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8 Rules Systems, Classic And Otherwise, That Are Pretty Fantastic

23/6/2016

9 Comments

 
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​‘It’s a rule system, Jim, but not as you know it!’

 After I started playing RPG’s and for something like 7 months, I only played D&D, and it was amazing. I love it, good old D20s, they are predictable, trustworthy and there are loads of resources out there.
 
Until one day, in between adventures, one of our older players brought in a dusty, old rulebook. It was something called ‘Traveller’. And it was very clear, even to us noobs, that it was Firefly in a bottle. Smugglers and traders, in a huge human empire? FTL (Faster Than Light) travel and Space Stations? Yes please!
 
The doors of perception had been blown asunder, and since then, I started to play (and often run games in) other rule systems, belonging to other games. And these the 8 that I’ve recently come across, each great in its own right.

1. D&D –
The juggernaut. Fantasy-based, although some of my friends have adapted it to contemporary environments. A D20 system, you roll, add your skill bonus, and see if your roll is high enough to succeed at whatever it is you set out to do. Character creation is straightforward, and can be as shallow or as detailed as you desire. The standard.

2. Traveller –
A sci-fi background, as old as D&D. Smugglers, traders and military in the distant future. As the original rules came out in the 70s, it still has a very gritty, low-tech feel to it (hence the usual comparison with the iconic series Firefly).

Character creation is fantastic, you start at 18 years, and you carry on trying to get jobs and/or studying, improving your skills as you go along (including simply being a space wanderer), and stop at whatever age you want. Famously, in previous editions, you could DIE during character creation (as in, for example, your character died during basic military training), and had to start again. You roll 2D6, add your skills, and see if you exceed 8 for a success. Space opera at its best, there are websites collating the tens of thousands of star systems of the galaxy, and most are fan made.

3. Through the Breach / Malifaux –
Through the Breach is the RPG sister game to the miniature game Malifaux. The background is perfection (steampunk, with horror and magic components). The titular Breach is a portal open to an empty city (Malifaux) in another world. There, and with the discovery of soulgems, Victorian tech met the atomic age, or close to it, as well as magic. Late 19 century intrigue with magic and a frontier feel...All of this said, the game rules are different enough from more common RPG’s that it does have quite a sharp learning curve, even if I found Character Creation positively engaging. I think that at the end, I didn’t have the time to dedicate myself to the game as it clearly and absolutely deserved. I used some of the background in other games and moved on. If you like any of the genres I mentioned, it is really worth a look.

4. Call of Cthulhu –
Another one of the Old Ones (get it?). CoC is deep, engaging, horrific and damn fun. Character Creation is trivial, and it uses a D100 skill and play set. Your skills are now percentages, and it works like this: If you have a 60% on Ancient Hieroglyphs, you roll the D100, and if you get any number between 1-60, you did it…..And now that you can read that inscription, you know your insignificance towards the Things From Beyond Space With Way Too Many Tentacles/Eyes, so you’re probably insane. You don’t WIN CoC, you SURVIVE CoC temporarily. The game isn’t even geared against you, it’s like the game doesn’t acknowledge your existence at times. You’re humans trying to mess about with things older than time. You’re not going to win, but it is amazing to try.

5. The Laundry -
And the day came when I said the words “Wow, playing CoC set in the present with modern gear would be cool!’ and someone set down a copy of The Laundry rulebook in front of me. The Laundry is almost an extension of CoC and follows pretty much all of its rules, with only a few exceptions (most of the skills have been updated, as well as gear).

Now CoC is horrendous. Delta Green, detailing a shadowy US organization that deals with Cthulhu-like entities, is very X-Files... And then there is The Laundry. Based on the books by Charles Stross, The Laundry is the English Civil service answer to Lovecraftian obscenities (During WWII, the HQ of the organisation was above a laundry, and the name stuck). Sure, they might be able to stop those Deep Ones, but only after submitting Form 34RG-T56-B. In triplicate. By tomorrow morning. Also, the key to magic is using mathematics to get energy from other dimensions, so you perform spells with PC’s, mobile phones and tablets. The nickname for said phones? The Necronomiphone. Perfection. 

I simply LOVED the silliness and pluckiness of an organization where you fight a losing battle against Old Ones, and also have to explain where your paperclips went. One of your skills is Bureaucracy, another is Status. The latter will dictate how far up in the organization you are, and how much gear you can requisition. On my first Laundry adventure, I included shapeshifting tentacled sheep. BECAUSE I COULD! :)

6. Savage Worlds –
A gem of a rule system. The first I came across, that was designed to be agnostic, fitting in with any and all backgrounds. Character creation is great fun, your skills now have dice associated with them (say, Melee is a D6 and Shooting is a D8). When you want to do something, your GM gives you target numbers that you need to equal or exceed. Obviously, the better the skill, the higher the die, and the more likely it is you’ll succeed.Not the key issue about SW is that it is totally and completely adaptable and transferable. Every single creature and/or character has the same type of stats. All of them. So you can pick and mix, and play.... whatever. There is no reason why you can’t play a dragon, or a mountain of goo, or a giant Mech or anything else in between. There are loads of sourcebooks, and the system is easy enough to adapt to any environment.

7. Cypher –
Cypher is a fairly new system that I think has loads and loads of potential. Character creation is intuitive, but a little bit more time consuming than usual. That said, it has A LOT more possibilities than your run-of-the-mill system, and the characters, from the gates, are much more rich, as you picking small bits of your background come with character creation. It’s the play that I find fascinating; Cypher has distilled EVERYTHING you could conceivably do into one D20 roll, of varying difficulties. If say, you want to punch a door, and it is a solid door, the GM might want you to roll a 20. Then say you’re really epic at melee, that lowers your difficulty by one level (which translates to 3 points on the die). Then you have brass knuckles, one level less, 3 points less… So you now only have to roll a 14. Difficult still, but by no means impossible. Also, you use points from a pool to lower difficulty in the way I just described even further, and that pool doubles as your Health. So if you do a lot of effort, you get weaker. Fair, methinks. The simplicity of the one-roll-for-everything is very attractive, and as mentioned before, this is a rule system that can be adapted with some ease.

8. Fate –
Fate is my current passion. As easy to play as Cypher, with Character Creation as easy as Savage Worlds, this is a rule system that is designed to be hacked and adapted. They say so on the core book, make your own skills, make your own rules. In a nutshell, you roll 4 Fudge Die, that can show +, - or 0. You can then get a roll of -4 (terrible beyond belief) to 0 (meh….), to +4 (Epic). Then you get a tree of skills, some at +4 or 5, and others all the way to +1. These will add to your rolls, and make them higher. The adaptability of it is staggering, the prices of the corebooks are modest, and once the character sheets are changed, you really do feel like you own your game. 
 
These are the ones I’ve tried so far. What have been your experiences with different rule systems?
 
 
Rui is still an ex-scientist and teacher. He is currently working on a FATE adventure in a cyberpunk city (New Hades, a city he originally designed around Savage Worlds, www.welcometonewhades.blogspot.com), and a Cypher adventure in space. With superpowers. Updates will be forthcoming. He can be reached at @atomic_rpg


Savage Worlds: Fast, Furious, and Fun! - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
9 Comments
Daulton link
23/6/2016 08:42:18 am

GURPS: Detailed crunchy rules, not everyone's cup of tea, but the sourcebooks are *very* well researched (GURPS Dragons for instance has a chapter on the real-world history of dragon mythology).
Steve Jackson Games

Tenra Bansho Zero: A Japanese RPG (recently translated to english), with a "Hyper-Asian" fantasy-steampunk background, with magic-tech mecha and cyborgs, Samurai with powers granted by spirits that possess their bodies, abacus-wielding sorcerers, and of course magically-powered ninja and wandering Buddhist monks.
Kotodama Heavy Industries (available on Drive-Thru RPG)

Shadowrun (Catalyst Game Labs) and Cyberpunk 2020 (R. Talsorian Games): both classic Cyberpunk genre RPGs. Recent editions of Shadowrun have been updated to reflect modern trends in technology. Cyberpunk 2020 has been out of print for many years, but the sourcebooks are amusing to read through what the "future" was supposed to look like in only 4 more years.

Battletech (Catalyst Game Labs): Classic giant-mecha bashing wargame with an RPG expansion.

Mekton Z (R. Talsorian Games) Anime Mecha RPG, with an incredibly flexible mech design system that lets you design pretty much any vehicle you can come up with.

Not exhaustive of my library, but those are the notable ones I have.

Reply
Travis
23/6/2016 09:00:55 am

Your first line ("It's a rule system, Jim - but not as we know it!") had me expecting that you'd be talking about systems that are far from the "standard RPG"... so I wound up disappointed.

But hey, this is my comment, so let's talk about a few systems that are "not as you know it"!

Plegrane Press' Gumshoe has been very popular recently. It's the system of Night's Black Agents, Trail of Cthulhu, and several other popular games. It's different from "the standard RPG" in two big ways:

First, it tries to guarantee that everyone gets a chance to do stuff by giving you expendable pools that you use to do things, instead of strict skill numbers. So, you may be the best fighter in the group... but if you try to handle *all* the fighting stuff, you're going to run out of points to use quickly. This helps ensure that *everybody* gets a chance to shine, instead of just two or three people, without requiring a class-based system that narrowly confines what particular characters can do. You can be good at everything... but you won't be able to be good at any of it for long.

Second, it introduces a rule that bypasses the old RPG problem with investigations. If there's a clue to be found, you have an appropriate skill, and you look for it, you find it. No roll necessary. Thus, you never have the problem that often comes up in old Call of Cthulhu scenarios, that no one made the roll to notice the secret panel, so you don't find the book with the info you need....

Next, Capes, from Muse of Fire Games. Capes is a superhero RPG... with no GM. Instead, in each scene, players get to choose what character they're going to play. Capes also centers around a conflict resolution system which allows players to introduce multiple goals in a scene: for example, "Save Mary Jane" and "Save the Falling Bus" can be two different goals... and the system makes it difficult to accomplish *both* if someone's fighting you hard on them. Thus, the system naturally tends to create the sort of "hard choices" that are a standard part of superhero comics - and the feeling of accomplishment if you manage to achieve both!

Further, since it is GMless, *players* get rewarded for allowing their *characters* to fail at goals. This comes in the form of Story Points, which you can use later on to help you with other things... possibly when playing a different character, since these are player rewards, rather than character ones.

Lastly, I'll mention Lords of Gossamer and Shadow. It's a diceless RPG, based on the original one, Amber Diceless. As a diceless RPG, you can't trust to luck or hope for a lucky roll... if your character is facing a superior foe, you have to find a way to shift the conflict to something you're better at, get allies, or change the situation around you. Thankfully, you've got powers that make the last one especially easy... but there's a good chance that your foe does too!

Try any of those for a game system that's "not as you know it!"

Reply
VP Quinn
23/6/2016 09:19:50 am

Sounds like enough for a listicle. ever think of being a guest blogger?

Reply
Shane link
23/6/2016 11:41:34 am

I love Fate and I'm dying to try Dungeon World. I also have a great love for West End Games D6 Star Wars system. It feels the most like Star Wars of any of the various rules sets attached to the license.

Reply
Nathaniel
23/6/2016 11:44:43 am

OD&D and 2nd Ed D&D.

My father was a DM for his friends and a PC at other times. As a toddler I sat with my father as he GM'd games at our house. I learned to read by reading the PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual.

In later years I would experience 3rd Ed, 4th Ed, and Pathfinder. Nothing could sell those variants like my fatrher could with OD&D and 2nd Ed.

WEG (D6) Star Wars

Freshmen year of High School, I was introduced to this game. It got donated to me in the months following. What sold me was the Choose Your Own Adventure style of play, introducing the players to character basics and mechanics. D6 is one of the least crunchy systems out there.

WEG Star Wars is also (IMHO) the only Star Wars system that treats Force Users the way they were intended to be during the Imperial Era, scarce and near extinct.

Mayfair DC Heroes

Last Edition of this game was in the mid 90s. Another High School acquisition, though I bought this one.

This is one of the few systems I have seen that deal with an Exponential System. As for Super Heroes, this is still my most favorite system. It has the ability to scale up or down depending on the power level you wish to play with.

This system also introduced me to the first set of rules dealing with Opposed Rules and Resisted Rolls. Also to be noted was that the Attributes were set in a three by three grid,

Physical Attributes in the first row. Mental Attributes in the second row. Mystical Attributes in the third row. Acting/Opposing Attributes were in the first column. Effect Attributes in the second column. The third column had Resistance Attributes.

The system may seem a bit crunchy but the math makes sense and the system is fairly seamless. Though the licensing for the system is limbo and the second company to own the licensing has fubared I am hopeful to see someone reacquire it and produce more with it.

Reply
Andrew Limsk
23/6/2016 06:17:37 pm

My favorite of the lesser known systems has always been Victory Games' James Bond 007 system which had a single universal resolution table based on a percentile roll. Slick, fast moving and captured the cinematic adventures of Bond very well.

Reply
Luke Notman
23/6/2016 10:24:22 pm

Role playing games are so varied that it's difficult to quantify the different ways to play a legendary heroic story or a fast pace horror fiction. Games like D&D and Call of Cthulhu are both solid points but games like Legend of the 5 rings get swept under the rug, same with palladium, and Roll-master, it's difficult to play them all, but they do fall under separate game categories.

The First excellent examples are the GURPS method of the 3d6, having a skill and trying to get underneath it on 3d6 makes for a good vatiety of campaigns, as a point buy system you can do anything from horror to heroes depending on how strong your characters are.

Secondly we have D20 systems like HERO, Mutants and masterminds, and D&D are the standard game set up when people think of a tabletop RPG, and it's normally the easiest to pick up and play. It's strengths are that you can add a time period to a game system and run with it, such as Paizo's new Starfinder game system that appears quite promising.

Thirdly, there's the D100 method like Call of Cthulhu, Rollmaster, and the Warhammer RPG series (there's quite a few) that manage a similar style of play to the 3D^ method, but the scale becomes a little broader, buying skills improves your stats a little at a time, both of these can help people invest in their characters which promotes the growth that makes RPG's so great!

Finally system that is severely underrated is the dice pool games, such as Legend of the Five Rings (D6's), and Vampire the Masquerade (and the World of Darkness universe respectively[D10's]). This makes for a more "Real Feel" for difficulty, that the easier things are the more dice you get, hacking a computer will offer a large penalty, but having a special program on your custom laptop might give you some dice to help with the attempt. This style of play I find is considered niche but is very underrated in most gaming circles.

To conclude, the games don't really have a lot of bearing on how dice are dropped, it's all in the system. I've personally played a game (we ran Rappan Athuk,) that began in RIFTS, transitioned into Hero, then became Pathfinder, which was then transitioned into Roll Master, which was too big of a learning curve so we switched to Hero again before using Mutants and masterminds, which is where the game has currently landed. The themes only changed when we moved away from Hero the first time, which was a switch from the Rifts Post-Apocalypse, to a "Batman by Gaslight" type pathfinder game leading to Rappan Athuk.

Be open-minded to new things your GM's might have in store, because there's so much potential in RPG's that bring the adventure to life!

Reply
Rabbithat
23/6/2016 10:31:39 pm

RuneQuest - for a while back in the golden age of roleplaying it was second only to AD&D in sales. When it appeared in 1978 it cast aside many of the approaches most other games took. It had no character classes, no experience points, no levels, and far fewer restrictions on how weapons, armor, and spells could be used than D&D and the like. Instead of a D20 it uses a D100 system. It also has the built-in fantasy world of Glorantha

Reply
Chris
25/6/2016 08:37:04 pm

All of the systems listed seem to be of the type: fixed dice roll with modifiers added to the roll result. I generally find this mechanic type to be lacking; I prefer dice pool mechanics. One of the most common dice pool mechanic systems is White Wolf's games, although I also like the system Legend of the Five Rings uses.

Reply



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