Hey Veeky Forums, have you ever tried to make your own RPG?

modular
[moj-uh-ler]

adjective
1. of or relating to a module or a modulus.
2. composed of standardized units or sections for easy construction or flexible arrangement:

I'm not allowed to borrow from 5e because....

I am mad.

You are a casual. All you know is d&d, and worse all you know is 5e.

You refuse to try another superior system. Instead you bastardise and gimp one to try and force it into a different mold.

I don't know how it in any way impacts you, but it's pretty funny that you're so upset by what I do with my group.

I wonder who it could be.

>ITT: Grognards get mad at OP for making ANOTHER fantasy heartbreaker.

Well I'm pretty sure that user's concern was not a matter of permission, it was a matter of disgust.

I put guns in 3.5 to make a high fantasy wild west setting.

I had an idea to make a Transformers system based in the most vague sense on 4e. The franchise already has Tech Specs which are basically ability scores from 1-10 (just make those the modifiers). I had this idea for how to handle character creation where you'd start with a basic skeleton like "Voyager biped, turns into a four wheel vehicle" and the you'd pointbuy additional modifiers and features (using Robot Points) until you had something more like "Voyager Die Cast Biped, turns into long haul truck, combines with trailer to form Ultra Super Armored Biped". All the terminology would be taken from the franchise, so the size classes would go Legend - Basic - Deluxe - Voyager - Ultra - Leader - Supreme, you would be able to buy special features like Transmetal, Flipchanger, Automorph, Brick.

It turns out that's a lot of content to make and when you allow players to start the game at level 1 with almost every possible size class, it's impossible to balance. So I decided a crunch heavy system was probably a bad idea for Transformers, and then I never touched the concept again.

I did! I made my entire own RPG, with the main concept of having completely seperate, yet distinct 'classes' that all have their own mechanics.

You've got a fighter/martial type, who trains in specific custom maneuvers that you make and develop during the campaign. Every maneuver has a number of negative qualities and positive qualities. Such as being slower to attack (Lowers your initiative to last in the turn), but deals more damage. Or not being able to use weapons with it, but increases your defence for the next round.

Then you've got a mage archetype, who devours energy from various mana wells and leylines and such, and uses this mana to cast various spells. Trick is, every type of mana is a subtly different 'flavor', and modulates the spellcasting. The bigger the spell, the more mana it costs, and mixing the wrong mana can end... explosively. (Sometimes by design.)

Finally, you've got the Wanderer. Part gadgeteer, part Final Fantasy-style Blue Mage, the Wanderer gets a number of 'lore' or 'tricks' they can learn. Examine a dragon breathing fire? He learns a 'dragon fire' trick, which is kind of a chemical flamethrower he keeps hidden on him. Spend a number of action points, and he can trigger the trick. The wanderer can also emulate maneuvers and spells, but spells are 'consumed' once used, and maneuvers take action points like anything else.

I never really got around to making monsters, but they'd all have to be made with their abilities designed for the wanderer to steal, and their body parts- the powerful ones- would have a few inklings of mana, for mana-starved mages to have.

Guns are already in 3.5. Don't people read the fucking DMG?

My group made a system that uses a free-form spellcasting system based off of Shadowrun's drain mechanics.

There are four schools: Manipulation, Conjuration, Alteration, and dampening.

Manipulation allows you to manipulate existing matter I.E Snap a bone, form a spike out of wood, shift sand to swallow a target, etc.

Alteration affects energies such as gravity, heat, or friction. I.E Heat metal, make dirt slippery as ice, make the gravity on a target heavier so they feel like they're swinging through molasses.

Conjuration... Conjures things. Such as illusions or whatever. Higher costs for making an object or illusion permanent or summoning a living thing.

Limiting factors include conservation of mass, and Sear.

Searing eats away at first your mana pool, then your health. The sear value of a spell is determined per-cast. Targeting a living being is very costly, as is grander scale spells. Things that outright kill the target are likely to outright kill you if you don't roll well on your dampening.

Three guns are in the DMG. I made closer to 30. I also tweaked the rules to make ranged combat a lot deadlier, as well as importing some of the deeper Cover mechanics from d20 modern.

So far, it seems to be going alright. Now if only I had the energy to ever run a game...

Might want to look into Unearthed Arcana and grab the wound system to replace HP, since HP is horrible for anything that's supposed to be 'deadly'.

We also made a handful of races with unique racial abilities, specifically avoiding stat or skill buffs because they're boring.

The more non-standard races include:

Undead: Live forever and bladed damage as if it were non-lethal and blunt as if it were lethal.

Trolls: Very tall and lanky with increased reach and quickened metabolism/. Heal, resolve diseases, and bleed-out/stop bleeding twice as quickly.

Orks: have a pit-bull-esque bite attack.

It's a partially outdated and disorganized mess, but there is a google doc if anyone is interested.

I always kinda wanted to make a game for Fullmetal Alchemist.

Alchemy for a magic system, WW1(ish)-era tech, the entire setting, all that jazz. I really like FMA, and a bunch of my friends do, and I figured it'd be cool to have a game set there but without the alchemy system being done to accurately reflect the show it seemed lackluster.

I made a few things for it, but gave up because I have so little experience even running games I don't have a hope in hell of making one that's any good.

What I went with is
* allowing two-handed ranged weapons (including bows) more benefit from dexterity than one-handed ranged weapons (1.5x dex bonus to attack, in particular)
* making your con score your massive damage threshold
* if you fail your massive damage roll you're disabled, not instantly killed
* if you would die on a given turn, you can instead bargain for your life, taking a -1 hit to Constitution and miraculously surviving whatever happened (up to a maximum of once per level)
* Once per character, you can also choose to take a Flaw, thus picking up a bonus feat from your near death experience

So, not so much Deadly, I suppose. "Swingy" is an adjective I've seen used before, maybe that's better.

Combat system is split into each character having one full "turn" of actions. Any action taken costs a fraction of your turn.

For example, Moving is 1/3, swinging a longsword is 1/2, casting a spell varies depending on what you intend to do.

Any character with more of their turn remaining than another character may make a reactionary response to their action.

Say an enemy rushes you, you may take a reaction to: Throw sand in their eyes (1/4), Dodge (1/3) Parry/counterattack (1/2) run the fuck away (1/3), or anything else you can think of.

Problem with that is, everyone takes long enough to do their turns already. Having to calculate fractions would amplify that a ton.

Why not instead just assume a turn involves 12 'action points'? Then swinging a longsword is 6 AP, moving is 4 AP (Or 1 AP per 10 feet or whatever), throwing sand in someone's eyes is 3 AP, etc, and remaining action points can't only be used as a reaction, but will move over to the next turn. The leftover action points is capped, of course, dependant on your stats so a clumsy, low-dex character would end up with a cap equal to their base AP, but a very agile person could end up with 18 AP the next turn.

That's a very valid point, and early on it did slow things down a bit.

However as time went on, we quickly began to build up reference points for how long something would take and the 5 - 10 extra seconds it takes was a fair trade off for the amount of player license it gives.

The reason we opted out of a point system was it took waay too long to sift through every possible action and assign a point value, and when we came to one we didn't know we had to sit there and calculate the cost... which brings it back around to square one.

I've made many and consider myself quite good at it.

What genres/setting do you prefer building systems for?

Well, what works for your group, works for your group.

I was just thinking of ways it would be more easily-accepted by a group learning a new system. And it's not as if assigning a point value to something would take any longer than assigning a fraction to something.

Instead of assigning swinging a longsword to 1/2 a turn, you assign it to 1/2 of 12, AKA 6. 12 is a perfect number for cutting down into halves, thirds, quarters... 5ths are impossible, but you can go all the way down to a 1/6th of a turn, AKA a second in most RPGs.

Sorry, I'm rambling. I'm actually working on right now, so I'm in that kind of zone right now. Trying to figure out a good way for a spell system. I don't want to go with D&D's 'infinite numbers of pre-written spells', simply because that's more work for me than anything.

I'm thinking I might throw together a kind of component system... in which case I need to figure out how to handle different 'flavors' of mana.

I tend to prefer weirder or more fantastical stuff over low fantasy/muck & grime "realism" but I've honestly done a lot of different shit.

No need to apologize, particularly for constructive criticism.

You say in your post that mages feed from leylines, what if different ley-lines grant different varieties of mana, each mana type imparting different effects to their spells.

What do you find to be common flaws among TTRPG's, and what drives you to build your own vs. play what's available?

That's already kind of what happens.

Hemaros is particularly violent, so it's the best for damage spells. Syphos is all about disease and secrecy, so anything poisonous or shadowy is what it's good at. Crysaya is about order and restoration, so it's basically only good for healing or object creation. Thaolai is about protection and purging effects, so it's shields and healing. Finally, Xeados is about minds and dreams, so mind control, emotion manipulation, etc.

And then Vangvan, which is about sacrifice and loss. It's basically blood magic, but it clashes and explodes against any other kind of mana.

(Then rare types of mana which can be drawn from certain creatures. Like draconic mana, which is basically amazing for fire spells but bad at anything else, or golemic mana, which has the special ability that created objects are permenant.)

I'm just not sure exactly how to apply that to components. Should anything with Hemaros just deal damage to someone regardless of the type of healing spell, or would it make damage-dealing spells cheaper, or increase spellcasting rolls?

I tried once, it was basically an A la carte system where I threw stats out the window unless your character was noticeably different than the average Joe. It was skill based, where you would spend points from what you acquired to further your skills and get new ones. Rolls were cumulative d10's based on your skill, equiptment, and prep time. Combat was a straight "roll against DC" where the excess number would be multiplied by the weapon's base damage (for example, you're attacking with knife with a base damage of 2 and roll 4 over the DC, so you do 8 damage). Because of this, even low damage weapons could be extremely lethal in the hands of someone with enough skills (or a good enough plan).

>Common Flaw
In modern times? Legacy/sacred cows and the tendency to "overdesign" things, as in trying to drop EVERYTHING into a core mechanic. Older games had more of a problem with having too many crunchy rules and too much of a focus on realism.

To be fair, my problem with TTRPGs is less about their actual flaws and more about the inherent imperfection of using a published system when everyone has their own opinions and ideas.

>Why make your own
I get driven to make my own usually for the novelty, for a challenge, and as well to create something that properly emulates and runs the type of game experience I want. It's hard to tie in everything you want into more rules-heavy and published systems- if you want gritty combat but the in-game rules have healing and simplistic combat it's not going to feel exactly right. That's why I always recommend people to make their own, it's good practice in game design and it could serve you better.

All in all though, I just despise the ideology of some of the faggots on Veeky Forums who believe that something being published makes it automatically better then a homebrewed system. Tabletop RPGs are the one medium of entertainment that is only rules, math, a little writing, and imagination. It's not like a video game where an indie game would suffer based on content and graphics, it's not like a movie where they can't get the thing into theaters, it's a tabletop game. Every single one was once just a hombrewed rule or idea that some neckbeard had before making it into a book and selling it. There's no magical jump in quality from that neckbeard to you besides experience and passion.

yeah, from scratch, curerntly explaining it in the Draw your Party thread.

Well said.

>and not really affect any of the others significantly.
Be careful with that line of thinking every part of the game is interconnected with the exception of feats because they are optional to begin with.

Not to say the balance is super delicate and perfect but just touching stuff willy nilly is going to cause some issues if a player finds a busted "build".

Also, I'd be hard pressed to say you've taken emlements from 5e if all you used from 5e are six attributes and a d20 resolution system. None of those things are what makes 5e, 5e.

I made a game based around Tarot cards as a randomization mechanic instead of dice.

Never figured out how to incorporate the Major Arcana into it

I would say if you draw a major arcana card, it has some assigned value or significance and then you draw again to get a suit card. Unless it's, like, the Fool in which case you treat that as the player basically getting to dictate the action.

I dunno. I'd probably have a better idea of how to use them if I'd ever played an actual card game with the tarot deck.

I made one a few years ago, don't know if I still have the details somewhere. It was completely homebrew because I didn't know any tabletop games and didn't want to learn.

Revolved around three different types of caster - humans, who had no innate magic, but who could build machines which would produce magic through musical harmonies, some sort of dark elf types who could produce magic by harming themselves and fuelling their power with pain, and a sort of destroyed god race who could cast spells innately but had only a limited amount of magical power in their lives before they ran out forever.

I also remember armour added additional hitpoints rather than any sort of real defence.

I don't remember much more about that, but it worked surprisingly well with a few balance adjustments on the fly.

A man after my own heart.

I've been burned too many times expecting games to be good at doing the things that they are fucking designed to do. Nowadays I mainly play established systems with an eye to getting some inspiration and ideas for the campaigns I *actually* care about, whereupon I will make a system from scratch that matches up appropriately to the nature of the game.

Rulesets make all sorts of statements, conscious and unconscious, about the sort of game you can expect. If the combat system is 20 pages and the social system is 2 pages, people begin to expect proportionately not only that level of depth, but that level of investment, and that level of playtime devoted to them.

I had my 'in' to game design at a better than 'random teenage fuck improvises some shit' level with my time on AdEva, but I really do think every consecutive thing I have made is better than the last, and each, I think, includes at least one mechanic that I think published RPGs are badly missing. I've been busy the last few years, but even just from my active periods I've come up with some shit for:

- Simulationist Persona (Undoubtedly the worst thing I ever made)

- Narrativist / Gamist Combining Mecha ala Voltron, Power Rangers, Aquarion etc. (Was deliberately bad, but my intent was to show off how much better it was at its job than everything remotely similar, despite being designed to be awful, I should revisit this one some time.)

- A fantasy heartbreaker (Everyone has one! This one was centred around a couple of unique mechanics mainly to do with inventory management via "pockets" and HP mechanics based around limb and joint damage.)

- A simulationist totally-not-Attack-on-Titan system, which I might have cause to revisit if people get excited again with the new season. It was... maybe a little overcomplex, reminiscent of early 90's games almost, I hope I can fix that aspect up without outright deleting any extant mechanics because speed as a universal modifier and altitude marks as modifiers were great, on top of not rolling to hit.

- A Jojo's Bizarre Adventure module designed to be added onto other game systems. I still see it posted around the place, I'm pretty happy with it.

- Currently working on a game with a friend about playing the supernatural artists that make SCP's. It's very interesting, designing a system entirely around incentives for being a dickass but never actually directly fighting people.

I'm, uh, working on a FATE version of Evangelion? Does that count, even if it's just a supplement thing built onto an existing system?

My favorite part is that the city has its own stress tracks for collateral damage, NERV's strained resources, and the reputation NERV has. A pilot has a very public breakdown on the news, opening concerns about child soldiers? Rep takes a hit. The Evas are all so wrecked they need to get repaired immediately? Resources take a hit. Some idiot smashes through a hospital to get to the Angel? Boom, Collateral damage.

Look up Sine Requie. I fear it's only in Italian but they use Suit Cards AND Major Arcana AND it's amazing

I've been looking at making my own post-apocalyptic game, with the purpose of being able to get a game up and going from zero to location-based adventure within 15 minutes, including characters. It takes cues from OSR games but it's definitely not going to end being OSR.

>Grognards get mad at OP for making ANOTHER fantasy heartbreaker.
Pretty much. It's like if OP wandered onto the fairgrounds where a classic car show was being held and started asking random people if they would give him advice on designing his new car, which is just a 1988 Ford Probe with some fins glued onto it.

Well, I did publish one some years ago... And got several others unfinished and unpublished.