Create a New System! - Page 5 - OG Myth-Weavers

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A community-created and maintained place for Game Masters of all systems to bounce ideas around. It's a place for inspiration and sharing tips.


Create a New System!

   
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Originally Posted by impfireball View Post
How about, players can purchase starting equipment, but they get deals or access to different equipment to buy at the beginning, depending on their homeworld.
Alright. Official change to my sentence: At character creation players choose a homeworld package that modifies the starting equipment market.

And a new rule: Humans choose from any homeworld package.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lutrine View Post
Alright. Official change to my sentence: At character creation players choose a homeworld package that modifies the starting equipment market.

And a new rule: Humans choose from any homeworld package.
Or it could be that humans have more homeworld packages than any other race, being the most nomadic or dominant. Humans being dominant is a cliche though. Maybe it's a 'planetary adventure' sci-fi or a 'big dark scary galaxy' sci fi?

The noble Kerrin are well known for both being the largest (Size 12), and most talented (8xLevelxApptitude Skill Points) of the common races.

EDIT: Why would humans be a good race base? They are so small!
Also, this might be one of the "problems" with the rules for rules generation.

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EDIT: Why would humans be a good race base? They are so small!
Fair enough, but how would you convince players that humans are a viable option?

I'm all for 'alien overload', but there needs to be a good reason for the underdog to have merit too. Best homeworld? Best skills? Best <insert>?

Humans are known for their extremely malleable DNA, which opens up many homeworld options, reduces the application time of genetic modification, and makes them more vulnerable to radiation than other races.

Tada! Humans no longer equal baseline. They equal gene specialists! Potential book quote: "Never take a human to Therrin. The genesqueeks'll start goin' protoplasmic on you in just a few days."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pheromax View Post
Too much magic if you are creating a new system!
Dude, chill; it's a ridiculous crowd-sourced RPG system, it's going to be kitchen-sinky whether you'd like it to or not.

Quote:
Cool for it to be out of space, however, make different species. Each player can introduce their own species to the game and they have to come up with their own abilities...If someone's species ends up being too strong or to ridiculous, the group could take a vote and make slight changes. When the changes are done the character's race becomes canon and anyone can use them henceforth.
I think that's a bit silly. There should be a selection of pre-fab core races, and new races should be an optional rule in the core rulebook or dmg (if ever such a thing exists) with a point-buy system for various attributes. Some of these attributes are innate versions of available sigils (spells) or items (genemods and what-have-you), although there should perhaps be some species attributes which are not paralleled by spells or items ("crystalline" is a good example; I imagine that it would take millions of years of genetic technology to convert a DNA-based life-form into a crystalline entity and therefore that's as close to impossible as makes no difference).

That's all for interpretation, here's my one-or-two sentence contribution to the rules proper:

"Players may select an existing race/species for their character, or at the GM's discretion may create their own. Races are created by using a point-buy system which determines not only the physical/mental/spiritual/magical properties of the race, but also its worldview, prejudices, and broad political and cultural tendencies*"

*a player's choice of homeworld should also have a bearing on culture.

Oh, yes, there is going to be some things that have been done over and over. It happens. Just wanting to see something besides standard elves, dwarves, wands, shields, magic swords, etc. I like the idea about about a point system buying certain aspects of a species, or else you could end up with the Continuum from Star Trek (for all my fellow geeks out there!).

I have an idea on the setting.

Basically, it's a world where trans-humanism has taken a foot hold and has existed for hundreds of years (or thousands). It's a bit like brave new world in the sense that everyone has genetic modifications. The galaxy is pretty much the 'door step' - mankind is just waiting around to scramble the industrial might to conquer the fringe worlds and colonize new ones. It's an age of expansion in an age where plenty of 'booms' and 'busts' have occured in expansion. Technology has reached a pinnacle point where it degrades or fails to get distributed.

Expensive star gates (funded by planetary government bodies or mega corporations) need to be erected for FTL travel that is efficient enough for inter stellar operations and industry (that's borrowed from eve online).

The adventurers are the risk takers - they crave stimulation, so they venture into the fringe worlds of lawlessness and depravity/villainy to undertake missions or get rich or both.

Everyone has genetic modifications of some kind to assist them - but you can never be too prepared for the fringes. Most of the skills involve learning how to use all of the exotic instruments that will help you in each mission. Think of Arrakis and the fremen (from dune) - that's just one world!

My idea is that it's not just a fantasy with science fiction slapped on - there isn't really the traditional dungeon trekking with the traditional character roles and party dynamic of DnD and those such games (an example of that would be anarchy online *shudder*). Characters make their own roles.

The kitchen sink element encourages open ended-ness in game play too. That's the most important thing, right?

Also fringe worlds having different cultures and standards of living can mean genre mash ups.

The GM, whoever that may be, should do as Gallium said, make a sort of corebook for what species can be chosen by players and also what planets they can be from. It would be hard work, but others could help, I suppose. It seems like you have a good base storyline going on there.

Quote:
Originally Posted by impfireball View Post
I have an idea on the setting.

Basically, it's a world where trans-humanism has taken a foot hold and has existed for hundreds of years (or thousands). It's a bit like brave new world in the sense that everyone has genetic modifications.
Actually, I don't think that people were genetically modified in Brave New World; the differentiation between alphas, betas, et. al was accomplished by splitting zygotes at the 8-cell stage or so (alphas are made one at a time, but the lesser classes were made in sets of fifty or so 'artificial twins'). Alphas were likely given their physical and mental fitness through some kind of eugenic selection*, whereas the deltas and epsilons had their mental faculties crippled by artificially-induced fetal alcohol syndrome.

*that would count as a kind of genetic engineering, but not "modification".

Sorry, this is all beside the point. But BNW isn't really a good example of trans- or post-humanism (that would be Kurzweil and Nietzsche, respectively). BNW is about the dehumanizing effect of treating people as though they are just another industrial product. Now, if humans in your setting ARE just another industrial product, colour me intrigued.

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My idea is that it's not just a fantasy with science fiction slapped on
Not that it's my place to challenge the OP, but isn't your setting edging very close to SF with some magic slapped on?

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Think of Arrakis and the fremen (from dune)
Now, that's a setting in which fantasy and SF exist very close together. You might also look at something like James Alan Gardner's Trapped, which has magic technology in the form of symbiotic, alien nanobots that give humans powers like pyro-kinesis and are effectively magic because we really haven't a clue how they work. Could also be that in this setting/future, someone managed to re-code some fundamental rules of reality (say they ran a timing attack on the fabric of space-time, like in Charles Stross' Accelerando). The changes propagate through space at lightspeed (or faster), and all of a sudden Things That Should Not Happen happened.

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Expensive star gates (funded by planetary government bodies or mega corporations) need to be erected for FTL travel that is efficient enough for inter stellar operations and industry (that's borrowed from eve online).
FTL is exactly the kind of thing that (with our present understanding of physics) looks a lot more like magic and a lot less like technology (of course, at some point they become indistinguishable, yadda yadda yadda...). Good thing we have magic in this setting to take care of it? The guild navigators of Dune aren't a bad example of a hybrid magic-technological solution (the guild navigators don't bend space themselves; ships in Dune have a space-folding drive that only a human with precognitive powers can navigate effectively - it's like podracing)

Of course, using the guild navigator as a model for FTL travel may or may not be a little too WH40K for comfort. Of course...

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A magic-user's ability to use sigils is due to an advanced genetic modification at birth - a mutation that has the unfortunate side effect of total blindness.
Blind, magic navigators might be too poetic NOT to include.

The only other thing I would say at this point is that there still aren't enough rules in "our" rulebook for this system to need a particularly well-defined setting. Again, you're the OP and this is your thing, but I think you may even consider allowing the campaign setting to be built up one line at a time, like the rest of the rules. Not that I don't enjoy writing paragraphs of text (I mean, look what I'm doing now), but making a ruleset one or two sentences at a time without any real way of knowing what comes next, or how others will interpret what you've written is, in and of itself, a fun game to be playing. And I think that I - and perhaps others - would like to play that game a little longer before you start designing this game from the top down.




 

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