Very Simple RPG

[Phoebe]

I've been thinking about how to construct a very simple skeletal role playing game. The goal is to apply an analysis of the fundamental categories of human activity to an easy structure for generating a long-term imaginative group game.

I have issues with the setup of abilities and skills and extras that you get in many of the major game playing systems I've encountered, from D&D and Pathfinder to Gurps and Shadowrun. I feel like it doesn't accurately fit the things people are capable of doing or need to do as humans (or gnomes, etc), and the way they apply their personal characteristics and traits to those functions. As an analogy it's kind of like coming up with planetary epicycles to explain an elliptical orbit. You have to dig into all these little details to figure out who gets to move where and who gets to do something else in response and so on and so forth ad infinitum. And I don't understand why the six basic traits are the six basic traits that they are, and why other things get classified as skills or feats or enhancements or whatever. So I'm trying to come up with a different set of basic stats, and a limited list of human functions or areas in which those stats could be applied at different levels of bonus or detriment. Everything you want to do in your story, including encounters and combat, could be accounted for with the simple interaction of basic stats and a list of basic human functions. There wouldn't be any distinction between mundane activities and magical activities; rather, the entire natural world would be set up in such a way that enhancements RPGs now attribute to magic are simply very advanced ways of manipulating one's surroundings.

This is motivated a little bit by the types of problems that Mike's instant game helps solve - i.e. wanting to jump right into play quickly with a convenient setup. So I was very inspired by what they did with instant game. But where I'm aiming with this is the space where people are interested in the long-term group storytelling of an RPG but don't want to learn something as complex and detail-fussy as one of the standard systems, and don't want to be bound to the types of worlds that are most readily created through such systems. I came to this after having experiences trying to role play with my family and kids, and after my kid tried to do role playing with her friends, which mimicked experiences I've had starting out in different game systems. I'm also very inspired by the way Mike runs a paranoia campaign, which could be a pretty basic bloodbath, but instead turns into a weaving together of all kinds of storylines. It's like he's writing a novel and has a dozen co-authors doing a few paragraphs per chapter each!

Anyway, some people really love delving into the intricacies of a gaming system, and planning out the construction of characters and scenarios that will evolve in a particular set of rules and possibilities. That probably applies to most people here. In a nutshell, other people hate this but still like the experience of role playing games that comes from constructing a story together with other people. I wanted to come up with something that speaks to this group of people while still offering them a good starting point for their story creation.

I'm curious what people who are seasoned role-players think about this type of system and whether you've encountered other things like it already, so there is no point in my reinventing the wheel.

[Eliahad]

I'm trying to think of the right clarifying question that will help me understand what you are looking for...and I think I'm close to understanding. It will probably come to me during rehearsal tonight. I'm going to guess during the Hallelujah Chorus.

[Cazmonster]

Look at Tiny Dungeon - I just got it and its super flexible and super simple.

I would link you to it, but my work filter is now less lenient. ESPN still gets through, but gaming sites, no.

[akiva]

is very simple. And free.

[Phoebe]

Those look interesting and I will have to explore further, thank you! It's fun to think about how I would set up a system like that but it's even better in terms of the time required to do things if such a thing already exists and I can adapt it to my purposes. When it comes to encounters I'm also looking for more of a plus negative neutral determinant. I tried to do a thing, I rolled dice based on some characteristic or ability I have that should determine my success rate, and then I either failed or succeeded or some neutral outcome occurred. Or maybe I critically failed or succeeded. But this is about as complicated as I would like it to be.

[Mike]

Classifying stats and skills into the most logical universal system always gives me fits. I've tried and tried, and I'm not very good at it. It's hard to be universal when the needs of the story and genre change so many things. A gritty medieval setting will might need eight different skills for different categories of melee weapons, while a modern setting only needs one: hand-to-hand fighting. The level of "common knowledge" for every setting is so wildly different. A millennial today will proficient with smart phones, various electronic media, Office, social media, etc. Probably knows how to drive, read, the basics of algebra. All this and more is included under common knowledge without taking special skills for it (although you COULD). For most people, how good you are will be based on abilities like reaction time or logical reasoning or whatever. A newlywed in rural America 1845 will know virtually none of these things and will have a wildly different set of common knowledge that would be beyond the abilities of most of those millennials.

Having said that, I've still tried a bunch.

One of the simplest RPG rules sets (IMO) is to have each player describe their character. Simply talk about them like you talk about a person. Make sure they (and GM) have a good concept of who the character is. Then when something needs to be done, roll some dice. High results are good. Low results are bad. Before the player rolls, the GM gives a modifier (plus or minus) that reflects how likely the character is to succeed based on the description of the character and the particulars of the situation. This is just me restating the most basic basics of Stories System (which Instant Game is based on). The problem is that it puts all the decision-making on the GM to decide how to model the odds of success on the fly for every interaction that takes place in the course of a game. It's fatiguing and can sometimes come off as arbitrary (which it is). It's easy to abuse the system. Players like having tangible things on their sheet so that they can say, "I use THIS!"

So I don't know. I'm leaning now towards having general stats Body, Speed, Mind, Personality. Or less or more than these... whatever works for you. You have a world with magic... is that controlled by Mind? Personality? Do you need a Spirit stat to cover it? But have a few general stats that you think cover most things in your setting. And then have the players highlight the things (good and bad) that make their characters unique, and then those count as bonus or penalty when they might affect action. You could create different levels of them. Skills could come in levels of 0 (nothing), 1 (trained), 2 (good), 3 (great), 4 (world-class). Or they could be good/bad/indifferent. Or you can rank them from 1 to 20. Whatever.

Personally, I like the freedom of not having a set skill list or specific division of skills into categories or whatever. I'd rather the players tell me what they're good at, and then we define skills and traits to reflect that.

[And I'm sorry if this is all unhelpful babbling. I have been looking at fine-tuning my own system for Mostly Dead and Terror at Camp Pinewood. Your post inspired me to reexamine my work, and so this may be more about me than about answering your question. I can't tell the difference right now.]

[Phoebe]

All that you are working out is helpful to me whatever it is. What you are talking about, in terms of a generic classification of human activity and ability, is exactly what I am thinking of. Hold on a sec and im going to lay my groupings on you.

[Phoebe]

Sorry, got distracted, this is the skeleton:

People have basic powers that fall roughly into physical and "other" groupings, and other extra Gifts and Detriments. Then they have abilities/skills in some basic areas of human functioning. The range of numbers start off limited here, and then could increase gradually with XP, much as in other games.

Encounters would permit you to choose from some limited combination of these powers and abilities, as matches whatever action you're proposing to do; then roll against them and everything is settled accordingly, with very limited other factors capable of affecting or modifying those simple rolls (e.g. vs. the way in Pathfinder we have about 40 things needing to be calculated to see what your bonus on a roll is, or your AoO option, or...)

Magic is not magic; it's just a natural ability like any other, such as animal husbandry. A true expert at it might be able to talk to those animals, and the "explanation" would not be a magic spell but some mechanism of nature as yet not understood. Same with flight - maybe if you have certain acrobatic skills or speed, eventually you can just take off when you're really good at it, with time aloft/maneuverability increasing gradually.

The basic powers would be these, with the things in parentheses meant to parallel one another. In an encounter situation you would choose one or another of those pairings to "activate", as it were. So one person is trying to run up to the monster real fast, and the other is exercising a mental capacity very quickly to do something (e.g. re-wire the trap on the floor, talk the monster into a confused state, etc).

Physical (speed, strength, endurance, flexibility)
Mental (acuity, depth of knowledge, memory, creativity)

Other Gifts in which characters have a rating include:
Health, Beauty, Charm, Perceptiveness
Detriments include:
Gullible, Impulsive, Inattentive

The sub-kinds of gift and detriment don't oppose one another. So there's no "detriment" of being unattractive to others, but there's a low score on your Beauty or Charm as judged by others. Likewise, there's no Gift of being specially attentive, but you can have a low score for being inattentive, combined with strong performance on some of the basic mental capacities like acuity and memory.

The basic ability areas, in which there can be subsets but minimally so, are these, and the point of breaking them up is to set some limits on what you can specialize in, or how many different areas you can bring to bear upon a particular action:

Growth (natural production): things that contribute to nurture and growth, whether of foodstuffs, increasing resources of other kinds, nursing and educating children, fish farming, and so on.

Hunting (capture, acquisition): animals or humanoids, includes trapping, tracking, fighting with shield and sword, netting fish, pickpocket thievery, mining gold out of the ground, etc.

Technology (artificial production): creating non-natural products like tools (some uses of the tools may go here, but others go elsewhere - e.g. a rope-maker may not be expert in using the rope as a lasso); useful containers might go both here and under art (rain barrels are here, painted pottery is below - some gray areas)

Art (not a hard clear line separating this from technology, since a shipbuilder also might build a beautiful ship): all the arts and entertainments, including things like cooking the food that comes out of farming or hunting

Conveyances: transportation, vehicles, support structures - things that move things around (some technology skills can overlap here, but e.g. race car mechanic is a technologist while the driver is a conveyance specialist)

Defenses: barriers, protections, charms, survival skills (e.g. building fire, building shelters)

[Eliahad]

Mike made me have these thoughts:.

What if the core system was based more on a larger set of attributes (nature) and the skills were then tailored to that individual character (nurture).

Humans have, on the most part, stayed relatively the same over thousands of years. So the base attributes that define one human from another could be built into their physical and mental attributes. Then the skills could push their aptitude in specific areas higher.

Body could be:
Health
Stamina
Strength
Beauty
Dexterity
Speed
Reaction

Mental could be:
Will
Wisdom
Intelligence
Charm
Acuity
Wit
Senses

Ahhhhh, I've lost the thread for the details! And basically this is shadowrun. Oi.

[Phoebe]

I would take a bunch of those and if they didn't appear as part of the basic 4 mental and 4 physical powers, they would be gifts, and Charm is one I forgot to include.

I have issues with Wisdom being in there at all, along with Will. Maybe some of those things are best thought of as Detriments - sort of like Gurps you might have Positive Gifts and Negative Detriments, and among the negative would be that you're easily distracted, easily persuaded, impulsive, and so on. So I will edit my list above to experiment with this.

[Phoebe]

So let me sketch out what an encounter might go like. Suppose I run into a cave and a skeleton rises from the ground undead to greet me. I might propose an action like this:
1) I move as quickly as I can to the creature;
2) I try to deal it a smashing blow with my flail by invoking both strength and Hunting skill: martial;
3) I try to dodge out of the way of anything it does after that by exercising my flexibility (or maybe this should be called maneuverability - Dex bugs me for various reasons - I want that category to include any kind of physical maneuvering including acrobatics)
4) Instead of rolling against my endurance, I want to roll against my memory to see if I remember anything about what undead creatures are like and what their weaknesses might be

So I would roll in these four areas to see if I'm successful in these ways, and meanwhile the skeleton is rolling to defend itself against my assault, and whoever rolls better vs. their powers and abilities will prevail. That determines any subsequent rolls for damage, like normal. You can include the possibility of a critical success or failure as well, for an easy means of adding drama and flavor to the narrative.

Or suppose I'm in town and I want to figure out the mystery of a local landmark that appears to have special properties, but people have forgotten it. Along the way at different junctures I might roll against a combination of my mental powers (basic), ability to track down and locate things (dungeoneering as a mode of tracking or spelunking), or special abilities I have to persuade people (perhaps it's beauty or charm, perhaps it's hunting as a mode of intimidation or argument, perhaps it's art as I create an illusion or gift). But these would all be classified under very basic categories, so that we don't have to have a bazillion skills in everything. Are you skilled in e.g. Hunting: Tracking? Do you have a lot of Charm? Do you have skill in Art: Visual (the highest forms of which would be like magical illusion spells - think of the sculptures so good that they can move...)? So your basic few categories of skill would be broken down into a few major sub-kinds, and that's it.

[Mike]

And if you have a specific world in mind, then this sounds like something very doable.

Start with basic stats (Strength, Quickness, Recall, Intuition, whatever...) and give them whatever range you want. I'd probably make it small and simple:
0 - below average
1 - average
2 - above average
3 - exceptional

If you want to expand that out, go ahead. Whatever feels right.

Now go for some broad skill categories: Melee Fighting, Stealth/Clandestine, Social Skills, Survival Skills, Ranged Weapons, Art, etc, etc. Make them more narrow or broad if you wish. They can range from 0 - Untrained to 6 - World Class. Make that range as broad or narrow as you think suits your story.

Now when the players want to do something, they pick the stat and skill that they think applies. And sure, haggling over price will almost always involve Personality + Negotiation. But something like Intimidation could easily be Body + Intimidation or Personality + Intimidation depending on the player's approach. Ranged Weapons usually pairs with Coordination, but for certain sniper activities, maybe Reasoning in the better stat to use. Etc.

[Mike]

[Mike]

And all of this is assuming you are wanting a standard Stat+Skill vs. Target Number arrangement.

[Walrus]

Pre-hysteria - it's simple enough to be able to use as a drinking game - and frankly is hillarious!!

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/100386/PreHysteria

And it is free!
Have used it as a pickup game - admitedly it's not everyone's cup of Java, but it is Hillarious and full of lots of opportunity for crazy rpg stories!

[Phoebe]

Interesting... Will need to dig into that one when Im not on a dying phone. For the rolling stuff above, I was not thinking it was so granular as having to roll for each separate thing, but rather you would just describe the parts of your action and take a roll for it. You would specify the various things you had to roll against to make your plan go. But none of them would have modifiers or anything else you would need to calculate. I do like the idea of rolling for each part of an action even if it turned out to be four or five or six parts, because the part of the game my kids like the most is rolling the dice. In fact it would be even better if you specify that some things got the D20, others got the D12, others got the D6 and so forth, so they got to roll all those suckers, frequently. The part all of us dislike is calculating small variable additions and subtractions. And in general when specifying what you can do and how you gain levels in it I dislike how specific you have to get. You should be able to say something very generic like, I'm investing a point in my animal-care skill, or my sheltering skill. Anything that falls under that as a subcategory is this enhanced without having to be named and specifically boosted on its own, on the assumption that these general categories of ability are transferable, in that progress in one often means progress applicable to others. Not always but often. So rather than having to invest your ability in one specific subclass of a weapon that you're wielding in one specific way, you just slap a point of boost on to whatever skills you want to use in that entire Realm of the Human Action.

Anyway, I was thinking there wouldn't be many rolls but now that I think about it more in the context of players I'm dealing with, breaking down a particular turn into at least three or four rolls is a good idea because that's what they like to do. And honestly if you normally have to roll for multiple attacks, and attacks of opportunity and saving throws and damages and extra bonuses and all kinds of other random stuff each turn anyway, you're already dealing with lots of complex rolling situations. On top of which you have all the modifying. It's just a lot of detail to keep track of when I want the kids to be focused on the actual narration and imagining something. And there's the laziness.