/grognard/ - Traditional Games

Well, back on halfchan we had 1d4chan, and it has a respository of lots of homebrewed stuff.

http://1d4chan.org/wiki//tg/_gets_shit_done

Care to tell us about your systems - what sort of games they're meant for, what (if any) the settings are like, what sets them apart, the usual stuff?

>>21
I completely forgot about 1d4chan, thanks for reminding me.

The system I've had in the back of my mind is a settingless system. More just the bare-bone thought of mechanics. It would be based on various layers of HP. Stamina that regenerates per round, well being that you regain per day, then deeply physical that would require medical aid and would persist for awhile (broken limbs for example). The rest of the system is based to work one top of the HP system. Actions would be based on consumption of the higher HP pools, but could be converted into lower if the player were to strain themselves more than their body could take to get more 'umpf' out of an action. Even the idea of magic that would require a personal sacrifice for higher yields could be done within this system (like the idea used in Unknown Armies).

The idea comes from most system I've played the thought of how you're alive and how much damage you can take seems more like an afterthought and is disjointed from the rest of the system. I'm sure there are other systems that better integrate a player's health, but the only one I can think of is Deadlands, and that's a cluster of dice, playing cards, and poker-chips. Fun system, but also a mess.

>>22
Interesting concept, and I would enjoy seeing it developed further. Even if it in itself is not a complete system, developing it as a theory/mechanism for handling health could be of benefit to other people developing systems, or modifying existing systems.

HP's always been a bit of a problem, and I think tying it into other game mechanics, as you're proposing, would allow greater depth and perhaps better simulation of health, while not spending an inordinate amount of time calculating it and whatnot - since it's also being used for other stuff, if you get what I'm saying.

>>20
I wrote a fully fledged rules set that was minimalistic, easy to run, easy to learn, and still had depth and it just got tossed because it wasn't 3.5 or something they already had used.

It's kind of the same thing as writing a huge (like 20-30 pages worth of prepared material) sandbox. If you get a group that just wants to be railroaded and led along some huge apocalyptic save the world path every time you're going to get burned, bad.

>>33
I know your pain. People getting so very invested in one system that they refuse to spread out and learn other systems.

I don't think it helps when you have many volumes of splat books to further enhance and expand upon a single system. Lots of money can be spent on a single system. Lots to read, lots to learn, and little reasons to branch out because of that.

I can't fault the companies making the books for trying to stay in business, but it can suck when lots of players have no desire to try new things.


Do you still have your system written out? Was it digital, or written in some notebook somewhere?

>>23
That was my idea. Though it was very basic to the point where things like 'race' and 'class' would be shoehorned in much like how HP seems shoehorned in other systems. Because of that I've kept it in my mind, but haven't fleshed it out much.

>>34
An observation I have had about splatbooks: everyone has their own pet splatbook and usually only that single person knows its mechanics. Invariably they being using more obscure / complicated mechanics until they might as well just be making the shit up themselves because nobody else has the ability or the time to care. There's also the unfortunately common occurrence of some guy who comes into a premade setting and wants to bring his new splatbook race or class into it no matter what and will hate you until the end of time if you don't change absolutely everything to accommodate him. This inevitably pisses of the other players and changes the D in DM to daycare.

Yeah I wrote it all out in a notebook.

I have never been a fan of HP either. HP and XP have never really sat well with me along with a lot of the other things you pointed out including class and race (not as archetypes but as defined mechanical roles). For HP I have tried a few things and can't actually remember which one I settled on. As far as XP goes, I just ended up scaling the leveling mechanic in my system off of natural criticals. It's not 1:1 and it scales exponentially but still makes the leveling process more exciting and erratic.