How would you turn the Harry Potter universe into a tabletop role-playing game...

that was a shop

Heavy narrative base, so probably FATE
Tweak the combat slightly
Do everything in my power to allow it to run School based games and games in the wider wizarding world specifically this youtube.com/watch?v=2WhhS2maFEs

The biggest problem with a HP game is that magic seems to be able to do literally anything, has absolutely no downside and every playable character will have access to it
It's high level D&D wizards but 10 times worse

I feel like "adventures in a wizard school" is a broad enough premise that you don't need to limit it to any specific setting.

As a world, the Harry Potter setting falls apart the deeper you look at it. I honestly think you would better off just putting the players in a generic fantasy world with wizards, so you don't have to explain to your players why it's important for them to sustain an apartheid society, why muggles should be allowed to suffer from diseases that you have magical cures for, or why wizards don't use ballsitic firearms as well as their spells.

>why it's important for them to sustain an apartheid society, why muggles should be allowed to suffer from diseases that you have magical cures for
Of all the things you can nitpick about HP, these two fall flat. The idea of keeping a separate society makes perfect sense, even if the setup is rather dumb. And the illnesses are a combination of the first nitpick and sheer not giving a fuck, which is pretty much the same as for us muggles. Done much to eradicate TBC lately?

These aren't nitpicks. The masquerade is fundamental to the setting, and neither makes sense logically or portrays the wizards as the side of "good." It makes the conflict with Voldemort seem like a battle between evil and total indifference, and it doesn't work in an RPG setting where player commonly want to play as heroic movers and shakers.

This is what I would do, but I would say spells can only be bought with Arcane EXP from Awakening 2e, but going to class will give you Arcane Beats on top of encountering magical shit around the school.

>It makes the conflict with Voldemort seem like a battle between evil and total indifference, and it doesn't work in an RPG setting where player commonly want to play as heroic movers and shakers.
You do realize that there are quite a lot of settings that work just like that, right? You've basically outright dismissed WoD and 40k with that post, and many others.

Not him, but I think the masquerade makes perfect sense. Wizards should be allowed to be left perfectly alone if they want. Muggles can be clued in on an individual basis, and y'know, things like the Witch Trials are real. I also don't see why wizards have to be actively handing out magical charity to muggles to be seen as "good", even though wizards have made it a point to protect muggles anyway, from dangerous monsters and dark wizards.

In a proper Hogwarts setting, players won't be muggle saviors either way. They'll be in school. I don't know about you, but for me the appeal of a Harry Potter game would be getting up to shenanigans around my magic school, not being a big damn hero to the poor helpless muggles, and jumping into that whole can of worms.

...

Adapt Dresden Files.

Done.

Those settings are dystopian and have a level of self-awareness beyond what Harry Potter seems to have. No one in their world questions a state ministry that holds everyone under indefinite surveillance and violently supresses any magical contact with the outside (except when they don't). No one questions why muggles are kept seperate when nonmagical people exist among wizards peacefully. Etc etc etc.

Harry Potter only works at the very personal level, not as a world. Once players go off on their own and start doing things the DM doesn't expect, the setting falls off a cliff. The easiest thing to do is just never explain it, which is why I suggest staging the game in a fantasy world where you don't have to drag a mess of lore or modern technology/politcs into the game.

I would start with searching through 4plebs and similar archives old threads dedicated to this subject, as it only seems logical issue like that could be brought quite often on Veeky Forums and already giving results.
Instead of, you know, starting out yet another thread about it. For fuck's sake, it's been already a decade, can't you faggots already grow up a bit and start thinking on your own?

I would want to make a really fleshed out potions system that lets you chose to learn recipes but will also let you experiment and come up with new potions based on the featured ingredients.

You mean like Dresden Files.

What even is this stance? The Trace is lifted when you come of age, and in wizard households, the wizarding parents are responsible for regulating their children's magic. No one is under "indefinite surveillance", unless you're referring to something completely different.

Nonmagical people exist among wizards peacefully because the ones that don't, I assume, have their memories wiped. You'd also have to be some kind of retarded to think that a magical 1% would go over well with muggles at large. I also don't see why going with the setting as is means you'd have to drag modern technology or politics into the game. Why the fuck would you have to do that?

Dresden Files potions are stupid. It's a good thing Butcher dropped them.

>"... he appeal of a Harry Potter game would be getting up to shenanigans around my magic school..."

This. Even if it wasn't in Hogwarts itself, I'd love to be roaming around a magical academy for magic and unravel its secrets, even if it might get me into trouble.

I suppose there could be the occasional subterfuge missions where you had to do things around muggles, but they should not be common.

>Sorcerer's Stone
Ugh

>I also don't see why going with the setting as is means you'd have to drag modern technology or politics into the game. Why the fuck would you have to do that?

Because they're part of the setting. You could easily make them not part of the setting, by playing in a different setting.

Or, and here's a crazy idea, I could just ignore them and keep the focus on the stuff that matters.

This was a pretty interesting read. Looks pretty detailed, and I'm actually tempted to trying it out.

Me too, I like how the dice mechanics seem to mirror the in universe behaviour. Having a pool of D10 that you can exchange for a +5 if you want seems to accurately portrait that you basically can't fail at spells that are easy or well trained, while still meaning that you can make a lucky shot at casting higher level spells or shooting for that high overshoot for extra potency/duration.

I also like how much room for homebrewing it gives you, because realistically everybody is going to do that to fit their head-canon /campaign concept.

Now I want to run this. I should stop reading new systems. I get sadder everytime, because I am forever gm and won't get to play this.

>Basically, imagine JK Rowling just handed you the Harry Potter license and told you to make a tabletop role-playing game. What do, user? What do?
Tell Rowling to go fuck herself, steal the concept of a wizarding school that's immensely dangerous due to incompetency/apathy, steal from Pratchett a whole bunch while I'm at it, and run the whole thing in Risus because I'm lazy as fuck.

Came here basically to post this.

A game about learning magic at a wizard school is a great setup and opens the door for a flavorful set of mechanics that wouldn't make sense in any other context, so you end up with a unique game that does its own thing well and isn't just a flimsy rehash of an already existing system.

But Harry Potter, as a setting, is pretty much the worst possible choice for this. The setting is deeply, deeply flawed and basically stops working if you ever get more than 2 steps away from Harry Potter the character. An average group of players will utterly break the world over their knee and present a more dangerous threat to the planet than Voldemort ever did simply by not being retarded.

The wizarding world is DANGEROUSLY ill informed and behind the times, to the point that its implied most wizards don't know man has been to the moon even by the 90s.

Wizard combat comes down to a choice between "hit them with a spell that is a mild inconvenience at best" or "take them out of the fight 100%" with little room for any kind of strategy besides being the fastest gun in the west.

And the magic system itself isn't particularly interesting, because there isn't anything to why or how it works. A spell does what a spell does because we say the spell does that, and that's are deep an explanation as the magic system ever gets. So you cant really set up clever problems or solutions involving the magic system, because whether or not the magic solves your problem is explicit and beyond any kind of player input.

I can’t see how so many wizards are ill informed when mudbloods are a thing that exist. They don’t even seem that rare all things considered. Maybe 1 in 5. Half-bloods are by far the most prevalent class of wizard and they should also know those sort of basics.

Exactly. There isn't any good reason why the HP universe should be the way it is, you just have to take it at face value.

You can squeak by with this in a book, but it will bite you in the ass in an RPG setting because the players can ask questions that a fictional character under author control won't.

An average group of players are all autistic?

You say this but Arthur Weasley, a man who allowed his obsession with muggles to ruin his social standing and almost got thrown in Azkaban for breaking a law he wrote by making an enchanted car, does not know the word Policeman in 1994 nor is he capable of determining denominations of currency with numbers written on it. In 1995 he ruminates loudly in public about the technological marvel that is a subway car. This man is considered by the Ministry of Magic to be an expert on muggles and their artifacts. He cannot pronounce electricity.

Or you could skip past all of that, just as the wizards do, and deal with wizarding issues.

Dark Wizards, Muggles actually being kidnaped for experiments, Politics, Trade, Magical creatures, Non-parallel magical engineering,
Eldritch Horror [Campy, maybe, but you know it would be nuts to see some school for "gifted children" settled in maine, and strange things happen. Things that no mage could make happen]

Every setting can be broken. Meta-plot logic can be applied to any literary, plot driven source.

Forget harry potter and the natural 20. Forget the years of analysis.

Hogwarts can be tied up in all of it's shenanigans, but the fantastic thing is that hogwarts is one school. As a GM you can make it as big or small as you want. Maybe Voldemort in all his power is a regional threat. Hogwarts IS pretty fucking english.

maybe, every other country has their own deterrents for such threats.

Don't call it harry potter the game, or hogwarts the game.
Go more expansive.
>World of Wizardry and Witchcraft.

I would definitely agree with the storyteller system being a primary influence on rules. I would focus more on the lives of the wizards outside of school, but would have a book for games in the school.

I would make the houses almost important as say, one's birth month in astrology. There are many houses outside of the hogwarts 4, but wizards do have a tendency to have extreme personalities based on cultural archetypes.

Focus would be on the wizards fresh out of the schools, and the various careers that wizards fall into.

I would also have "Sorcerer space" Wizards don't live in between enchanted or glamoured space. They live in parallel subspaces. The "wizarding world" is the same size as earth itself. The reason they interact with the muggle world is because it is superimposed on top of it, and ever now and then cracks slip up.

Having a fantasy world just as big and old as real earth, in culture gives big opportunities for exploration.

>Campy, maybe, but you know it would be nuts to see some school for "gifted children" settled in maine, and strange things happen. Things that no mage could make happen

That would actually fall pretty flat, because Potterverse magic doesn't really have any rules to speak of. I can't think of a single rule we were given about magic in the setting that wasn't broken at least once.

So to do 'things no mage can do' you would first have to establish that there are, in fact, things no mage can do.

That said, there do seem to be some kind of godlike beings in the setting that have magic above and beyond wizards. If the tale of the Deathly hallows is to be believed, those three brothers met SOMETHING on the road that gave them all that sweet shit. It might not have been the grim reaper, but it wasn't nothing.

I think one of the biggest focuses of the system is a need for a larger time investment in learning specific spells, over a period of time. The biggest take away from HP is that the spells in the Universe take time and effort to learn, not just pure magical talent. Harry was successful because he was well practiced in spells other Wizards his age were not practiced in or even attempted, such as the Patronus.

>I can't think of a single rule we were given about magic in the setting that wasn't broken at least once.

You can't MAKE food or drink that actually nurishes you from thin air, you can only multiply it a bit if you already have some, and even that doesn't seem to be very easy, as the trio doesn't multiply their extremely limited supply while on the run in the wild. They resort to eating mushrooms and fish the find, because just getting to some place with people is too dangerous. Considering all the shit Hermine can do, that one is remarkable as something she states as possible in the same book, but apparently can't do. The only time we see someone do it is when Harry keeps on multiplying the booze while Hagrid and Slughorne get more and more wasted, but that is under the influence of felix felicis where he knows he can't fail.

Food in general seems to be hard, as even Hogwarts still employs a hundred house elves to do all the cooking instead of employing some kind of magical kitchen.

But you are right in that the setting serves the narrative and JKR made up the rules as the plot demanded.

In Chamber of Secrets soup from no where comes out of Molly Weasley's wand, she levitates an empty pot onto the fire the shoots soup out of her wand.

Why are you looking for any consistency in this pile of garbage? It's pretty obvious that Rowling's goal was not to create a believable world, or even an exciting and magical one. There's no other explanation - she must have purposedly created one the dullest franchise in the history of movie franchises. Seriously each episode following the boy wizard and his pals from Hogwarts Academy as they fight assorted villains has been indistinguishable from the others. Aside from the gloomy imagery, the series’ only consistency has been its lack of excitement and ineffective use of special effects, all to make magic unmagical, to make action seem inert.

Perhaps the die was cast when Rowling vetoed the idea of Spielberg directing the series; she made sure the series would never be mistaken for a work of art that meant anything to anybody?just ridiculously profitable cross-promotion for her books. The Harry Potter series might be anti-Christian (or not), but it’s certainly the anti-James Bond series in its refusal of wonder, beauty and excitement. No one wants to face that fact. Now, thankfully, they no longer have to.

>a-at least the books were good though
"No!"
The writing is dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs."

I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing. Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

>That edgy shit list
>With Great Gatsby on top of so many so much better books
>Muh intelligence is too high to enjoy books where the lyricism is centered around a narrative instead of a half baked philosophical idea
>And then picking an order amongst the idea centered books that show what a small minded brainlet I am

There is SO much wrong with that list it isn't funny. Stop reposting this hot contrarian garbage everywhere.

I think this requires more study...

Fuck you Topps, you aren't getting my ideas to fuel your lazy designers egos

Wait... I've read this EXACT post before. This is a copy-pasta.

That's a great failure of trying to seem intelligent right there.

I hate when an image gets ruined like this.
How can I imagine her not wearing anything under her skirt if you faggots keep putting disgusting underwear in the way?

>Done much to eradicate TBC lately?

I give 10% of every paycheck to the against malaria foundation.

Post that shit son.

Probably just run this as the core system with a bunch of reskinned stuff for the classes and setting.

This is exactly why I'd love a Harry Potter game but I could never play one because at the end of the day, everyone thinks Harry Potter is more about that Chosen One bullshit and less about mystery.

Honestly, every time I imagine doing a Harry Potter setting, my mind flashes to the Muggleborns importing memes into sterile-ass Hogwarts. Some jackass sends a Rickroll Howler or creates a giant sky-Pepe, and the Muggleborns are cracking up or sighing while the wizard kids are just at fucking sea. I've never been able to take HP seriously as a setting after picturing that. I blame the Harry Potter fandom for ruining Harry Potter. On so many levels.

I can't believe I had to scroll this far to find it.

DULLEST

>because I am forever gm and won't get to play this.

why don't you just propose this to your group as your next campaign?

it's set in the early 90s so no social media, not many cell phones, not as pervasive surveillance & the news wasn't a 24hr cycle of 'DOOM, DOOM'.

Then you miss out on the feeling of rubbing her so they get damp then pulling them down

GM Chris from D20 Radio is making Harry Potter theme for Genesys. Not saying it's the right system for it, just that at least one is at works. Probably there are others too.

How new are you

What a newfag