Why is it so hard to do dedicated sports-themed RPGs?
Not skirmish games, wargames, or boardgames. I'm talking about role-playing games where each player controls a single character.
What are some fun sports-themed RPGs where the sport is baked into the rules and isn't just fluff?
How would this work? What even are sports with teams of 3 to 5 people? Or you want to use sports only as a backdrop?
If I liked sports I wouldn't sit at a table and roll dice to emulate them.
I think Velocity is something like that in the X-Games sense.
Otherwise, do wargames like Blood Bowl
Because it's a really dumb idea.
Play a wargame, skirmish game, or boardgame. Alternatively, play a video game.
This, the same applies to any activity that can actually just be done in real life
Alternatively, play a sport.
But I can't live an escapist power fantasy if I do that
I've been pondering the idea of a game that sets out to emulate most sports manga, covering everything from baseball to MMA with a unified system that covered stuff like training and dealing with your reputation and rping but different splats that go specifically into the sport itself.
The one thing that carries over to all of them would be over the top anime abilities so in basketball you might have a guy who's so good at juking and dribbling he basically has ninja like shadow skills (leaves after images of himself to fool opponents) or in football a dude who's a literal tank of a man and very hard to stop once he gets going
I used to have a lot of fun with X-Crawl. Despite being Shackled to the mechanical nightmare that is the D20 system, the premise of the game was rather amusing. The DJ, or dungeon jockey, would use a combination of advanced technology, Magic, and Showmanship to generate and artificial dungeon four teams to try to conquer. Sometimes directly competing with each other, other times going for highest loot totals or fastest times. Individual teams were sponsored like sports teams are. Extremely skilled professional adventurers would get lucrative endorsement deals as well as sizable paychecks and bonuses. The increased metal background of sports competition led to many interesting stories like crooked managers, fixed fights, organized crime influence, inter party jockeying for increased Fame and better contracts, and even Regional rivalries. Did you hear that the New Orleans Kensai beat out the Atlanta Perytons last week? That means they have a solid shot at the super crawl this year. If they don't blow it in the playoffs.
I made a homebrew for a basketball game that went off dice pools and marking adjacent players for defense. I just found that the more detail I added, the more it would likely turn off people not interested in all that. It's tricky to make some kind of equivalent of blitzball where it's all stat based.
it has to be something you cant get in real life, so make it more fantasyish or sci fi.
Do like a blood bowl type deal. Or a futuristic blood sport. Getting people around a table to roll dice and pretend to play football just isn't gonna happen.
>things are dumb because thinking makes my head hurt
Being a world-class athlete with million-dollar contracts and chicks falling all over you is a power fantasy just as much as being a knight defeating a dragon.
I see your Blood Bowl and raise you BLITZBALL!
>Poison roundhouse kicking people out of the sphere is legal
What exactly are the rules to Blitzball?
VeloCITY focuses on parkour, rollerblading, skateboarding and biking, so yes, it amounts to a system about extreme sports. The focus is on urban exploration and adventures in an urban space, but you can place a focus on the extreme sports themselves if you wanted.
...
Just take a sport board game and slap Savage Worlds on it.
I have thought of a Genesys game where the players a running a sports franchise (american football in this case). They are literal zeitgeists and the game is played from the executive, management, coaching, and line levels. Major business decisions down to the games themselves (not game for game but drive for drive).
One day...
Anyone else remember the old mutant League video games and Cartoon Series? Some kind of horrible chemical accident kills a bunch of people but turns many many more of them including a number of professional athletes into strange genetic mutants with unusual abilities. When scientists realize that exposure to similar chemicals causes these mutants, and only these mutants, to heal rapidly they quickly become exploited as a new sports League where they can play without padding, and without restraint or personal fouls, and not sustain any career-ending injuries.
bloodbowl.png
Are... are you saying... the verboten slam? The chaos dunk?!
Curling with Fiasco could be fun. Its already half retarded as a sport.