Since it looks like the devs might have abandoned it at this point...

There's really not that much difference between the fighting styles, though, even the way you tried to describe it.

Neato. I was in the process of modifying that RPG myself. I'll be taking a look at what you've got, it's always good to see other home brews of a system.

As a full warning, one potential flaw is that combat will likely take awhile. *Everyone* has damage reduction equal to their Toughness score, and Health is equal to (Toughness + Tier) x 5. Damage, however, has *not* notably been scaled up all that much. This means that combat is mostly about winnowing down an opponent's Health piece by piece, with probably a good chunk of your attacks not being able to make it past an opponent's damage reduction unless they deal a lot of damage or you have some way of ignoring or reducing their damage reduction.

Additionally there's an Action/Reaction system, of which you get more as you increase in Tier. Reactions let you do anything you can do as an Action but on other people's turns, in a "first in/last out" manner, allowing you to do something like, say, Move out of the way of of an incoming Melee Attack so that the Melee Attack doesn't hit you.

However this is by and large a feature, not a bug. Combat in DBZ takes a long time, so a DBZ RPG should reflect that.

If the GM told us we'd be focusing on adventures a la DB or GT instead of just pure fights like Z, I'd jump onto trying to play a Bulma-type character in an instant.

This sounds much better than the one hit kills in Regalia's game, at least. Though with how DBZ is structured, there's often a lot of talk going on during fights as well as scenes elsewhere to make for breaks. So that kind of thing could make it flow fine, I think.

I was doing away with HP and the default fatigue system all together, so issues with those aren't terribly important to me.

At work, unable to give it a full in depth read, but I like what I see so far.

Good idea with the techniques. In all but a few cases they have the same crunch and are just fluffed differently, your system captures that we'll.

This is awesome, thanks for sharing user.

>Charisma based character

I'd play the team hype-man if I had the opportunity.

So, the Ginyu Force?

And Jaco.

Could be, if range was important. If you only have 2 actions per turn, having to spend one of them to get closer is worse than using a Namekian long arm or two ki blasts to attack.

Guy who wrote it here.

I've been re-reading it and remembering a lot of changes I was going to make, and looking at it again after so long has really helped me realize how stupid some parts of it are.

I'm working on some revisions now, mainly to the powers/power level system, because what the fuck was I thinking letting powers bring in dice more than once each?

I'm also going to get rid of spending PL directly and instead have the Power Curve generate ki points which can be used to enhance Raises and Sees, and probably move Ki Points down to Advanced Character Options, making it a set of optional rules.

And speaking of Power Curve, the way that interacts with conflicts and escalation is going to get tweaked a little, too. Mainly to cut down on the buckets of dice but still granting an advantage for being significantly stronger than your opponent.

here.

I notice you got rid of skills entirely, I gotta say its a genius move. You have no idea how much I hate myself for not thinking of it earlier.

I've been wracking my brain trying to get a somewhat balanced number of useful skills for my stats, the idea of doing away with them entirely never occurred to me. It's a good solution to the whole "useless skill" thing.

I don't want to use the word "steal", but god damn a good idea is a good idea.

I've a question.

Akira Toriyama described Ki as being Energy, Courage and Mind. When we see characters use Ki attacks they sometimes look tired, exhausted even. This would imply that it's strenuous to go all out, that it drains the users stamina.

If a system had Stamina and Willpower pools, a Ki pool might not be necessary. Ki attacks could cost Stamina (Energy), Willpower (Mind) and Courage (to roll the dice).

Is it controversial for there to be a Dragonball game with no specific Ki stat or Ki points?

ooh good point. could be interesting. stamina management instead of ki power hmm...

Usually they're just convenient labels for "points you use on energy attacks" and "points you use on other stuff," usually.

Though it would be cool to see a tangible wearing down of a character's stamina. Perhaps even combine the two so that Ki points are basically your threshold of energy you can use before you really start feeling the burn, and from there you can keep using ki attacks by burning stamina.

In the DitV hack, what you describe is represented by ki attacks accumulating fallout.

Funny you should mention "burning stamina".

I was thinking that characters SPEND stamina for physical actions, willpower for mental actions and both for ki attacks. A character that's out of stamina or willpower can BURN it to keep going, reducing their maximum value to gain a few more points to spend, effectively pushing themselves to exhaustion.

I'm actually working on a setting using this right now, which seems fairly balanced despite its flaws. The only serious issues I'm having is how the fucking tiers of power work. How do you upgrade tier of power. Do you have to rebuild your character afterwards? Why don't transformations kick you into higher tiers? Could they?

There's a ton of questions left about how this system plays and how the tiers stack that leave a lot of room creatively. I'm a novice to creating my own settings so I'm not really sure how to approach this.

Yeah I'd jump bulma too

>implying all my players except the edgy kid wouldn't play mr Satan/hercule

Are you talking about , or ?

I can't answer for the DitV hack (I know nothing about it), but for the game posted in the OP you can't increase increase your base tier without getting a permanent powerup via GM fiat. It doesn't call for a character to be rebuilt, it simply raises their odds of success when they roll die (as detailed on the tier chart on page 33) and, in the case of transformations, grants bonus die in certain areas.

I am unclear, however, on whether the transformation sets the characters tier to that listed by the form (so, tier 3 for Super Saiyan) or if it's added to the characters base tier (so, a tier 1 character becoming a Super Saiyan gets bumped up to tier 4)

Talking about the OP

And I had thought that the transformation was supposed to be available to a character of that tier, and was simply adding points to their capabilities rather than giving them tier upgrades.

I would argue that some races, like demons or artificial humans are quite obviously a cut above some other races, especially since some races are literally uplifted versions of others.

Nope. A Saiyan gets SSJ when the GM says so, and when he uses it it bumps him up from whatever tier he was (presumably one) to Tier three. Or tier 4 if it's added to his base tier. That's unclear to me.

So if a character is tier 3 do they become tier 6?

No one really knows.

>it's up to the GM

got it

If transformations add to your tier and the character is going SSJ (a tier 3 transformation) then yes, it'd add three to whatever tier they are naturally at.

I prefer the idea of transformations adding to a characters tier.

Personally I think I am going to have the Super Saiyan transformations add one tier to a character's current tier, since the attributes boosts seem to be differentiated enough to give good flavor to each one, but I think that's a cool idea too. It would be interesting to have seen the authors flesh out this system a little better before they called it quits.

Why do none of these games offer Roshis MAX Power form or Tiens Four Witches Technique? They'd be great way for humans to have a few more options in the transformation department.

Right, I'm not at work anymore.

Ginyu and Jaco are certainly possibilities, but honestly when I was making the Taunt and Brag actions I was more just thinking about how often in DBZ we have characters just standing around either talking about how powerful they are, or else how weak their opponents are.

I figure that as long as people standing around talking about their power is in the show so much, it should be an actual mechanic.

True, but that's not very fun.

The one I posted here, , has Roshi's max power technique. It's just Unlock Potential, flavored for Roshi.

Yes, only because the authors couldn't be assed to be clear about it.

>It would be interesting to have seen the authors flesh out this system a little better before they called it quits.
Between the system itself being so full of holes it needs to be scrapped and rewritten from the ground up to half of the people following it demanding the authors cater to their bullshit headcannon Fanfiction, I honestly wouldn't blame Regalia for washing his hands of it completely.

The only good thing about that game was the presentation. It has pretty pages to look at, and that's it.

That's the thing: the original Dragonball could make for a good campaign. Even GT would. That's because there's things to do in those series other than be Fights Man. That isn't the case in Dragonball Z.

>if range was important
Range isn't important in DBZ, though, since characters move so fast.

>That's the thing: the original Dragonball could make for a good campaign. Even GT would. That's because there's things to do in those series other than be Fights Man. That isn't the case in Dragonball Z.
I don't disagree but I also don't wholly agree. You just have to look passed what actually happened on screen and instead think about what potential there was for other things going on that the show dropped the ball on.

I mean the entire Namek arc was about going to space to find this other planet that they'd have to explore to find a completely new set of dragon balls, then having to deal with a new powerful enemy, the Evil Emperor of the Galaxy and his minions, and save the people of that planet in the meantime.
There's so much potential for the there and back again, assuming things go differently, and is probably the best Z story arc for an RPG campaign.

Most of the other arcs were basically "prepare to fight the BBEG" but had aspects that could have been elaborated on to make the campaign more interesting. Gohan's survival training, the Room of Spirit and Time that could send the heroes back in the history of seemingly any planet, surviving three years in an infinite plane where time moves differently on the inside than the outside and create any extreme environmental condition, finding robot warriors that you can't just sense exactly where they are, finding the secret lab of the man who created said robots, finding the horrible bio weapon leaving nothing but death in its wake, keeping said bioweapon from finding robots and making itself more powerful, delaying the bioweapon from destroying everything while the strongest PCs prepare to fight him by fucking off to the previously mentioned infinite plane of insanity, discovering the mysteries behind those strangely dangerous competitors in what should be a friendly tournament, finding the hidden base of the evil sorcerer trying to resurrect an ancient evil, ect, ect, ect...

You should be a DB GM.

>Range isn't important in DBZ, though, since characters move so fast.
This. I seriously don't know what anyone suggesting range and movement should matter is thinking.

I used to a long time ago, and I probably would again.

Buu Boobs Bump

Some characters move faster than others. Then there's teloprting versus speed.
Remember near the end of the Buu Saga, when Goku teleports to Vegeta so they can use the Potara earrings to fuse together? The time it took for Buu to get to their location was quite crucial... if they had delayed any longer, Goku and Vegeta might not have fused in time.

I can understand why ranges, hard speeds and a battle grid don't make much sense for a DBZ game. The way characters move makes it difficult to build a system that makes sense.

However, they do occasionally seem needed. Several attacks have been shown to be AoE or to have short range and it's entirely possible a player might want to group enemies together to blast them all, or to use one of these short range moves on someone who might be distant.

A more contextual ranged system might work. I can recall in the Star Wars d20 system that space combat was based on general distance as opposed to specific position (ranges went from point blank out to extremely far). Skill checks were needed to change your distance relative to your enemies.

I'm not saying that'd work for DBZ, especially since it sucked at handling multiple PC vessels, just that a more abstract movement system is what a DBZ game would need.

Ahh yes, the Majin. An entire race of fat guys with hot wives.

>You just have to look passed what actually happened on screen and instead think about what potential there was for other things going on that the show dropped the ball on.
But then you're not staying true to the source material, and the game stops being a DBZ game and becomes "D&D in DBZ."

Just play a DB game, or a DBGT game, if that's what you want.

>I seriously don't know what anyone suggesting range and movement should matter is thinking.
Because they're thinking in terms of game mechanics, specifically in terms of how other games handle combat, rather than how DBZ handles combat.

I mean, I get it, you want the game to be fun for the players, you want the combat to be exciting and full of strategy (since the biggest draw of DBZ is the combat), but the problem is that grid-based combat doesn't fit how the fights play out in the show.

Abstracting combat means you have less strategy in combat, and there's already not much strategy when all characters are Fight Mans and they solve all problems with Punch. With a battle grid, you can position your character and employ strategies based on positioning. Thing is, like you said, it doesn't fit DBZ at all.

Which is yet another reason why DBZ RPGs are stupid.

I wonder if majin women would be more interested in thin human/saiyan/whatever guys because they're different and exotic, or fat human/saiyan/whatever guys because they're different enough to be exotic, but not so different that it becomes disconcerting

I think way too much about stupid shit like non-human psychology regarding settings

Majin are all shapeshifters, aren't they? They can look however they want, so maybe the lady ones are just the ones that saw a fashion magazine and decided they wanted to look like that. Then you have the lazy ones that just stick to the default.

Is there an option to be a hunky slab of bubblegun like Super Buu?

>but the problem is that grid-based combat doesn't fit how the fights play out in the show.

Eh...yes and no. The vast majority of combat in Dragon Ball Z is melee, fist-to-fist. Energy attacks allow for some range, but when we think of the great fights in DBZ we remember Goku and Frieza pummeling each other, or Gohan and Cell, or whatever.

That and beam struggles; the d10 DBZ thing I posted up there doesn't have a mechanic for beam struggles. Putting one in is a goal for me.

The point is that DBZ is a show about combat, so an RPG should focus on combat and allow you to do lots of cool things in combat; it shouldn't generalize nor abstract combat.

Majins have distinct male and female genders; they're the result of Fat Buu finding a dirty magazine of Mr. Satan's and deciding that he wanted a wife, so he created one, named Booby. All subsequent Majins are descended from Buu and Booby.

This is also why male Majins look one way and females the other: male Majins take after their male antecedent, Fat Buu, while female Majins take after their female antecedent, Booby, who looks like she does because she was literally modeled on a porn star.

I'm not kidding, this is 100% canon.

That said, were I the Narrator of a game that allowed the Majin race, I doubt I'd disallow a male Majin who looked like Super Buu.

Where does the name Arcosian come from? I'm fairly certain it isn't from any official media, but it's so prevalent.

As far as I was aware Freezas Race doesn't have an official name. The closest they got was in a game (Xenoverse if I recall correctly) where they were referred to as Frost Demons.

Grid-based combat doesn't handle combat where characters are constantly zipping about and moving at high speeds while also punching and kicking.

Then you knockbacks to deal with, and also the fact that they can fly, adding a third dimension to your grid combat.

The English FUNimation dub.

dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/Arcosian

What if we scaled the grid out a bit? The whole 5ft square thing is far too small scale to allow for DBZ antics.

So it's a dub name for a race that might not be Freezas in a scene that (correct me if I'm wrong) only occurred in the anime.

Maybe, but then you have the problem of stationary figures on a grid meant to represent characters constantly moving about and changing positions.

I was thinking somewhere along the lines of you've got to be in their square to perform melee attacks or grabs (unless you have Namekian noodle arms). This is a fairly open area that can contain several characters, it is implied they are moving about close to one another.

The old world martial arts tournament arena might only be 2x2 on a DBZ scale battle grid.

At that point you may as well be abstracting it.

Yes.

But it's also the absolute closest we've ever gotten to an official name, so...

When I made the grid in the d10 one up there, I specified that a square was as small or as big as the Narrator wanted it to be. It has no definite size in feet or meters or whatever. It could even represent miles if need be.

Combat is necessarily abstracted, after all.

>and also the fact that they can fly

Well, not all of them. Yajirobi and Roshi have never demonstrated the ability to fly to my knowledge.

"Flight" is easy enough to manage anyway; once you've learned how to do it (I made it a technique that costs 0 Ki to activate or use, but which you need at least 1 Ki in your Ki Pool in order to keep using), you just state that any movement can be vertical as well as horizontal.

Why not just give one side the "Positioning Advantage" or something as a tag that can be won and lost over the course of the fight. This let's them dictate what range things are currently being fought at as well as giving them access to certain manoeuvres the one's without advantage don't have.

They also get to narrate how far the fight is travelling as it is so prone to do in the show.

And that's a nice neat mechanic to giving meaning but not stodge to the concept of range.

That's not a bad idea.

Yeah, if you can't make an engie or thief type character useful it's kind of pointless. Might as well give everyone the same character sheet at that point.

I often find the tons of homebrewed Storyteller games that Veeky Forums makes or finds or shits out to be kinda bothersome and busted due to making a narrative hacknee'd piece of crap into combat heavy stuff, but this seems pretty solid.

Also I appreciate you putting in every playable race from Heroes so far. Making demons and Kai a subclass of Alien was dumb.

Yeah. Any mention of range should only be that Namekian and Majins can attack melee from range.

Which, without any rules on range or distance, would imply that they can always attack you in melee regardless of how far apart you are.

>The villain has fled at high speed and is now but a speck on the horizon

>I roll to grapple.

That has very much happened in the series.

Simulationism doesn't work for DBZ, which is why exists.

Disagree completely.
You don't have to repeat exactly what the show does shot for shot to stay true to the source material. The framework is there, in the show, you're just elaborating on the source material.

Bullshit it has. Piccolos arms don't stretch that far.

In Xenoverse they're just called "Freeza's Race." Seriously, that's just what they call them.

The "Frost Demon" crap is from that webcomic DB Multiverse.

In the English dub of Xenoverse, Cell does say (if your character is a Frieza's Race one), at the start of a fight with him,

>"No, I have all the data I need on Frost Demons. I have no need to fight you."

Or something to that effect. However, Cell wouldn't have any way of knowing that Frieza's race call themselves, given that neither he nor Dr. Gero ever met any. It's likely just a nod to DBM, nothing more, and the game as a whole does prefer "Frieza's Race".

Though I prefer the somewhat more direct Japanese translation of "Frieza Clansmen", seeing as a Frieza's Race character in Xenoverse is implied now and then to be a distant cousin to Frieza.

It's because a cloaked & horned race did the initial trading with the Saiyans

Chill happened to be a cloaked & horned Frieza race dude who was pestering the Saiyans

Froze also wore a cloak in the Dragon Ball Heroes promos.

I worked on a DB game with some friends back in the day.
crazy shit
mid-fight per action XP so you could level up traits & attacks mid fight
high mobility, flying attacks, hit and run attacks, martial abilities, ki abilities, ki sorcery
bunch of races konats, truffles, cyborgs, majin, etc

wonder if i can dig it up

Everyone else just uses *teleports behind you*

This.
The only time range truly matters in DBZ is when it can be measured in continents.

>mid-fight per action XP so you could level up traits & attacks mid fight

That's how I was thinking Saiyan Zenkai could work. Normally players would have to train to spend xp, but when a Saiyan comes back from near death (or actual death) they can spend whatever points they've accumulated on stats.

For example:

Victor earned a bunch of experience points fighting some weird Power Ranger guys before the party ran into the BBEG. He didn't have time to train and spend them so he asked another player, Kevin, to mortally wound him.

His plan went a bit awry when the healer DMPC ditched him to help Greg, possibly because he was being a dick to him a few sessions earlier, but he eventually got healed up and spent his built up points to boost his stats.

Now Victor is stronger and better able to help in this epic fight.

It can be used for a quick and dirty boost in power, but it can't be abused to leap ahead of the rest of the party.

Wouldn't that make noodle arms a useless racial trait? If everyone can just attack anyone in melee at any time, there's no benefit in having greater reach.

Correct, at best it would be flavor or a bonus to some rolls.

Maybe a reach mechanic, like in AD&D, where the character with the longer reach gets to strike first in some situations, regardless of who is faster.

In the case of allies you could pull them out of an incoming attack, thereby negating it.

>this DBZ game is too much like DBZ

Well, that's one way to do it.

That sounds horrible.

I mean the spending XP mid fight thing.

The DitV hack can do that, . Conflicts are usually encouraged to keep the stakes low so that there can be multiple follow-up conflicts, like breaking a battle up into segments.
Meaning you can potentially get experience and get slightly stronger between each "segment" of a battle.

Stretchy arms are useless in DBZ "appears behind you" fights, which is why Piccolo doesn't use them all that much in DBZ.

Which is why DB would make for a much better RPG, because there's actual variety in what your character can do (and the power levels are toned way the fuck down). You can make a tech character in DB and it would be viable. You can have stretchy arms and have them be viable. In DBZ, you can only make one kind of character and have it be viable. DBZ is trash as far as tabletop RPGs go.

However, DBZ does make some good tabletop games, like the card game was pretty good. Hell, if you wanted to do a DBZ RPG, just use the card game for the fights. Maybe tier the cards by how good they are, and then let characters get new cards from higher tiers to replace/supplement old ones as they level up. At least then you'd have a game with some variety and one where the combat is fun.

This guy again.

Thank goodness no one has to let themselves be held back by your lack of imagination.

>I'm not kidding, this is 100% canon.
No it's not. It's from Dragonball Online, the (now gone) Korean MMO that Xenoverse cribs a lot from.

It is something that would be entirely plausible, though.

Pic related is her.

Didn't Toriyama write the plot for Online and Xenoverse? If so, it'd be pretty damn canon.

>lack of imagination
In other words, you do things in your game that decidedly aren't DBZ yet call it a DBZ game, because you know a game that actually follows DBZ would play like total garbage.

But that's a reason to add an instant transmission option that not everyone takes/gets, not a reason to give EVERYONE speeds

I don't think it's horrible, but it might not be the best way to represent that particular trait.

It's hard to find a way to do the whole "gets stronger every time they almost die" thing without making a game mechanic players will inevitably abuse to get ahead.

Just because characters like that were never featured doesn't mean it's an impossibility.

Bulma and Pilaf both used small mechs at various points, a combat focused scientist might be able to figure something out to stay competitive.