The Campaign Builder's Guild

I've been working for a while on this framework, since as a GM i started trying to run all sorts of interesting settings and games, which tended towards falling flat because either limitations of the systems available, or people were scared off by the rulers heavier systems that half the players wanted to use. So I sat down trying to find a base i could use for most of my campaign ideas.

The key ideas :

• Char gen is point buy. I've played both kinds of systems, and I've always liked pure point buy more.
• Make your own everything : Skills, "Feat"-equivalent items, and disadvantages can all be player made, and the GM decides with player whether things are fair and what cost to set for them.
• Toughness-Penalty Combat : There isn't hp, rather like some other systems, damage is accrued via penalties to your later damage resist rolls, with more exotic penalties taking effect as your character gets more beat up.
• Classless : There aren't classes in the traditional sense, although there are packages to allow skill specialties and buying advantages/disadvantages.
• Fully Interpretation based checks : There are very few set rules for circumstance modifiers/penalties, the GM is expected to judge all that based on the situation and make up some numbers. In combat, the GM decides initiative order and how many actions can be executed per turn.

The last point is a bit dangerous, but on the plus side, it allows an infinite number of types of maneuvers and stunts to be made, so I want to see how it goes. But yea. ask me anything. I want to see this come to life more, and I've reached about a stopping point for what I can do without some reactions from people.

Since I wanted this to always remain a free community gift, it is copyrighted as you may note... but, it's Creative commons BY-NC-SA. So things aren't very restricted in the least.

The character building aspects remind me of One Roll Engine, with the sub-games Godlike (A WWII era Superhero game) and NEMESIS (a Horror game).  There you get a certain number of points based on what style of play you want, and use these to buy points in your stats (Body, Mind, Coordination, etc), as well as your skills, powers (like super powers, magic, or psychic abilities), and traits (anything that doesn't fall into one of the above categories.  Different things have different costs based on how good they are to have.

I think you might be doing yourself a disservice retaining some d20 conventions that aren't really necessary in a rules-light game. For example, with your abstract skills system and the encouragement to use skills creatively, do you even really need base stats? Characters can just define skills based on whatever they're good at, and use those as a single modifier to the roll. Perhaps point costs could be determined by how "generic" the skill is-- you could have a skill called "Awesome Badassery" but one level in it should probably cost as much as like 10 specific skills, because of all it seems like it could do. Specific saving throws also seem like they could be better handled by skill checks instead, too.

For further inspiration, you might want to look at systems like Risus and Fudge. :)

Quote from: sparkletwist
I think you might be doing yourself a disservice retaining some d20 conventions that aren't really necessary in a rules-light game. For example, with your abstract skills system and the encouragement to use skills creatively, do you even really need base stats? Characters can just define skills based on whatever they're good at, and use those as a single modifier to the roll. Perhaps point costs could be determined by how "generic" the skill is-- you could have a skill called "Awesome Badassery" but one level in it should probably cost as much as like 10 specific skills, because of all it seems like it could do. Specific saving throws also seem like they could be better handled by skill checks instead, too.

For further inspiration, you might want to look at systems like Risus and Fudge. :)

At the risk of hijacking with a debate about the construction of different game systems, I just want to mention that having base stats like strength and intelligence is usually around for a reason, and gets across that people have different natural abilities that may make them more inclined towards certain kinds of skills.  Lots of strong, bulky characters will have trouble wriggling out of tight spots, whereas not everyone has the body necessary for lifting heavy loads.  That said, I will admit that having a base stat does lead to categorizing what things like "intelligence" mean, which can cause problems. 

Quote from: Seraphine_HarmoniumAt the risk of hijacking with a debate about the construction of different game systems, I just want to mention that having base stats like strength and intelligence is usually around for a reason, and gets across that people have different natural abilities that may make them more inclined towards certain kinds of skills.

Sure, but that's far more relevant in a system where all that is explicitly defined and there are definitive rules written that interact with those stats.

In a system that's not, like this one, things that characters are and aren't good at could be defined by the way the essentially arbitrary skills are named. Actually, a character is who is specifically supposed to be bad at something might have a "negative skill" or whatever, like, say someone in the game is "Agile Gymnast +2", why not give the big bulky guy "Agile Gymnast -2"?

Quote from: Seraphine_Harmonium

Quote from: sparkletwist
I think you might be doing yourself a disservice retaining some d20 conventions that aren't really necessary in a rules-light game. For example, with your abstract skills system and the encouragement to use skills creatively, do you even really need base stats? Characters can just define skills based on whatever they're good at, and use those as a single modifier to the roll. Perhaps point costs could be determined by how "generic" the skill is-- you could have a skill called "Awesome Badassery" but one level in it should probably cost as much as like 10 specific skills, because of all it seems like it could do. Specific saving throws also seem like they could be better handled by skill checks instead, too.

For further inspiration, you might want to look at systems like Risus and Fudge. :)

At the risk of hijacking with a debate about the construction of different game systems, I just want to mention that having base stats like strength and intelligence is usually around for a reason, and gets across that people have different natural abilities that may make them more inclined towards certain kinds of skills.  Lots of strong, bulky characters will have trouble wriggling out of tight spots, whereas not everyone has the body necessary for lifting heavy loads.  That said, I will admit that having a base stat does lead to categorizing what things like "intelligence" mean, which can cause problems.  

What Seraphine said is mainly is why I kept it, since I still like the idea of using base stats alone to handle some quick questions. There is concern about how relevant they may be, but thinking about pulling them out... saving throws would need to be removed or redesigned too, I guess those could become skills too though. Hmm.

I think right now, you could probably break down primary stats into innate aspects and secondary stats into skills, I'm just not sure whether that would be helpful or more confusing to new players. I'm a firm believer that every minute spent on the rules portion of character gen (not writing up a concept, that's different), decreases the willingness of new players to pick up a system, and if it really goes long time to gen, it decreases the chance that the campaign itself will take off. It was the hope that prim/secondary stats would reduce the number of innate aspects and skills the characters need to invent, thus speeding things up, but if that turns out to not hold true (or if they're more trouble than they're worth in game)... it might be better to ditch them. I'll ponder this.

On a side note, how big of an issue in practice is it, that stats->skills don't have explicit mapping?  The majority of the time I thought it'd be a pretty quick consensus during a check, and after the first time it was agreed upon, it'd likely remain that way. So the first time Agile Gymnast is rolled, people quickly agree that it's probably Dex based 90% of the time, and that's that.

EDIT: Per some of the IRC comments I'm also considering switching to 2d10. I'm not a huge proponent of "results must be super bell-curvelike!" but I can see the argument for having them be a little more reliable than the 1 die fickleness.

Quote from: DrKisaragiOn a side note, how big of an issue in practice is it, that stats->skills don't have explicit mapping?  The majority of the time I thought it'd be a pretty quick consensus during a check, and after the first time it was agreed upon, it'd likely remain that way. So the first time Agile Gymnast is rolled, people quickly agree that it's probably Dex based 90% of the time, and that's that.

For that skill, probably not that big of a deal. For other skills, though, it can be. Like, socially-oriented skills-- do you roll them on Intelligence, Wits, or Charisma? Do you really want to sit there debating it for every single use of every single skill?  For something like "Intimidation" or "Persuasion" or something, it seems like it could go a lot of different ways.

One of the common pitfalls of rules-light games that rely on a lot of quick rulings like this is that they eventually stop being rules-light, because the GM, in an effort to be consistent, starts codifying how to rule on things. For example, "Intimidation" is Int-based here for this guy, and Cha-based there for that guy, and maybe even Str-based for the big bruiser guy, and so on. But anyway, what it means is that, essentially, the GM is adding lots of new rules. Not only that, but rules that are not very well balanced, because they're being thought up on the spur of the moment. I feel it's better to avoid this sort of thing as much as possible, by using very generic mechanics that are applicable to a lot of situations in general. There may still be debates about skill applicability with "pick a skill and use it," but that's more situational, and the naming and nature of the skill is in the player's hands-- so I would think there is not nearly the urge to codify everything rigidly and defeat the point of the game.

Anyway, personally, I favor multiple dice with more bell-curvy results. But then again, I've got something of a fondness for weird dice-rolling schemes in general. :D

Something I like about One Roll Engine, is that skills aren't rigidly tied to a particular base skill.  The total dice rolled equals Stat+Skill, but you can use whichever stat applies at the moment.  I believe one of the hypothetical examples was a character trying to use an alien blaster rifle might roll Mind+Firearms instead of Coordination+Firearms, since the crux of the matter is figuring out how to actually make it work.   

This isn't quite as "freeform" or "creative" as it sounds. All you're really doing here is using a practical skill as a knowledge skill when trying to determine how much abstract knowledge you might have about that thing. It's something that could easily be distilled into a more concrete rule-- which, of course, is good, except that the "rules-light" game just got a little heavier.

Compare this to simply saying "It involves Firearms. Roll Firearms" without having to mess with any kind of base stat at all. Which way is lighter?

Quote from: sparkletwist
This isn't quite as "freeform" or "creative" as it sounds. All you're really doing here is using a practical skill as a knowledge skill when trying to determine how much abstract knowledge you might have about that thing. It's something that could easily be distilled into a more concrete rule-- which, of course, is good, except that the "rules-light" game just got a little heavier.

Compare this to simply saying "It involves Firearms. Roll Firearms" without having to mess with any kind of base stat at all. Which way is lighter?

I get the idea... but there's always going to be a want for some modifiers that apply to more than one skill, aren't there?. FATE does it as you're describing, but FATE also doesn't have much mechanism  for having general familiarity in a set of skills, unless you use one of your Aspects on defining it, and even then you have to use fate points to call that proficiency forth. In the end we come back to people wanting some way to spend a little more to boost the results of a handful of skills.

My other thoughts about how this worked in practice would be that the player would probably declare they wanted to use a certain stat as their modifier, and the GM would only make an argument out of it if it didn't make sense. I've played games in more than one system that was like that so I thought it'd be fine enough to use here. It seems Seraphine has had similar experiences but sparkle's didn't go so well, if I'm reading right.

Quote from: DrKisaragiI get the idea... but there's always going to be a want for some modifiers that apply to more than one skill, aren't there?.

In a system where the skills are completely ad hoc, I don't see why this has to be the case at all. If you want a more overreaching bonus, why not just define your skill to be more inclusive?

If you want different bonuses for certain things within the same general area of competence, there could be some rule that if you have a more generic skill, buying more levels of a specific skill that would be contained inside of it only costs the difference. So, for example, if you've got "Badass Gunslinger +5", it only costs you the equivalent price of 1 rank to get "Shooting Dudes in the Face +6".