Sell me your favorite system?

Scene participation rules are a feature of the Standard Roleplaying System that usually serve no other purpose than to make the game even worse.

Tokyo Nova has PCs wanting to enter a scene that neither the GM nor the Lead Player has put them into make a check with an appropriate society or connection skill to see if it makes sense for them to be there.
And even if a PC does not participate in a scene, they can still get things done off-stage, with some class abilities specifically made for this.

Mini Six
>Simple to grok generic toolbox system
>Characters take minutes to create, simply distribute 12 dice into stats and 7 dice into skills/perks
>Uses only D6, though it's recommended to get one of a different color for the wild die
>Fantastic for running a game in a book or movie setting you like
>Several options to tweak and customize
>Comes with several settings in case you need something quick, including not!Conan, not!Firefly, and not!Ghostbusters
It's not perfect by any means and you'll need to configure the game to your liking, but as a generic system I think it's a good stopgap between Risus and GURPS.

I will shit in your coffee machine and turn it one if you don't play my system.
If you don't have a coffee machine then I will buy one, give it to you then shit in it when you don't expect it then turn it on.

Even if I had a coffee machine, I wouldn't use it.

that's why I will buy one for you, give it to you and shit in it when you aren't home, turn it on then leave.
Except if you play my system of course

Plus user is just gonna pirate it anyway, so why bother.

Epic Level Campaign it up
>Explore Dragons
>Fight Dungeons

Pirating is fine, as long as it makes them stop perpetuating shit systems.

But user, after I ruined the last coffee machine my wife won't let one in the house, it'll be thrown away before you can enact your plan.

And then we'll go back to playing Runequest.

you don't know me or how fast can I shit in a coffee machine

You're not doing a great job of selling me on freeform.

then off I go to bu a new coffee machine for you, and a short trip to taco bell

But the nearest Taco Bell is more than 125 miles away. And it's subject to EU food regulations, so it wouldn't even help with what you're trying to do.

then I will eat a gyros instead of that

For that kind of gyros, you'd have to travel about 700 miles.

totally worth it

How does that work in practice? Don't you run the risk of some characters not interacting with the other PCs much or not really doing anything in general?

>Although sadly the system has problems, the biggest of which is one of the worst edited core books ever, making it far, far harder than it needs to be to learn and play. It's a damn shame.

are there any good mechanics summaries online? I've been meaning to learn the system but every time I look at the actual book I just groan.

I don't have a favourite because i play very little, but you want to be sold?

>Lamentations of the Flame Princess has a ton of weird-ass horror modules. If you want to run cosmic horror, insect gods, tiny extradimensional eye parasites, cocks that spray acid, chandeliers made from living children or muppets from Ohio, check it out. Or just convert the modules.
CON: Race-as-class. Also it's often so "quirky" it's hard to take seriously.

>Into The Odd. Short, sweet, perfect for one-shot exploration and full of strange and bizarre items and encounters.
CON: Very limited progression and customisation.

>Dungeon World. It's basically D&D for the drama geeks rather than the math nerds. Fairly freeform, completely player driven. Dice are only rolled to resolve story conflicts and there's only one roll for everything: 2d6 + mod.
CON: It's basically just a rough guideline around freeform. No depth or strategy.

>D&D 5e. Rules are fairly simple to pick up but PLENTY of 1st and 3rd party resources are available to expand your campaign. Extensive background lore. Classic fantasy monsters AND unique setting-specific ones.
CON: Caster supremacy. HP per level. Class system.

>Heavy Gear. Established setting factions characters and tech to run a sci-fi campaign, and hex based mech wargaming for set-pieces. Either part can be run separately.
CON: Rules written for the setting. Focus is on bipedal mechs- don't like don't play.

>Demon: The Descent. Players are rogue servants of a godlike machine, masquerading as mortals to hide from the "angels" that pursue them. How will you sustain your cover? What are your plans for the God Machine? What does it mean, to be one of the fallen?
CON: It's ALL about the characters so if you and your Storyteller don't have strong ones then you will get SUPER bored and fast.

>Nemesis. It uses the One Roll Engine and the sanity trackers from Unknown Armies to make a fairly straightforward modern-day horror system. Also, it's free!
CON: Dice system is a little weird. Only mechanics, no GM tools or setting elements.

>Ops and Tactics. A hack of D20 Modern that changes it into a 3d6 based gunfight simulator with optional magic and high tech rules if you want to play Shadowrun instead.
CON: Detailed gun rules using the d20 system's weird-ass HP system. Classes are... odd. 300 pages of guns but only like 3 rules for melee weapons.

I have three OSR retroclones I rotate, of which LotFP is one.

>Lamentations of the Flame Princess
+ extremely quick and simple
+ classes are minimalist and focused
+ real world europe setting
- skill-system too simple for my taste
- characters tend to be mechanically one-dimensional

>Dungeon Crawl Classics
+ rearranges non-physical stats so you have intelligence, charisma, and LUCK, which cleverly bypasses one of the most enduring mechanical imbalances of DnD
+ creative takes on familiar classes
+ non-vancian magic system
+ start campaigns with 4 weak-ass lvl0 peasants with varying professions and gear and get classes after the first adventure for anyone who survives
+ tables for everything, including every single spell in the game
- tables for everything, including every spell in the game, making it a massive chore to write new spells
- uses weird dice that are hard to get hold of

>Beyond the Wall
+ questionaires to start you off with backstory and build a character at the same time
+ three part spell system - cantrips which you roll to cast, spells which use slots, and rituals which take a lot of time
+ no cleric/mage distinction, just wis and int based magic
+ hero point system to prevent the hardcore lethality of above systems
+ assumed hub-oriented gameplay
+ flexible system that's easy to hack
- very little system-specific content
- wis/int distinction feels like an unnecessary holdover from DnD in a system that's already done away with the cleric/mage distinction (could possibly be fixed by importing DCC stats into the system)

They all share a tendency for a rigid class system with few options during character progression (the classes themselves are easily modified at character creation in Beyond the Wall, but remain relatively rigid after that), and they're all very easy to pick up.

>CON: Detailed gun rules using the d20 system's weird-ass HP system. Classes are... odd. 300 pages of guns but only like 3 rules for melee weapons.

Two things. 1. The gun book got cut way the hell back in 6th edition.

2. There are plenty of rules for melee weapons, just not as many upgrades.

I ran out of upgrades.

Classes are odd though. They're barely classes at all.

Oh shit now i feel bad for badmouthing the system in front of the author.
And yeah the classes are the d20 modern ones, right? I recall seeing classless rules in O&T as well, somewhere.

You ever play Bridge?

>Oh shit now i feel bad for badmouthing the system in front of the author.

Don't. That's how I fix problems.

>And yeah the classes are the d20 modern ones, right? I recall seeing classless rules in O&T as well, somewhere.

Kiiiiiinnda? I made a lot of changes. I just retained the general structure.

There exist a "Archetype" that you can build yourself. It is by far the best and most powerful. DO not use it.

There's a reference pdf that floats around, but it's very out of date and uninformative. Mr Rage also wrote a summary of Secret Arts, but that kinda skims over the core mechanics. I could talk through the basics, if you like?

yes please

So I'll start from the very basics, the dice system.

The game uses d10 dicepools. Most of the time, you roll a single set pool of dice, based on your Rank- A 'power stat' of sorts that increases naturally as you progress your character acting as a general measure of your ability. For a starting character, at Rank 4 (the second lowest) your pool is 7 dice.

For people used to dicepool systems, the idea of rolling almost the same pool every time seems odd, but it makes sense when combined with everything else in the system.

Reading the dice is quite odd, too. Instead of looking for dice over a certain TN or just taking the highest number, instead you look for sets of dice- That is, multiple dice showing the same number.

LotW evaluates the value of these sets (and single dice, but they're less significant) as 10 per dice in the set, plus the value on the dice. It might sound a bit odd put like that, but it's intuitive when you're actually reading the values.

A pair of 4's? 24. Three sevens? 37. A single 2? 12.

And here's the part where things get interesting, and LotW accomplishes something in its base mechanics that I have literally never seen another RPG achieve- Every set of dice can be used to make a separate action. On every roll you have a Major Action, the primary reason you rolled the dice which you can base on a single (if you're unlucky and roll no sets), but more often than not you'll have more than one double or higher on a roll. This ability to make multiple simultaneous actions is amazing for combat depth. The moment after rolling your pool when you're trying to figure out the best way to make use of it always presents you with a huge number of interesting possibilities and decisions you can make, and it's an aspect of the system I find extremely compelling.

From there, let's get to the main pieces that make up your character. Weirdly, LotW doesn't have stats in the way most other games use them. Things that would be stats in other games, like physical strength or dexterity, are folded into the Skill system.

The main components of your character in Legends of the Wulin are your Skills, Kung-fu styles (External and Internal) and Archetype.

Skills are very simple. They're a static modifier, capped at +10 at the starting rank, that you apply to a set to create a result. Out of combat you might use Awareness to spot something hidden or Inspire to lift someones spirits, quite standard as far as skill systems go. However, it also has applications in combat, both on its own and through the Secret Arts subsystem, but we'll come to that later.

Your Kung-fu styles are probably the most mechanically significant things on your sheet at character generation. Externals represent your physical fighting style, giving you a variety of passive benefits and techniques you can draw upon as well as defining your basic combat stats.

Characters can have multiple External styles beyond the first, and while they don't stack or directly benefit each other instead it gives you a lot of flexibility, letting you change up your fighting style if you come against an opponent you match up to poorly.

In addition to stats and techniques, Externals also have Qualities, Laughs and Fears. This is a very elegant little subsystem that wonderfully emulates the classic Kung-fu movie 'My style exploits your style!' and such.

A styles Qualities describes its traits, both physical and philosophical or spiritual in some cases. Laughs are what a style is strong against- If you can justify it in your description in combat, Laughing at an opponent nets you a +5 bonus. Fears are things your style is weak to- If you Fear your opponent, you take a -5 to your rolls when opposing them.

Research suggests that this system is a favourite of girls with low self esteem

Internal Styles are a more active system than Externals. Instead of being passively beneficial, Internal techniques and stat boosts require expending the systems primary combat resource, Chi, to make use of. Internal styles are very varied, from simple statistical boosts to the ability to throw fireballs or lightning to even stranger and more esoteric abilities.

There's a lot of different Internal and External styles in the book, and even more on the Wulin Legends wiki (although as with all homebrew take it with a pinch of salt and be ready to adjust for balance) and the combinations let you represent a huge variety of powersets and fighting styles as fully functional (although even in the core book some are better than others.)

A core trait of LotW is that everyone involved is a badass. You can take the most passive, low key styles you can find and you'll still be able to hold your own in a fight, even if you don't do so through direct offense.

Although at this point I'm not sure what I should describe next. I could go into the primary combat rules, to contextualise what I've talked about so far, or I could go into Archetypes and Secret Arts, which is one of the weirdest and hardest to understand parts of the system but is also really damn cool once you get it all straightened out.

Reign / ORE also does the multiple sets for multiple actions thing in case you're interested. Also a D10 pool system.

>Research suggests that this system is a favourite of girls with low self esteem
I'm gonna put this in the "pro" column for reasons to play.

Rifts. Its diverse and easy to use. Can be used for many kinds of settings and is accompanied by great flavour books.

Strike!

It's simple and streamlined, but also has a lot of optional rules. The design is also really focused. It's got probably the best grid/turn based tactical combat I've seen in an RPG, or at least the most enjoyable one.

Can you go into more detail on this? I've heard Strike mentioned a lot, and I've looked into it, but the tactical combat side always felt rather unsatisfying to me. There are a lot of character combinations available, but none felt particularly deep or interesting, they had a particular style or gimmick but the decision making was mostly in how to apply that to the current situation.

Either one is fine with me, but it sounds like you're leaning towards archetypes and secret arts already. What are they and why is it so cool/weird?

So Archetypes are another layer of differentiation between characters aside from your Kung-fu styles, and the ones available in core are Warriors, Doctors, Courtiers, Priests and Scholars. It's important to keep in mind that this is all in addition to your character being a martial badass- A Courtier or Doctor can fight on an even level with a Warrior, what's different is how they go about it.

Although to explain Secret Arts I need to explain Chi Conditions. They're very simple, but LotW uses them to do a lot so it's worth stating explicitly.

A Chi Condition is a mechanical bonus or penalty tied to a narrative clause. For beneficial ones, if you obey the clause you get the bonus. For negative ones, if you fail to obey the clause you take the penalty.

Warriors Arts are the simplest form of Secret Art, and mostly deal with the creation and manipulation of Combat Conditions.

A Combat Condition is a chi condition describing a particular fighting style, and giving you a bonus when you follow it. A few canon examples are being a Drunken Master, getting a bonus to your rolls while drinking or acting drunkenly, or an analytical combat style doing the Sherlock Holmes movie thing of mentally planning out your every move before executing your plan in a split second. There are some funnier ones too, like the Combat Condition of a renowned martial teacher who gains a bonus to his rolls in combat while lecturing his opponent on what they could be doing better.

Some of the expanded techniques for Warriors Arts let you identify and exploit the traits of your opponents External styles more easily, create more powerful Combat Conditions yourself or gain the ability to reduce the effectiveness of opposing Combat Conditions, as well as a few other useful bits of utility.

Warriors are the simplest and most straightforward Archetype. I often recommend for people playing LotW for the first time to either ignore Secret Arts or to just let everyone play Warriors.

You have a lot of choices to make in any situation, and there's something intensely satisfying in pulling off a good combination between characters. The enemies play by similar rules, so they have access to a bunch of special abilities as well, which gives them a lot of character.

Also, a bunch of the class/role combos work out surprisingly well, there's a lot of non-apparent synergy, like Defender Skirmish Archer or Striker Enabler Warlords for instance.

It achieves a lot with very little, which makes it adding more stuff to it quite simple.

Doctors are the second simplest Archetype, in my experience, and are incredibly useful to have around. As you might expect they're excellent at helping people recover from injuries more quickly and can also create Medical Conditions, enhancing their allies through the use of herbs or other traditional methods.

But here is where I need to describe another of the odd concepts in LotW, 'discovery'. Out of combat, it's possible for people who know a certain Secret Art to 'discover' a Chi Condition upon someone. To do this, the player presents the GM evidence to support their claim, which influences the DC of the Discovery roll.

It's a bit of an odd IC/OOC divide, since while in universe you're discovering something that's already there OOC you're inventing it from the whole cloth, although the better a basis you have for it the easier it is to do so.

If you see an opponent constantly eating large meals and drinking heavily, a Doctor might use a Discovery roll to diagnose him with a Medical Weakness, his gluttony creating an internal imbalance that will penalise him in future, unless properly treated.

In addition to their very useful out of combat utility, Doctors also have access to Quick Work, letting them make attacks in combat based upon their Medical skills, letting them ignore a lot of the more standard defences by targeting pressure points, using acupuncture needles and other such techniques. They also get some extremely nasty in combat utility, able to debuff the hell out of opponents, exert themselves to generate more Chi (letting them fight harder for longer) and even pull some horrible tricks like reversing an opponents blood flow (which is a very hard attack to land, but if it actually hits is one of the deadliest Poison attacks in the game).

Courtiers are where things get a little weird. Not too much, but a little.

Like Doctors, Courtiers can discover, but instead of Medical conditions they discover Social ones, identifying the Passions or Influences that might be affecting a target.

I also realise I didn't quite finish with Discoveries last time. The interesting thing about them is that they can be used to influence behaviour as much as to provide a mechanical bonus or penalty. A Condition on an NPC can subtly but noticeably change what they might or might not do, so they can be a powerful tool even outside of direct confrontations.

Anyway, Courtiers excel at social manipulation, gossiping and learning until they can pick up someones dirty secrets or identify what drives them, and then manipulate them to their benefit.

They're also some of the most dangerous Secret Arts Attackers in the game. Like Doctors, they can use their Secret Arts to attack in combat, with good ones being so powerful that they can potentially bring an opponent to their knees without striking a single blow.

While a lot of their arts focus on making their words amazing weapons, they also have some fun utility stuff like the amusingly named 'Cordial, Upright, Courteous, Temperate, and Complaisant Technique', which lets you learn a secret about someone after spending a full scene of polite conversation with them, no matter what.

Priests... Priests are full weird.

Priests can also Discover, but they discover supernatural conditions, curses or driving forces that can empower or restrict people. While the evidence for Doctor and Courtier discoveries is often more literal, Priests instead operate on metaphor and theme, tracing paths through someones actions that they can use to justify a certain supernatural effect.

They also have some of the strangest and funniest conditions in the book, like... I'm just going to copy/paste this one, because it's great.

>A young courtier is cursed by good luck. He wins money that makes his friends envy him, the King’s concubines flutter their eyelashes at him, and his lord consider making him one of his eunuchs. A thousand and one good fortunes alienates him from life at the court, driving him out on the road as a penniless (but well-fed!) beggar.

Priests Secret Arts attacks are also solid, getting a few techniques to buff them and being able to use spiritual power to really bash around an opponent, but their best stuff comes in their utility techs, letting them gain access to mystic telekinesis, spells of invisibility or the ability to create grand geomantic arrangements to manipulate the people within them.

Priests are a lot less concrete than the other archetypes, a lot of their stuff relies on bullshitting the right mystic mumbo jumbo and metaphorical gibberish together to make what you want happen, but personally I find them immensely fun to play. Of course, we've not yet reached maximum weird. Up next- Scholars.

Scholars... Okay, Scholars. Even I'm not 100% on Scholars, not so much because of the rules and more because of them just being odd.

Up until now, Chi Conditions tend to only affect a single person. They're quite personal things, requiring evaluation of someones actions and so on.

Scholars create Chi Conditions on the world. A Scholars Prediction, if successful, affects literally everybody, everywhere, forever. In predicting the future they can create a global trend towards what they predict coming about. Scholars are also the slowest, least combat capable archetype, they get very few tricks to actually influence what's going on in the current scene, but with prep time, the right tools and a good justification, you can literally change the entire world.

Now, there are downsides. Predictions take an entire scene to make, so they require a significant time investment, as well as always costing Joss (A secondary system resource, gained and lost relatively frequently) to create. Any particular prediction can also only be tried once- If it isn't true, it isn't true. Of course, you can rephrase it or try to make similar predictions, but it does require you to be thoughtful with what you try to predict and how you word it. A good prediction can be very potent, but subverting prophecy and defying fate is entirely possible.

As a GM I find Predictions fascinating because... If a player makes one? I have to keep it in mind for every relevant situation. A Prediction that an evil organisation will fall, or one that gives a bonus to those fighting them, will influence literally every event that organisation is involved in, subtly tilting the odds against them. The sheer power of Predictions is staggering, even if their direct personal impact might not be as obvious as the other Archetypes.

This is great. Please go on.

Was just taking a break to have a bite to eat.

But yes, from the overly long above rambling I think you can see why I call Secret Arts a very weird but very interesting part of the system. It enables player characters to interact with and influence the world and the characters in it in ways I've never really seen before, and it's a huge amount of fun to play around with, whether for serious plot purposes or purely for entertainments sake.

Next I suppose should come the full combat rules. As I said earlier, LotW doesn't use 'stats' in the same way other systems to, folding almost everything into its skill system. However, its External styles do provide Combat Stats. Every External provides a total of 35 points of bonuses, split in increments of 5 amongst the six stats, with no stat higher than +15. The six stats are-

Speed- Sets your initiative for the round

Strike- Adds to your attacks

Footwork- Used for mobility and evading attacks.

Block- Also can be used for defending yourself against attacks

Damage- Adds to damage rolls

Toughness- Opposes damage rolls.

It's relatively straightforward, although just looking at that you'll likely notice a few core problems, which is one of the issues with the system.

Strike is the most useful stat by far, and Damage somewhat suffers since it only really matters when you land a good hit.

Footwork, being used for defence and mobility equally effectively, is outright better than Block RAW. In my groups we houserule this to allow both to be used for mobility, with Footwork based movement being going over or around things, while Block based movement is going through things.

With the basics laid out, I'll describe the initiative roll, which unlike most systems is actually an integral part of combat where you have to make important decisions every single round.

The initiative roll is something of a misnomer. It happens at the start of the around and is used to define your place in initiative order, choosing a single or set and adding your Speed, but the ability of the system to let you take multiple actions on a single roll allows LotW to also uses this roll for a lot of combat utility purposes.

Moving between Zones, analysing an opponents style or focusing to regain more Chi are all core actions that anyone can take with a set on the initiative roll. The system also encourages GMs to be flexible with players if they have a particular idea, and provides a few useful structures for this purpose, the primary one on init being Waves.

Waves are very cool, a simple concept that works very elegantly in combat. A Wave is any extended action that might have a chance to be interrupted, generally ones that affect the environment rather than a specific enemy combatant.

When declaring a Wave, you assign it a set and calculate its value on your initiative roll, and the Wave will resolve when your turn in initiative order is reached. Every person who goes before you in the combat, however, can try to oppose and Break your wave, preventing the action from taking place.

This makes Speed really important for utility purposes, letting you control the environment and how people move through it very effectively.

A lot of Internal and External styles also have techniques which trigger on the Initiative roll, meaning you'll almost always have something to do with it beyond just assigning your initiative score.

Next comes your attack roll when, once more, your attack is just one thing you can do with it. Although your Internal or External styles might give you extra tricks to make use of, there are three core Marvels you can always make use of- Disrupts, Disorients and Knockbacks.

Marvels are the most basic way you employ your Skills in combat. They are made with and defended against with skills, and are used to represent a broad variety of actions you can take to impede your foes indirectly.

Disrupts let you impose a -5 penalty upon one of your opponent combat stats if they hit. They can be recovered from on initiative if the opponent can beat the roll made to inflict them, but otherwise hang around for the whole fight.

Disorients are similar, but instead of penalising an opponents combat stat they penalise one of their skills instead.

Finally, Knockbacks let you move an opponent to an adjacent zone, letting you get some distance, throwing them towards a group of waiting allies or other such things.

Disrupts and Disorients might seem relatively small and insigificant, but they add up. A boss fight I recently ran in LotW ended up with the boss suffering from all the following D/D's-

-5 Confidence (55)
-10 FoB (38/44)
-5 Hardiness (36)
-5 Wu Wei (55)
-5 Speed (50)
-5 Footwork (50)
-5 Strike (59)
-5 Block (64)
-5 Toughness (56)

It's worth noting that the FoB disrupt is a special Doctors Arts trick, letting you directly penalise your opponents ability to regain extra Chi, hurting their ability to keep fighting.

Marvels are always binary, they succeed or they fail, but Strikes opposed by defences can have a couple of different results... But that means I need to get into the damage system, another of the awesome but weird things about LotW.

Successful attacks in LotW inflict Ripples. Ripples are an abstract measure of the increasing risks involved in a combat, including attrition, minor injuries and such building up bit by bit. Ripples never decrease during the course of a fight, and it's generally impossible to avoid gaining a few, no matter how good your defences are. However, Ripples in themselves do nothing. Instead, they build up until you suffer a particularly successful attack, which causes a Rippling Roll.

Rippling Rolls use a pool of d10's equal to the number of ripples you've suffered, choosing a high set and adding damage, opposed by toughness and a small pool of dice called your 'Chi Aura'. At the start of a fight ripple pools are small, but in the aforementioned bossfight the boss ended the battle on 21 ripples.

The Rippling Roll (often abbreviated to a RR) plus Damage is compared to the opponents Chi Aura plus Toughness, and based on the difference Chi Conditions are inflicted on your opponent.

Injury Conditions are the most common sort of condition inflicted in combat, imposing penalties on your opponent of increasing severity and eventually allowing you to take your opponent out.

However, Injury Conditions are still Chi Conditions- So they give the opponent a choice. Obey the narrative clause, such as not using a broken limb or putting pressure on an injured leg, or take the penalty. It avoids a total death spiral, since you can attempt to fluff around your condition penalties to keep fighting, but over the course of a fight you'll find it harder and harder to do so as you have more conditions inflicted on you.

Injuries aren't the only conditions inflicted in combat. Secret Arts, as mentioned above, can be used in combat to attack by Doctors, Courtiers and Priests, and there are also Elemental Attacks, letting you inflict especially punishing special injury conditions on your opponent as you burn, freeze, poison or electrocute them.

LotW fights can drag on a little long, if you have people with particularly good defences or just have unlucky rolls. As a GM, I often build NPCs more for offence than defence just to ensure things don't get bogged down, as well as having most sane opponents abandon a fight after suffering a Major condition or two. But I general I find the combat flow of LotW incredibly fun, almost always presenting players with interesting decisions to make and a constantly changing set of narrative prompts and restrictions they need to play to for bonuses or avoid for penalties.

There's also a last few things to mention, like end of battle Rippling Rolls. After a fight, every person involved in a combat rolls their ripples to have a final condition inflicted upon them. However, unlike in a combat where you're restricted in what types of condition you can inflict, the end of battle roll can be used to inflict any sort of condition.

While this can be used to especially screw over a defeated enemy, it's more flexible than that. Two allies having a duel could use the end of battle roll to put a buff on each other, their sparring preparing them for the battles to come. Or a powerful opponent who enjoyed the battle might put a condition on his fallen foe that will help them grow in strength and power, so they'll be an even better fight next time.

Small things that don't really fit anywhere else-

LotW uses an abstract system of weapon tags, with each tag having three associated traits. Basic weapons all are roughly equally good, but you can also create Special Weapons, combining two tags into an exotic or particularly potent weapon combining traits or stat boosts to help you in combat.

Armour is also in the system, although RAW it's massively overcosted and pretty bloody useless for what it does. Still, it's not hard to fix.

Any other questions? I might post again when I remember stuff I failed to mention elsewhere.

Do post again if anything comes to mind.

Getting pretty hyped about this system now. Thanks for laying it all out.

Praedor.

They had they first supplement this year, which was rad. After 16 years of waiting.

Damn I really want to take a crack at writing up LotW: Lite.

Any advice for would-be GMs about making new lore sheets?

After having a sleep, I have a couple of more things I should add, along with a larger post on the unfortunately fucked up elements of LotW. As much as I love the system for its unique approach to things, the shoddy state they released it in means you need to do quite a bit of tweaking to make it work.

My favorite system is Warhammer 40k. You should play it 'cuz good fuckin' luck finding any games if you don't. Fuck you.

Loresheets are tricky, especially if you use the core rule of 'You can only learn one technique per level of your Internal'. While it works okay with core materials, when you're making use of homebrew styles it's a real arse to try and tie every single one to an organisation of some sort, so I tend to just waive that rule and let people take every technique in their Internal.

Other than that, the guidelines for writing them are rather vague, like a lot of things in LotW. Unarmed special weapons are always cool, as are style synergies and various interesting fluff things.

Although while it's less egregious than somethings, this is one of my annoyances with LotW. I always find it annoying when RPGs force players to choose between interesting utility and in combat effectiveness, and it's especially annoying when the two different progression currencies- Destiny and Entanglement- would seem an ideal way of letting people have their fair share of both.

I forgot to mention Virtues, Deeds and Entanglement, the secondary progression subsystem of the game.

Each character have a set of Virtues, traditional Chinese values (both positive and negative) that are assigned a score between one and five. When a character achieves something significant, they earn a Deed of an associated Virtue.

RAW, they gain a number of points of Entanglement (the aforementioned secondary progression currency) equal to their score in that virtue, which is spent by the GM or the other players on things associated with the event, establishing the PCs connection to the world through their actions. It's a cool idea but it's pretty fiddly in play.

Most games I'm in just keep deeds consistent, one per character per arc, but I often ask my PCs to nominate deeds for one another. RAW PCs are meant to nominate deeds for one another freely, but that can become a total headache to actually deal with.

>Into the Odd
>CON: Very limited progression and customisation.

Not if you follow the blog it isnt. The creator has made a dozen of posts on progression and character 'scars' as well as getting an apprentice to take over your estate.

But... The rough side of LotW. It's been mentioned before, but it can't be overstated enough that the editing and layout of the book is so fucking Bad. It contradicts itself at various points, buries rules explanations in big swathes of fluff and leaves some quite important rules concepts unstated anywhere. It makes actually understanding the game an exercise in interpretation and figuring out what works and what doesn't. The Half Burnt Manual (available on the Wulin Legends wiki) has a few fixes and clarifications, but there's still a few things that need discussion.

A few of the core styles are borked. Fire Sutra is just bad for no good reason, although the Wulin Legends fixes help it a lot. Meanwhile, Heaven's Lightning is ridiculously overpowered RAW, having total flexibility and unsurpassed chi efficiency, but once more there are fixes. Slightly more complex to fix is Removing Concepts, where an innocuous seeming technique- +10 to all skill rolls- is part of some of the nastiest Secret Arts builds possible, since it effectively boosts your offensive stats beyond anything most opponents will be able to defend themselves from.

Another big issue in the core book is Elemental Chi. By the core rules, the elemental styles are just better than the neutral ones, since you gain your first few points of Chi quicker, you can spend those points more efficiently, and on top of all that you regain more Chi per turn. There's various suggested fixes, boosting neutral Chi regeneration, further restricting Elemental Chi or just removing it entirely, but it's a thorny issue in general.

I suppose I should mention it, IMO it isn't really an issue but some people find the 'Daoist Sexuality' section and other parts of the fluff on ancient Chinese philosophy annoying or offensive. I actually quite like them for explaining aspects of the philosophy and attitudes of the day, but they're also completely skippable.

Does it support Ripple/Hamon?

No, why would you think that?

>Sell me this pen.
No, that's okay. You can have it for free. It came in a 12-pack, so I've got plenty more.

>Slightly more complex to fix is Removing Concepts, where an innocuous seeming technique- +10 to all skill rolls- is part of some of the nastiest Secret Arts builds possible, since it effectively boosts your offensive stats beyond anything most opponents will be able to defend themselves from.

Another player here. Going to explain this one a bit.

LOTW combatants take many forms but outside the archtypes themselves there are 4 main sorts(With a lot of characters flowing between the two in various ways):

Fair Fighters: These people want to bash their stats against your stats and bring you down. Generally they tend to focus on having the best stats. They are almost never bad but don't quite have the same 'Curb stomp' potential of Secret Art Bullies. Any archetype can play this easily as it's more heavily focused on external/internal than archetype. Warriors do have a hair of an advantage though, having easily applied conditions to boost themselves.

Disrupt Monkeys: These people tend to be Warriors (Even if the first sort sounds more warrior) as Warriors get to be the king of kicking the other guy in the balls. Most people can only disrupt to a -5. Warriors? They can disrupt to a -10. Other archetypes can often do SOME disrupting to -10 (Doctors can do Focus on Breath, which no one else can do and can also do footwork) but Warriors can make any stat very, very sad with a -10 disrupt (Note: A -10 disrupt is still rather hard compared to a normal one). Disrupt monkeys make the opponent weaker and weaker and tend to let allies land the killing blow.

GURPS. It's a perfect constructor system: it have tons of material and rules for building your setting (or adapting an existing one) and you can build almost every imaginable character in it and play with it. You can adapt it to all playstyles, and it will work good in most. The combat system is really deep and interesting to play, providing players with many tactical options and choices, most of which will matter. So are the rules for social interaction. You can have entirely non-combat campaigns in GURPS, and mechanically they will be just as interesting as combat ones. Besides, GURPS have a really friendly player community, more friendly than any other RPG community I saw.

Personally for me, it's logic and lack of abstractions that sells the system. There is no bullshit like "HP isn't just your body being hurt, it's mix of luck, fatigue and damage", "AC is, abstractly, how much you are protected".
HP is how much you are hurt. DR is how much damage you can absorb without getting hurt. Intelligence is intelligence, charisma is charisma.

Man, I have Anima, but the whole thing feels so much like four systems badly smushed together, with entirely too much granularity in places where a weeaboo adventure game really doesn''t need it.

I do rather like how summoning works, though.

Elemental Blasters: Any archetype is equally good at this, as it's tied to your internal more than your archtype. These people focus on elemental styles that grant them the ability to attack with set-value elemental attacks rather than your usual strike. Elemental attacks also tear right through toughness and armour like it's not there. They are, however, not particularly accurate compared to a boosted strike and cost a metric ass of chi. Elemental Attackers tend to either burn very hot and very fast, throwing out the biggest attacks they can in an attempt to nuke the other guy before running out of chi puts them on the back foot OR they play the careful game, saving chi and waiting for a fantastic roll to blow the nuke on. Regardless of the choice, Elemental attackers are very notable for dramatically shifting the fight the moment they land a hit.

Secret Art Bullies: And then there are these assholes. A Secret Art bully looks at a battle and goes 'Oh, that's a nice kung fu fight you are all having there. I don't think I want to do that. Instead I'm going to turn this into my favoured sort of fight.' Priests, Doctors and ESPECIALLY Courtiers tend to make good Secret Art Bullies. Since secret arts are not resisted with Footwork/Block like normal attacks are they are the kings of shattering otherwise really tough opponents. They don't make heavy armour for your heart. They have the greatest potential to curbstomp a foe who isn't prepared for them but also falter heavily in the face of someone who's not weak to thier particular form of being a dick.

Removing concepts has the issue that it unfortunately ended up the best possible internal for Secret Art Bullies as it allows them to get +10 over other combatants in a system where starting characters who focused a stat will only have +10 in the first place. It's otherwise a good internal but that one level 2 technique cracks open something the devs didn't expect.

As I said, however, characters tend to have more than one style from the listed ones. My current character in a Modern Day LOTW game for example is Glacier Jade, the daughter of the Glacier Maiden (A possibly-person possibly-spirit deeply in tune with the concept that in the end, all heat will die and it will become cold and dark. She's real fun at parties). She blends Secret Art Bullying and Elemental Blasting.

The major battle we recently had was against an animated brass statue, an avatar of the Fire God (Another possibly-person possibly-spirit who is the incarnation of the concept of...well, fire. He has an entire cult from India). He was drawing on his divine fury (Courtier condition) to make himself a truly terrifying combatant...as long as he maintained that anger and focus.

She proceeded to troll him so hard he wasn't able to maintain that focus, her courtier attacks focusing on mocking him and such complete babbling nonsense (Terrible puns, constantly referring to him as Ragnaros rather than The Fire God etc) that his anger faded away into mystification at this strange woman and he was no longer able to benefit from his condition, seriously dropping his ability to fight our group.

She had, however, been playing very safe and low on chi spending the entire battle as her allies wore him down and took advantage of it to nuke him hard with ice attacks, tearing through all the armour that game from being a brass statue and finishing him off. Which is more or less her battle plan, open up with cheap courtier attacks and finish off with ice (As ripples don't care about the source). A lot of characters have some sort of combination strategy like that. Like Disrupt Monkeys with good strike who like to start wailing with multi-attacks once the enemy can't defend any more or low damage fair fighters who rack up the ripples with normal fighting and finish off with a fire blast.

Battles are very versatile and two characters rarely fight the same.

What would you say the weaknesses of it as a system are?

It have only one weakness, but it's really the major one: it's a constructor system. As such it asks from GM much, much more than other systems do: it asks him to be a game designer, because GURPS GM needs to decide which rules and content he will use. You can't just take GURPS from a book shelf and start playing: you need to decide on basics, you need to generate or find some content your setting or conversion and you need to put up some time combining all this up. This is the truth behind "no flavor" accusations: GURPS have no flavor, until you add some, it is really in the end an instrument box, not a pick-up-and-use game. Playing GURPS may be an really good role-playing experience, but GM have much more prep work to do than in any other system I played.

Also: GURPS splats have the best suggestions for gamemastering in any system, for whatever genre, and suggestions on how to mix and max genre. If you want to know how to run something, pick up a GURPS splat, ignore the >20% rules, and read the 'how to run' section, because the suggestions and lessons apply across systems.

I love DCC but the funky dice thing is annoying as hell. I actually homebrewed the rules to avoid the use of the dice chain entirely, so that my players don't have to shell out $20 for fucking dice.

Bump

Question - how do end-of-combat rippling rolls work when there's more than two people involved in the fight? Who determines the condition? Just wing it?

Generally I let whoever fought that person the most (in the classic "let us split up and duel individually!" groupfight), or just a consensus from the opposing side (for e.g. a boss battle), with the Sage breaking ties.

I don't think there's any explicit rules about it.

>Ctrl+F 'cats'
>nope.jpg

I am slightly disappointed.

You get to fuck a cow with Big tits

This is always a great question to ask. No RPG system is perfect. They all have real issues and weaknesses, even if they're things fans of the game/genre might not mind that do turn off other people. Being self aware about the weaknesses of your favourite systems is very important and shows you actually know your shit, so half-arsed replies are a good sign that someone isn't giving a good account of things.

system name?

Corruption of champions

LoTW fanboy here. This shit, this shit RIGHT HERE, this is why I love LoTW so much. This is the only system that has useful rules for "fate" that I have ever seen. And Scholars get to be the fucking king of it.

Too bad it's a ded system that nobody ever runs. I need to get around to finishing a 1-shot prewritten adventure for it and see if it can rouse some interest in the system.

My current personal favorite, naturally, is the one I'm writing at the moment, Misfortune, and by extension Despair, its "expanded ruleset".

Some pinpoints:

>Misfortune:

-Emulates Slice of Life anime, of all things. But it can be used in great effect to play in most low-powered settings.

- Unconventional but less abstracted: It might seem odd as a roll-over system, but it is actually less abstracted than most. Your "stats" are your WEAKNESSES. Meaning that to beat a challenge, the character needs to overcome their weakness, making the rolls feel intuitive.

- Modifiers to rolls affect the difficulty of the roll, and the math is simple, it always works in twos. Rolls are 2d6 btw, the pet dice roll of Veeky Forums.

- Super light, in all good and bad it brings. No inventory for example, the most important things you carry are your personal items, which can be things like mementos or something dear to the character in general.

- No deaths, at least on surface level. All the damage you amass is more of an hindrance on your future rolls that slowly heals, more trying to emulate emotional damage rather than physical. Physical injuries are simply Problems (negative modifiers on certain types of rolls). Death is possible, if the situation really calls for it, but there are no clear-cut rules for it.

- Almost everything can be resolved with a single roll.

- All this, condensed into less than 4 pages. Very much a pamphlet game.

>Despair

- High-powered settings, with high drama and high stakes.

- Death mechanics similar to TBZ, with you getting bonuses to rolls if you sacrifice your health.

- Designed to run high-risk Manga or Superhero games, but similarly very lightweight like Misfortune, the parent system.

- Lightning-fast combat resolution with stakes raising with each roll, condensing even huge battles into just minutes on table.

>Cons from both

-The amount of crunch is so tiny that people might think it's thinly veiled freeform. Which it might.

Stuff sounds intriguing

Addendum:

>Despair:

- In addition of the death mechanic, plays a lot with the concept of sacrifice, where continuing to fight is harmful for the character, even if they win.

If have some old versions of the games lying around, but I am trying to get a new version PDF of Misfortune out, probably today or so.

Actually, let me drop a related game that IS ready. YankESP has the basic rules of Misfortune, laid down to a game about Japanese delinquents with psychic powers, setting reminiscent of Mob Psycho 100.

It has all the basic rules, but I'm tinkering the base rules to be more applicable to everything ever. YankESP will probably get art somewhere around the beginning of next year, and by that point I would call it ready to go.

Geh, it wasn't as ready as I thought. Basic errors that make it kinda silly to run it RAW. Ones I thought I had weeded out, but not apparently.

Whatever, you will probably hear about YankESP again next year, once I commission Pilgrim or someone else to make the arts for it and finalize it myself.

I'm in and running a few games of it, but the community is painfully small.

Then again, with no official support and the game being as hard to get into as it is, it's no wonder it's got a small community. I do hope we see more games build off its ideas though. As much as I love LotW, a lot of its ideas are better than their execution.

Is there a gathering place for the community, however small it is, beyond the wiki?
After this thread I'll likely run it soon, and it might be good to know in case I take to the system.

There's a channel on the Sup/tg/ IRC, #LotW, although it's pretty quiet you can generally find a few people there to talk about stuff.