DBZ Campaign

Hey Veeky Forums, all the FighterZ talk and the ending of Super has me in the mood for some Dragonball goodness. I've been looking over systems and think that Marvel Heroic is the closest to what I would want in a game. It looks like the right mix of crunch and rules without tying down too much. The various homebrews I've seen all seem to get caught up in the details and/or attempting to balance the universe.

So, I figured I'd ask here. Has anyone had any luck with a DB(Z) game? Is there anyone around with experience with Marvel Heroic that can let me know how it would play out?

Other urls found in this thread:

1d4chan.org/wiki/Dragon_Ball_PNP_RPG
nerdnyc.com/tmp/marvel/Hero-Cheat-Sheet.pdf
nerdnyc.com/tmp/marvel/Watcher-Cheat-Sheet.pdf
files.meetup.com/1713643/mhr_randomdatafiles.pdf
docs.google.com/document/d/1oTq1TU-_zMdTRR4IoJ9VXu5vvq4lzSm2GNZ1-tU6lvs/edit#heading=h.nba7emrym9nu
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Nobody?

There is literally a system for exactly that and it's a thing of beauty.

1d4chan.org/wiki/Dragon_Ball_PNP_RPG

Have you tried online?

I'm in the research phase right now. Learning systems and doing interest checks rather than setting up a game right now.

Thanks, I'm looking into this right now.

It's not quite exact, but Godbound could be worth at least checking out. It's free, handles really high-level combat well, and I've heard of people using it for DBZ games before.

Ugh. No, that thing's a trainwreck. And that's coming from someone who likes Fuzion rpgs.

It looks like it, but there are a couple of things I'm seeing in terms of setting things up.

There was a Veeky Forums Dragon Ball rpg but it fell through.

Yeah, I was keeping an eye on that. The status effect and equipment stuff felt too bogged down. And I wasn't a fan of the attempts at race balance.

The whole KI system was also unbalanced and easily exploitable.

That was why I was looking at superhero systems and liked the SFX stuff from Marvel Heroic acting as special moves rather than attempting to mechanically represent BP and all that jazz. It's a pipe dream.

Legends of the Wulin or Strike!.

Only RPGs I know about that make fighting a centerpiece (though with wildly different approaches).

How's Strike!?

I am actually in a campaign right now styled after the original Dragon Ball. Before Z, before Saiyans and aliens and Time Travelers and power levels. Back when it was just a half dozen martial artists traveling around, fighting monsters, fighting armies, fighting each other, and constantly trying to invent or ReDiscover new martial arts techniques to give themselves an edge.

The DM is using the exalted system, with his own home-brewed setting. 100 small city-states in not!China. The gods of each city-state, because it is an Eastern setting and exalted derived, everything has its own God, got together and decided with open Warfare was bad for business. It kills too many worshipers. So all conflicts between cities are resolved via martial arts tournaments in which one to five Champions are selected to represent each City, depending on the size and severity of the issue. the party all started out as mortal martial artists, that's through hard work, training, and the favor of the Gods from several cities, we all basically earned the equivalent of terrestrial exaltation. Right now the campaign is winding down and we are each looking to establish our own martial arts school, which means fighting other martial arts Masters for Prestige and impressing potential students.

Hey, that's pretty cool.

It's class and teamwork based, with grid tactics, so probably not really the thing you want for DBZ (unless you want to play something like the Ginyu Force).

Okay, so reading over some of this stuff has given me a few ideas. Let's talk about a setup.

I was thinking Lord Slug shows up in year 761 and pulls his planetary conquest and wish for youth before the Frieza saga. Goku would try to stop him but get bodied by Slug, possibly killed. Not sure yet.

Anyway, I figured Slug's clan and minions would be a good excuse for alien characters around, Radditz and potentially other Saiyan/Halfbreeds could show up looking for Kakarot. Namekians could show up after learning of Slug's rejuvenation. Androids from the collapsed Red Ribbon army or Capsule Corp may be in development to protect a resistance. And then you've got plain old humans holding out with ki powers and tech.

How's that for at least a foundation?

>Marvel Heroic
Oh shit, how did I miss this?

I've never done a DBZ game with this, but I've got some links you might like.
>Cheat sheet for players
nerdnyc.com/tmp/marvel/Hero-Cheat-Sheet.pdf
>Cheat sheet for DMs
nerdnyc.com/tmp/marvel/Watcher-Cheat-Sheet.pdf
>RNG-based char gen
files.meetup.com/1713643/mhr_randomdatafiles.pdf

Also check out Plot Points or Exploring Infinity

Thanks. I'll check them out.

This works as a basis. If I were to make a Martial Artist for this game, I would do something like

>Affiliations
Solo d6, Buddy d10, Team d8

>Distinctions
Don't Count Me Out!
Karate Cowboy
If You Can't Beat 'Em Trick 'Em

>Power Set: Lone Star Training
>>Enhanced Durability D8
>>Enhanced Speed D8
>>Enhanced Stamina D8
>>Enhanced Strength D8
>>SFX: Roundhouse. Step up or double Enhanced Strength die against a single target. Remove highest-rolling die and add an additional die to your total
>>SFX: Ki Focus. In a pool including a Lone Star Training die, replace two dice of equal steps with one die of +1 step.
>>SFX: Second Wind. Before you make an action including a Lone Star Training power, you may move your physical stress die to the doom pool and step up the Lone Star Training power by +1 for this action.
>>Limit: Conscious Activation. While stressed out, asleep, or unconscious, shutdown Lone Star Training. Recover Lone Star Training when you recover that stress or wake up. If you take mental trauma, shutdown Lone Star Training until you recover that trauma.

>Specialties:
Combat Expert D8
Menace Expert D8
Tech Expert D8
Vehicle Expert D8

And Milestones to taste.

How does one adapt transformations for tabletop, tho? In the manga they're usually just free power ups. The only way I can see them working is by adding heavy ki consumption / a time limit.

Going by MH, a transformation would be a new power set. If you wanted access to both, you should make them mutually exclusive. The base form with more utility and the heightened form with a weakness to represent the drain, either in terms of ki or stamina.

Temporary ones? Assets, especially ones you pay PP for to keep for the whole scene.

Tell me user, how do you make the perfect character?

Impossible. Every powerset must have a weakness and Cell is perfect.

Dragon Ball Z: The Anime Adventure Game is a pen and paper RPG that utilizes the Fuzion D6 system, published by R. Talsorian Games.
It is conveniently located in Da Archive.
The rules are super simple and easy to follow the only problem is that the numbers get more that a little nutty but the books tell you how you can minimize that fairly easily
All you really need to do is roll a few D6 add your skill/ability to it and say how many point of Energy you're spending on attacks or defense

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Try Anima: Beyond Fantasy. It has a pretty workable ki system. Might need to tone down the critical rules as combat is pretty brutal.

Get ready for OC fan Transformations

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So goddamned dumb.

>that Cell

Im fucking down for a DB game.

Marvel Heroics would work fine for what you want, since it's already designed for Superheroes, you would just say that a normal guy like Hercules would basically have all d4s compared to the other characters who would have one d8s in the Super Sayain stages and d10s-d12s when they reach SSGSS.

Better than Super's shit though where everyone is just a new color

Honestly the levels they've reached in Super is a bit ridiculous as well, but at the very least they aren't just adding more limbs and spikes every-fucking-where. The pictures I referenced in my post are completely over the top and stupid. "Oh man Cooler is now 30 feet tall and has 4 arms and spikes everywhere"

That's retarded. Absolutely retarded.

True it's over the top and more than a little edgy but my pint is that it is a clear change in the characters design instead of just swapping the color palette
It's more visually interesting even if it is a little overdesigned

To be fair: they have a history of crappy palette swaps and nearly insignificant detail changes. Goku going super? Just make him blonde with blue eyes, and change his aura to yellow. Oh, there's a second level of super? Make his hair a little longer.

The reasons the 'monsters' got more involved super-modes is that A: They're monsters, they have to look monstrous and intimidating or else they're just another shmuck. And B: They're temporary. We have to draw the power-up form for an episode, maybe three, before we never see them again. Easy animation budget.

This is why I honestly never liked Z, GT, or Super. Dragonball was best when Goku was just a particularly skilled human prodigy fighting a bunch of other humans, semi-humans, freaks, and earthling monsters. Once they started getting cosmic, the series went to shit with constant 'I know we said X was the scariest thing in the galaxy, but here's Y, his big brother! And Z, his dad! And this other guy we've never mentioned before, even when a literal god in charge of a quarter of the universe was listing off everyone stronger than you. And then there's this guy who's even stronger!" Seriously, let it die. Move on. Make another fighting anime. Do something else. Go back to your roots and do it all again. *SOMETHING*

>The various homebrews I've seen all seem to get caught up in the details and/or attempting to balance the universe.
How about something where the mechanics are focused around controlling the narrative of the scene instead of tracking hits blow-by-blow?

docs.google.com/document/d/1oTq1TU-_zMdTRR4IoJ9VXu5vvq4lzSm2GNZ1-tU6lvs/edit#heading=h.nba7emrym9nu

Literally the reason SS goes blond is because Toriyama was sick of filling in Goku's hair in the manga and he could just leave it white in a B&W work.

Yet one more reason being lazy pays off in the long run.

That augmented Frieza actually looks nice, as long as we're giving Frieza an augmented form. The spikes are kept very minimal and the head just grows back some of the brow bones that it had in his 1st form anyway.

I hated this transformation, for a number of reasons - not the least of which is the fact that it flew in the face of the King Cold presented in the manga or anime, just like the rest of the webcomic does. We are *never* given a reason to think that Cold isn't already in his final form when we meet him, and he isn't suggested or demonstrated to be any stronger than Frieza and Frieza doesn't treat him with any degree of deference, so it's safe to assume that the Cold we saw in DBZ was already in his most powerful state.

But even assuming for a moment that it really was just his 2nd form, and around the same level of Frieza 100% in power, all that it would have taken to establish Cold as a threat would be to presume that the same scale of difference between Frieza's 2nd and 100% power forms applies to Cold. At the risk of breaking out bullshit power levels, Frieza at 100% power (120 million) is 120 times stronger than his 2nd form (an even 1 million). If you apply the same scale of difference to Cold, that would put Cold's 100% power form at over 14 billion, which is significantly larger than anyone has ever guessed Super-Perfect Cell's power level (Daizenshuu 7 pegged it at around 1 billion).

My point being that there's no reason to make up whole new transformations just to play up Cold. All that Dragon Ball Multiverse had to do was just hold off on having him transform and make his 4th form his most powerful state, and we'd all buy it. No need to break out the random spines and extra arms.

For Dragonball Z, yeah, something like Marvel Heroic would work really well.

For Dragonball, I don’t know.

>was just a particularly skilled human prodigy
He had a tail and could shrug off small arms fire.

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