. GURPS would be second after that (despite its reputation, it's surprisingly easy to use and adaptable to virtually anything).

Okay, how about D20 but without D&D's horrible stats system.  People can use feats or something similar to increase their stats, and we'll use the armor class as damage reduction rules, because the rule of armor class being anything that contributes to making you harder to hit is too unbalanced for words and just plain bad.
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Offline R. U. Sirius

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #20 on: April 14, 2014, 08:17:11 pm »
How will you determine people's class abilities and skills?
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Offline fancy_kitten

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #21 on: April 14, 2014, 10:04:11 pm »
Different classes will most likely have different weapon proficiencies to start out with.  Combat oriented classes will probably get bonuses to things like HP or damage and magic or utility classes will get abilities that are exclusive to them, etc.  I've used the point-buy system a few times before and I have to say it's my favorite, it's way superior over randomized stats and growth rates.  However, this would probably require me to introduce caps or something similar to make sure classes don't become different in name only and to keep people from getting overpowered.  For instance, using this system a berserker or barbarian type class would probably only be able to get their armor rating so high, but their strength cap would be way higher than any other unit of the same level, and they would get access to a skill tree that revolved around sacrificing defensibility for speed and damage.
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Online ironbite

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #22 on: April 14, 2014, 10:16:23 pm »
That's starting to sound like a homebrew and those can get complicated really really fast.

Ironbite-stick with something like GURPS if you're gonna do that.

Offline fancy_kitten

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #23 on: April 14, 2014, 10:46:23 pm »
Clearly I'll need to learn a little more about GURPS then.

Edit:  My first thoughts on Gurps:  I have to buy books to figure out what it is?  No.  Okay, so looking at Wikipedia you apparently only get four attributes and some other stuff.  That's pretty simple I guess, I don't know if it'd necessarily be better though.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2014, 10:50:55 pm by fancy_kitten »
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Offline chitoryu12

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #24 on: April 14, 2014, 11:04:51 pm »
Clearly I'll need to learn a little more about GURPS then.

Edit:  My first thoughts on Gurps:  I have to buy books to figure out what it is?  No.  Okay, so looking at Wikipedia you apparently only get four attributes and some other stuff.  That's pretty simple I guess, I don't know if it'd necessarily be better though.

I'm an experienced player, so I can give some basic info:

GURPS exclusively uses six-sided dice for everything, and almost all rolls are simply done with 3d6. You have four attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Health. Along with the obvious things that they affect, these stats also determine your starting HP, FP, basic speed (essentially your reflexes) and basic move (how fast you can run), Will, Perception, and so on.

GURPS is a point-based system: the GM selects how many character points the players start with, and you use those points to build a character. Increasing beyond average costs points, while decreasing gives points back. There are also Advantages, which give you various benefits or abilities (like Combat Reflexes or 360 Degree Vision), and Disadvantages, which confer penalties or flaws to the character (like everyone's favorite, Alcoholism, or Hemophilia). Most GMs set a limit to how many Disadvantages you can have or how many points you can get back from them, as most Disadvantages give the player anywhere from 5 to 20 points to spend; limiting Disadvantages prevents minmaxing.

Skills are likewise purchased with points. Each skill has an attribute that corresponds to it and a difficulty level. How many points you put into a skill determines how much it's trained based on the defining attribute. For instance, a DX/Easy skill (like Guns) requires 1 point to bring the skill level to equal your DX, so if you have 10 DX you get a 10 in Guns if you put one point into it. More difficult skills require more points for each level, and characters with low attributes have an inherent disadvantage in the relevant skills.

GURPS is different from d20 in that low rolls are better. To make a skill roll, you roll 3d6 and try to get at or below the target number. A 3 is always a critical success and an 18 is always a critical failure; your skill level and sometimes equipment affect whether the crit range for successes and fails increases past those. This means that unlike d20 and such, roll probability is on a bell curve: rolls in the middle of the range (from 8 to 13) are the most likely to occur, with very good or very bad ones being less and less probable.

GURPS is a completely universal roleplaying system, and as such the Basic Set only provides the absolute basics to set up most common campaigns. Sourcebooks provide much more detail, and they tend to go into so much detail that they can actually be used as reference material for non-GURPS stuff. High-Tech is the go-to book for anything taking place from the industrial revolution onward, Low-Tech for cavemen up through the renaissance, and Ultra-Tech for sci-fi.

It often gets accused of being math-heavy, but it's really not. There's obscene amounts of optional rules for both realistic and cinematic gameplay, but these are optional; the best thing about GURPS is that it's designed to be 100% modular, and you can literally strip it down all the way to a pamphlet that fits in your back pocket. You can freely add or remove rules, including house rules, and you're usually safe. All of the units are real-world measurements rather than abstract game units and equipment is given stats based on heavy research (the formula for determining firearm damage is still being parsed out, but it's very complex and tends to create results almost identical to the real world), which means that making custom items and weapons tends to be fairly easy just by comparing stats to similar stuff already in the book.

GURPS shines when used for realism and in many ways is built as standard for realistic games, but there's a ton of cinematic rules and sourcebooks that allow for stupidly wacky games with about as much realism as the average B action movie.

Edit: Looking at your suggested house rules, GURPS would work quite well for it. You don't have "classes", since you just buy everything from the ground up, but the books often provide templates that can be used as a basis for characters. Having to make everything from square one instead of being restricted to classes also really helps with flexibility, and you can make much more varied and useful characters and expand them naturally as they progress.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2014, 11:07:51 pm by chitoryu12 »
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Offline fancy_kitten

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #25 on: April 15, 2014, 12:11:19 am »
Hm, that does sound pretty cool and isn't too far removed from some stuff I've done in the past.  My first thoughts are that the simplistic style could be really useful, but like with anything adding more detail will make it more complicated no matter what.  I'd also like to see if it could be tweaked to use d12 instead of d6, but I definitely like the idea of only needing one type of dice.
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Offline chitoryu12

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #26 on: April 15, 2014, 12:44:04 am »
Hm, that does sound pretty cool and isn't too far removed from some stuff I've done in the past.  My first thoughts are that the simplistic style could be really useful, but like with anything adding more detail will make it more complicated no matter what.  I'd also like to see if it could be tweaked to use d12 instead of d6, but I definitely like the idea of only needing one type of dice.

I think some people MAY have used d12s in homebrew modifications for specific rolls, but completely replacing the d6 with d12s fundamentally changes the entire system. Everything from skill rolls to damage to random table rolls would need to be edited with such caution that you'd basically be rebuilding the system from the ground up.

I've been playing GURPS for a few years now with varying levels of complexity and from 1 to 4 PCs. In practice, the GM ends up performing the majority of the math to figure things out. One major advantage to the system is that combat takes place one second at a time, unlike d20 where one round is 6 seconds. It makes it move a bit slower (though smart GMs will handwave away long periods of time where nothing happens), but it lets you fight in a lot of detail. Just about any action you could reasonably think to take can be performed in GURPS and likely has rules for it; doing it is usually as simple as stating what you want to do and having the GM CTRL+F on his PDF of the rules to look it up.....or just making a house rule on the spot. It makes the combat a lot less abstract than d20, since there's more options for exactly how you can attack, defend, move, etc.

Also, it has a completely sensible defense system similar to your idea for AC. Defending consists of both various moves (like Dodge, Block, and Parry) and DR from armor or natural resistance. DR is a straight subtraction from damage; the more armor you have, the more damage someone needs to inflict to really harm you. Certain attacks or bullets have armor divisors to represent added penetration of armor, and some have a fractional multiplier (like "multiply damage by 0.25") to represent the attack having lower penetration than normal. There are also various damage types, including subdividing bullets based on their size; larger bullets like .45s get a damage boost after they penetrate the armor. This actually increases the realism for 9x19mm vs. .45 ACP: 9mm deals more raw damage (as it has higher penetration), while .45 ACP is larger and thus damages flesh more but has a lower velocity and thus has more trouble penetrating armor or cover.

As for damage and HP, you don't die immediately at 0 HP. There are optional rules for lowering abilities as you lose health, as well as the effects of pain and shock, but damage can go into the negatives of HP. The further into the negatives you go, the harder it is to stay alive; at one stage you need to make Health rolls to stay conscious if you do anything more than stay still and rest, at another you need to make Health rolls to not die or begin dying, etc. You need to reduce someone to -5xHP (for an average person with an HP of 10, that's -50 HP) to kill them instantly, and -10xHP to completely destroy their body beyond hope for magical or sci-fi revival. Bleeding can cause gradual damage after an initial attack, which can cause someone with a non-crippling wound to die minutes or hours later without medical attention.
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Offline R. U. Sirius

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #27 on: April 15, 2014, 12:45:11 am »
The New World of Darkness system from Onyx Path (formerly White Wolf) only requires d10s and is also highly customizable.
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Offline fancy_kitten

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #28 on: April 15, 2014, 02:24:19 am »
Hm, that does sound pretty cool and isn't too far removed from some stuff I've done in the past.  My first thoughts are that the simplistic style could be really useful, but like with anything adding more detail will make it more complicated no matter what.  I'd also like to see if it could be tweaked to use d12 instead of d6, but I definitely like the idea of only needing one type of dice.

I think some people MAY have used d12s in homebrew modifications for specific rolls, but completely replacing the d6 with d12s fundamentally changes the entire system. Everything from skill rolls to damage to random table rolls would need to be edited with such caution that you'd basically be rebuilding the system from the ground up.

I've been playing GURPS for a few years now with varying levels of complexity and from 1 to 4 PCs. In practice, the GM ends up performing the majority of the math to figure things out. One major advantage to the system is that combat takes place one second at a time, unlike d20 where one round is 6 seconds. It makes it move a bit slower (though smart GMs will handwave away long periods of time where nothing happens), but it lets you fight in a lot of detail. Just about any action you could reasonably think to take can be performed in GURPS and likely has rules for it; doing it is usually as simple as stating what you want to do and having the GM CTRL+F on his PDF of the rules to look it up.....or just making a house rule on the spot. It makes the combat a lot less abstract than d20, since there's more options for exactly how you can attack, defend, move, etc.

Also, it has a completely sensible defense system similar to your idea for AC. Defending consists of both various moves (like Dodge, Block, and Parry) and DR from armor or natural resistance. DR is a straight subtraction from damage; the more armor you have, the more damage someone needs to inflict to really harm you. Certain attacks or bullets have armor divisors to represent added penetration of armor, and some have a fractional multiplier (like "multiply damage by 0.25") to represent the attack having lower penetration than normal. There are also various damage types, including subdividing bullets based on their size; larger bullets like .45s get a damage boost after they penetrate the armor. This actually increases the realism for 9x19mm vs. .45 ACP: 9mm deals more raw damage (as it has higher penetration), while .45 ACP is larger and thus damages flesh more but has a lower velocity and thus has more trouble penetrating armor or cover.

As for damage and HP, you don't die immediately at 0 HP. There are optional rules for lowering abilities as you lose health, as well as the effects of pain and shock, but damage can go into the negatives of HP. The further into the negatives you go, the harder it is to stay alive; at one stage you need to make Health rolls to stay conscious if you do anything more than stay still and rest, at another you need to make Health rolls to not die or begin dying, etc. You need to reduce someone to -5xHP (for an average person with an HP of 10, that's -50 HP) to kill them instantly, and -10xHP to completely destroy their body beyond hope for magical or sci-fi revival. Bleeding can cause gradual damage after an initial attack, which can cause someone with a non-crippling wound to die minutes or hours later without medical attention.

I'll take all of that into account, thank you.  Gurps definitely sounds like an option worth considering, with or without tweaking.

The New World of Darkness system from Onyx Path (formerly White Wolf) only requires d10s and is also highly customizable.

I'll look into that one as well.  For the time being, how would you guys feel about a system that uses only 1d100 and was based on percentages?  I've played a couple of games using that system and it's easier than you'd think.
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Offline fancy_kitten

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Re: I want to start a roleplaying group, you guys
« Reply #29 on: April 27, 2014, 07:52:27 pm »
I hope it's okay if I bump this y'all.  I'm going to do something embarrassing and post a link to the old Fire Emblem RP I ran years ago (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13255600470A64520100&page=1) to give you an idea of what kind of RP I'd like to and am able to run.  Yes, I used to be Randomtropeloser and actually used TvTropes at one point in my life.  I feel bad about it but whatever, that's not the point of this thread.  Assuming anyone bothers to read it, does it look any good?  I've always wanted to actually finish it and my writing has improved a lot over the years.  I have another idea as well if anyone if interested, but what do you guys think?
« Last Edit: April 27, 2014, 10:16:01 pm by fancy_kitten »
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