Chameleon: Prototype TLHH RP System

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Okay, so here's a write-up of the system, in more formal language.


Why "Chameleon"?
This system is designed to "blend in" with any setting, and it's designed to flow seamlessly into any set of rules that the GM (the person running a game) may introduce. This also means that any Chameleon characters are theoretically able to "shift" into any setting, with its own unique rules.

The Core Mechanic:
You roll dice. More specifically, you want as many dice as possible to land above a certain number, called the "Target Number". What those dice look like, what that number is, and how many dice you roll are all determined by other rules, but no matter what, you always want to get as many dice above the Target Number as possible.


Character Creation:
When you create a character concept, you absolutely need the following areas...

Physical
This is where you describe the physical capabilities of your character. Are they strong? Fast? Agile? Try and keep this simple.

Sturdiness
This is where you note your character's resistance to harm, of any type. Should be simple, but note any particular resistances a character has.

Intellectual
This is where you describe the ability of your character to think clearly, make rational conclusions, and examine evidence. Again, simple is good.

Emotional
This is your character's response to other characters, how they interact with other people. Are they empathetic? Social? A loner?

These are the primary areas that games will use to generate Attributes from. Other areas that could be helpful...

Background
How'd your character get to where they are now? What's their story?

Personality
How does your character react to the world? How do they solve problems? Are they decisive? Brash? Nervous? Out for vengeance?

Goals
Big things your character wants to do, like...conquer the world


Once you have those down, it's time for the GM to look at your character, evaluate it, and then make up Attribute scores for them...


Attributes
An Attribute measures the raw force you can bring to bear on a situation in one area. Attributes are categorized according to the categories above (Physical, Sturdiness, Intellectual, Emotional), and just how many Attributes (and which ones) depend on the game. A combat-heavy game might have Attributes for Strength, Agility, and Speed under the Physical category, while a survival-oriented game might merely have Strength and Evasion as its Physical Attributes.

An Attribute is a single-digit number (double-digit Attributes are beyond superhuman) that determines how many dice you roll when you try to succeed in a task. This represents the pure strength of that Attribute coming to bear on the task.

The GM will derive your Attribute from your descriptions in those categories, and ask you about any nuances.


Abilities
It doesn't end at Attributes, though. Abilities further define your character's capabilities, by determining just how good your character is at utilizing a specific skill or technique within an Attribute. This may be something like Longsword Combat, or the more mundane Underwater Basketweaving. An Ability is measured according to a size of die, something which depends on the number of sides.

This is the progression of dice, from smallest to biggest (the number indicates how many sides are on the die...and yes, those of you who'd recognize this, I do believe I ripped this from D&D)...

d4 -> d6 -> d8 -> 2d4 -> d10 -> d12 -> 2d6 -> 2d8 -> d20

So, a d4 is the smallest die you can have, and a d20 is the biggest. What a normal die is differs, depending on the game, but a d6 or d8 is usually average.

When you attempt to complete a task by using an Ability, roll dice (according to your Attribute) and use the die specified by your Ability. By default, roll d6's. (Note: you can be forced to roll d4's, if you are either penalized by conditions or you are horrendously bad at a specific Ability, because of a character Flaw)


Other Modifications
Your character will also have Equipment, and perhaps personality Traits. Equipment is simply that. Stuff that your character carries around. Unless it's noteworthy, don't pay attention to it. Major gear, though, like a weapon or tool of the trade, should be noted. The GM will specify just what equipment does, but it should usually be something a bit useful, and nifty, sorta like a TCG card's gametext. For example: a weapon might increase the size of your die for a specific Ability.

Traits are similar, but they're found in the actual character. A GM decides how many Bonuses a character may have in a game. A Bonus is a positive trait, like Natural Diplomat. Just like Equipment, it gives a nifty bonus to the character in a game. A Flaw is a negative trait, and while theoretically you can take as many Flaws as you want, the GM should cap this. For each Flaw you take, you may have an additional Bonus. A Flaw is something like Bad Breath, which negatively impacts a character in a game. But don't just add it into mechanics, roleplay it!


Tasks
Different games will handle this differently, but when your characters have to complete a task, if it's not one that they reasonably could accomplish (or that is rather irrelevant to the story), have them attempt to succeed at it through rolling! Each player may choose one of their Abilities to use (or an Attribute, if they have no appropriate Ability), and then apply any bonuses/penalties from Equipment/Bonuses/Flaws. Then, roll the dice!

How do you determine success? The GM will set a Difficulty for the task. This is how many successes you must roll. A success is anything that equals or beats the Target Number, set by the GM.


What about--?
Any other rules? That's left to the individual games. A GM has a lot of control over their game, and should keep an eye on balance. (i.e., things like Flaws and Bonuses being equal, even if it takes more than one Flaw to balance out a Bonus, and the proper setting of dice, the Target Number, and the Difficulty of tasks)

Things like combat have been left out because not all Roleplay has combat as its central aspect. What about a spy roleplay that focuses on battles of wits between political members?

And so on. Any questions on anything here? Just real rough here, and I don't have a lot spelled out very well, but it's something.

[AgentDrake]

Nice. I can see something like this working quite well, especially if we can get a Dice Roller thing-gummy actually set up on the forum. Something flexible so that we can define how many sides on the dice, et cetera. I don't know what was on the CC boards, but I'm sure we can get something that will work.

[sickofpalantirs]

yep get the dice thing and a good game master and we are ready to rock and roll.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

http://javascript.internet.com/games/dice-roller.html

That's one quick one I found, if it's possible to grab the code for the forum. Mythweavers is a community with a nice die-rolling system. You type in the number of dice and the number of sides, inside [roll] brackets. Like...[roll]1d20[/roll] and such.

Anyhow. The dice, if needed, can also be rolled up by the GM when need be.

[Elf_Lvr]

Well, we definitely need to rig something up for combat, because I'm pretty sure most of the people here won't be satisfied without a little bit of open warfare.

I also think that there should potentially be a set of limits on things like attributes, abilities, and bonuses. We are NOT gonna have god-like characters because someone doesn't write any flaws in their character's descriptions.

For example, if we did an RPG in the LotR universe (which is probably what is going to end up happening at some point), each race of character might have a certain set of abilities/attributes that are slightly customizable by the character's creator, but not so much that we can have a hobbit shooting a bow like an elf, or a dwarf tracking as well as a ranger.

The flaw/bonus thing seems a little out of place to me... some people could just pick off a lot of "useless" physical attributes to increase their bonuses in useful things. Like getting bad breath in exchange for being able to beat their way through a brick wall, Hulk-style.

This sorta stuff will probably be determined by the GM of each individual RP, but we might want some general guidelines on "how-to-make-a-RP-that-doesn't-end-up-god-like."

[CarpeGuitarrem]

The flaw/bonus thing seems a little out of place to me... some people could just pick off a lot of "useless" physical attributes to increase their bonuses in useful things. Like getting bad breath in exchange for being able to beat their way through a brick wall, Hulk-style.

This would be something regulated by the GM. Flaws and bonuses should be balanced appropriately. Having the ability to surge in physical strength would be balanced out by Flaws that penalize you equally, such as perhaps lapsing out of consciousness.

I don't know if you have any familiarity with GURPS, but it uses a similar system. It assigns point values to Advantages and Disadvantages. This is something that, in Chameleon, can either be abstracted or made concrete by a GM.

http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=SJG31-0004

This sorta stuff will probably be determined by the GM of each individual RP, but we might want some general guidelines on "how-to-make-a-RP-that-doesn't-end-up-god-like."

Right. That's the way the system is designed. If a GM wants to make an RP with godlike characters and no flaws, they're free to do so, by allowing players to take lots of bonuses, high attributes, and some nice Abilities. That's up to the GM to decide. I'm envisioning an opening post that lays out a game's setting, and then some basic guidelines for power level.

And once I have a look over the rules, and a little extra time, I'll be writing up a guide on that. Once I figure out how it should scale. Also keeping in mind that some of this will only come out during playtesting. However, I think it's safe to say that having Abilities rolled on d20s is probably beyond godlike, for starters.

At the moment, I'm thinking that 2-3 is an average Attribute score, d6 is an average Ability score (most abilities being d8), and 3-4 is an average Target Number, with 1 success being the normal Difficulty. Like, difficulty for a standard task, one that might be slightly tricky.

[FM]

What about percentage dice? You need an "open" dice system, that lets you roll ANY dice you want, like rolling a d100 (for percentage plays) or a d3 (for some effects). For instance, Ray of Frost deals 1d3 damage.
For online play, I think a point-based system would work fairly better, and I'd avoid rolling dice altogether for as long as possible (just imagine a regular D&D combat online, it could take WEEKS for a battle between 4-5 characters to be over). Perhaps your abilities could translate in the number of HD you could take out in a single combat turn (allowing to weaken higher HD monsters by a percentage of that number), instead of rolling dice for attack and damage rolls.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I've hardly heard of d3, and the only major use I heard of for d100 was encounter tables. On top of that...a d100 would be beyond godlike in this scale, I think.

Combat here would be much faster than a D&D combat, and wouldn't necessarily be based in attack + damage. Remember, this is an entirely different system here. What I envision is people posting relevant abilities/attributes they want to use in non-combat situations, and as for combat...that would differ per game.

On top of that, combat itself probably wouldn't be the focal point of this system.

[Elf_Lvr]

Well, combat seems to be the focus of all the Free-Forms we've seen so far, and I doubt that's likely to change just because we move to a structured thing. Combat is going to be a major part of this whole thing, and I'm really struggling to come up with a good system for it.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Actually, I just had a brainstorm on one way you could handle combat. Namely, gunfighting. You get to put Wound Points in three areas: Light, Moderate, and Critical.

Then, you've got rolls by an attacker, and rolls by a defender. The attacker's roll (his ability to shoot straight) goes against the defender's roll (the ability to take cover and avoid a bullet). If the attacker beats the defender, look at the discrepancy between the two. If it's small, the defender loses a Light Wound Point. A minor wound. If it's larger, that's a bigger wound. Take a point away from Moderate. If it's big enough, that's a Critical wound. Yeah, you take a point out of Critical.

Let's say that when you run out of Light Wound Points, all Light wounds go straight to Moderate wounds, and you get a penalty. When all Moderate Wound Points are gone, Moderate wounds go straight to Critical wounds, and you get a penalty. Both of those penalties would probably stack. Anyhow, when your Critical Wound Points are gone, you die or are incapacitated.

That should probably work.

I'll probably actually be cooking up an initial playtesting RP based on my concept of The Hidden, just to see how things scale, and to get things moving. Might even bump the Average die up to d8, to allow for more variety.

[sickofpalantirs]

probably would shoot for 3 light points...2 moderate points and a critical point? or one of each?

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Well, I was thinking maybe it could be based off of an Attribute in Sturdiness. Like, say, an Attribute called Toughness. It has a certain value, and you get to distribute points however you want. So you could theoretically have lots of Critical points (for a berserk type of character), but your character would suffer the penalties for having no Light or Moderate points pretty quickly. So they'd take a long time to die, but their effectiveness would be decreased quickly. On the other hand, you could have an agile but fragile character who has one or two Critical points, and lots of Moderate and Light points. So they don't suffer the penalties, but one big mess-up or hard shot, and they go down.

[FM]

You know, that might work. However, since combat is usually between PCs and NPCs, so as to save the DM trouble for rolling both defensive AND offensive dice, you could simply assign a number (similar to Armor Class in D&D) to minions, and the amount of "damage" the players would do to it would be determined by how much they exceed the given number. Also, to mkae things faster, you could have some rules to larger battles, like treating small packs of Goblins or so as one single enemy for attacking purposes, etc.
Would be even faster, and simpler.
PS: Not entirely sold out on the L, M, C thing, perhaps a straight value for hit points would be smoothier. Given an AC of, say, 12, for a 4 hp Goblin, and a player with no modifier, the player would roll a D20 to attack. Assuming he rolled 13 or better, he struck true. So, if he rolled a 15, the Goblin lost 3 hp and is now hanging on 1 hp only. If he rolled 16 or better, he killed it in a single blow. SOmething like this, to drastically reduce the number of dice rolled.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Well, all of it would be fluid. This wouldn't be a set combat system for anything, but one that I'll actually probably be implementing into my test game.

But that aside, I'd like to stay clear of a D&D combat clone. It doesn't have the feel at all of combat where you could potentially get killed in one shot at any time, by a normal blow. (Which would be covered by the idea of having a Critical point average of 1 or 2 for a normal person) That's what I don't like about a single HP value. D&D combat always comes down to "wear them down as much as possible". It works fine for what it is (epic sword-and-sorcery combat), but it doesn't give a gritty enough system to do it with. In my mind, the same bullet (which does identical damage no matter where it hits you) could either disable your arm or kill you. Based on how accurate it is. D&D bases lethality in the damage roll, not the attack roll. This would put lethality in the attack roll, and remove the damage roll. (Most weapons would deal one point of damage, with some big ones dealing two)

So actually, as far as GM work goes, it's the same. And maybe less. You roll an attack die and defense die, as opposed to rolling an attack die and damage die. The other thing I like about that...is that it represents that an attack effort and a defense effort are both dynamic. An attack can be well-done or poorly-done, and a defense can be the same way. It's not like Final Fantasy, where you take turns attacking.

[FM]

D&D DOES have combat rules to deal with targetted attacks, you know. Most people simply avoid using it, because most groups will rather use the system as it is, since any set of rules that makes combat more deadly or tricky WILL hurt the PCs more, since NPCs are just that, random minions that can get killed, run away, etc, but the PCs are always the same, taking blow after blow, THEMSELVES being "worn down", thus why most playgroups will usually experiment with the optional rules for targeted combat for a while and revert to the regular way. Also, the way I suggested, damage rolls would be ignored completly, and the attack roll itself would play a major role. In the example I gave, it's fairly common for a trained sword fighter to hit once and drop the opponent, given a rather "weak" opponent as a Goblin, most swordplayers will usually aim for lethal areas anyway, so that way, the better the attack roll, the closest to hitting a lethal area (and hitting it hard enough, of course) you are. I can't see how this relates to the abstract "damage rolls" system of D&D, which makes weapons pretty much obsolete from 6th level onward, since the damage BONUSES are more than enough to make up for a roll of 1 in a d8, for instance. The combat system I suggested is not only simpler than yours, being more fluid and quicker, but it's ALSO more "realistic" flavor-wise, after all, I don't see how "distributing damage points between Light, Moderate and Critical" is flavorful, it's actually closer to the abstract "generic hit point loss" system from D&D.
But hey, I volunteered to help and no one ACTUALLY asked for my help, so I'm just barging in, go on and do your thing. Might work out better, after all.
PS: There are also rules for parrying in D&D, if a character wants to fight defensively. And then, there are feats that increase your defense based on base attack bonus, which pretty much stands for a character ability to parry a few blows. There're also feats for dodging blows, akills for tumbling across the battlefield, etc. It's not at all like Final Fantasy...