YADFH
Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2015 10:27 am
Okay so I've been thinking about a homebrew setting and trying to build a super-simple system built around the principles of fast-paced play (and mechanics to support this) as well as significant player agency (which is kinda hard to support mechanically). The whole idea is for something I can play with friends who don't have the attention span to even look at a D&D character sheet and want some ridiculously fast-paced play with their beer, pretzels and bawdy jokes about the office ladies. Guys who won't play anything if it doesn't promise utter brutality and who don't care about losing characters as long as their death is sufficiently Brutal and Metal.
So. Do you think this sounds Brutal and Metal enough? While still being simple enough?
Design concept:
A d20-oriented game for very new players. Simple, fast to play. Streamlined mechanics to make the game seem fast-paced. A player turn shouldn't take more than thirty seconds, from the word 'go' to the word 'next'.
Physical combat should be badass. Tome Barbarian's physical combat ability, relative to its environment, is about the level of power I'm looking for.
Core conceits of the setting:
-Might Makes Right.
-Things used to be better, and humanity's trying to get back to that. Though not necessarily exactly where they were.
-No trade, poor communications, points of light and all that jazz. If you want something, you probably have to carve it out of someone's ass.
Core conceits of the mechanics:
-Everyone has magic, but it's more about flexibility of options and enhancement. Most combat is physical, if magically enhanced.
-No fiddly bonuses, streamlined mechanics.
-Many reasonable options for dealing with situations, but limited enough to prevent option paralysis.
Setting is sorta like Fantasy not-Europe with a heavy dark ages/iron ages feel. Dark and brutal. Life is a neverending struggle, and death is likely to be violent and early.
Setting concept:
As humanity grew, so did big business, and eventually, megacorporations came to dominate 90% of human wealth and productivity. Such megacorps could easily buy and sell entire governments, provided they were not checked by another megacorp in the process, and as a whole, governments came to place the needs of the corps first. Such businesses ruled their demesnes with an iron fist. Eventually, corps began to see greater profit in international tension and contrived to start a series of brushfire wars. Some dead troops, some dead rebel militants who didn't buy into the system, whatever, who cares. Profit!
They didn't expect this series of wars to ever go nuclear. But, the best laid plans of mice and men and all that.
Now, humanity has begun to reclaim the nuclear wastes. Some hid in shelters, some just weren't near the blasts, but for whatever reason, humanity survived, although not without change and adaptation. Mutation has set in, and humanity has divided into several stable strains of mutations, most now different enough to claim status as new species.
Humanity wasn't alone in mutation. The planet's wildlife has changed as well. That which was already threatening has become moreso (protip: avoid Australia!) and even common animals have become dangerous.
Even reality as its known has changed. When the bombs hit, something happened. No one knows what or how, and few are left who have the scientific background to figure out the mystery – and now, magic has crept into the world. Humans and near-humans can cast forth mysteries and weave magic that was previously the domain of fantasy works. Every silver lining is attached to a mushroom cloud, however; where previously the small folk were just fairy tales, now they are real – all too real, as is their sadism and cruelty.
Magic Stuff
Magic items are few and far between, and largely based on the legend of their wielder. Thus, hardcore warriors have hardcore magic items rather than being powerful because of their shinies.
Each PC can have as many levels of effects as they have levels, no more than half that total put towards making any one item magical. So a level 10 PC can have 5 levels worth of enchantments on their swords, and assign the other 5 elsewhere. These levels of enchantment must be spread between 3 or fewer pieces of equipment.
Blood is the life. Blood and sacrifice can be used to power rituals with a wide variety of effects. However, overuse of rituals or sacrifice of the unwilling can taint rituals and whatever they are meant to affect. As an example, enough fertility rituals will eventually give farmland The Bad Touch and give you a patch of dystopic Hell on Earth. The end result is a malignant creepy-ass presence and places nobody wants to go.
This can, in time, lead to sentient forests, forts, etc. By that point, ritual cleansing isn't enough. You have to go in and kill the spirit that corruption has spawned. (Yes this is an adventure hook.) Forests will be creepy as fuck. ROUSs, dire wolves, giant-ass spiders, all that awesome shit. Something is always watching you. Forts will have walls dripping blood, animated armor, torture equipment scattered around and the like. Towns will be infested with zombies, have blood fountains in their city squares, etc. Lots of undead, corrupted stuff. Everything is just painful to look at. Or maybe it's totally different. Maybe it's like medieval Silent Hill. The point is, these aren't pleasant places to be.
In addition, ritual and sacrifice can be used to empower equipment. Willing sacrifice leads to 'white magic', with magic items that compel users to be all goody two-shoes and shit. Unwilling sacrifice, which, humanity being what it is, is rather more common, leads to powerful blades that will harm their wielder, armor that will shit the bed when you need it the most, etc. Mechanically, you can get up to 3 more levels of enchantment on a piece of equipment by cursing your stuff, but it also gets curse levels, powerful maluses that will ensure you pay more than you receive without exception. Still, it's fast power, and someone will always find that worthwhile.
Potions, poisons and combat drugs are totally a thing. Creating them is simple, you throw some shit in a pot and watch it all day, enhancing them with your magic at certain stages of the process and fueling the reactions that make it a potion/poison/combat drug rather than just some shit thrown in a pot. Anyone can make them, though their effectiveness does rely on skill. In addition, bolts and arrows whose heads are made to carry poison effectively are totally a thing and can be bought without making people ask awkward questions, because using poison against mutated beasts isn't at all uncommon. Random redshirt guardsman #3 needs every single edge he can get against the Rampaging Dickwolf. That said, only four consumables can be carried at a time before their magic auras start to interfere with each other and break down.
Mechanically I want for potions to be awesome and useful. Enough healing to be worthwhile, enough of a combat buff to warrant carrying, enough damage and easily-enough used to be worth taking a moment to try to poison enemies, so forth and so on. But with a hard cap on how many can be carried so that teams don't spend a few minutes sucking down potions before major encounters and trivializing them completely. At the same time, the cap has to be high enough that players don't worry much about actually using them.
Advancement
Advancement is level-based because characters are supposed to turn into Big Damn Heroes. If someone is badass enough to have character levels, they don't care about stupid stuff like rads (except in ridiculous doses) or the sniffles. They matter too much for petty little things to affect them. Even if they take way too many rads wandering the wastes, they don't die; they just turn into Super Mutants or whatever, because Big Damn Heroes becoming Big Damn Villains is cool.
Divinity
Gods are trying to rise again. With effort, you can steal their divine rank and spark of divinity.
Gods get power from being worshipped. Worship starts by being awesome and reknowned as mortals. You can reduce their power by slaughtering their followers. Yes, this is IC justification for crusades.
Divine power doesn't really mean all that much, initially. A bit more magical 'oomph' for stuff relating to their reputation, defense and HP bonii. That's what it means as a mortal. Their mortality still limits their full power, but after they stop being a mortal they get all kinds of cool benefits, at the cost of their interactions being secondhand through an avatar or worshipers.
To steal the power of the gods, you must incapacitate them rather than kill them, and keep them alive and incapacitated for a ritual of sacrifice. And yes, using unwilling gods does indeed taint the ritual and make the recipient of that power vaguely demonic. And yes, because of this, there are some very hardcore demons out there. As well as hardcore gods who won't hesitate to hunt them, or mortals interested in divinity. For gods who are beyond mortality, the use of their avatar or a truly significant number of worshipers suffices.
So, what do you think? Is this BRUTAL and METAL enough? How can I make this more BRUTAL and METAL? Are there any parts that give a strong "one of these things is not like the others" vibe?
So. Do you think this sounds Brutal and Metal enough? While still being simple enough?
Design concept:
A d20-oriented game for very new players. Simple, fast to play. Streamlined mechanics to make the game seem fast-paced. A player turn shouldn't take more than thirty seconds, from the word 'go' to the word 'next'.
Physical combat should be badass. Tome Barbarian's physical combat ability, relative to its environment, is about the level of power I'm looking for.
Core conceits of the setting:
-Might Makes Right.
-Things used to be better, and humanity's trying to get back to that. Though not necessarily exactly where they were.
-No trade, poor communications, points of light and all that jazz. If you want something, you probably have to carve it out of someone's ass.
Core conceits of the mechanics:
-Everyone has magic, but it's more about flexibility of options and enhancement. Most combat is physical, if magically enhanced.
-No fiddly bonuses, streamlined mechanics.
-Many reasonable options for dealing with situations, but limited enough to prevent option paralysis.
Setting is sorta like Fantasy not-Europe with a heavy dark ages/iron ages feel. Dark and brutal. Life is a neverending struggle, and death is likely to be violent and early.
Setting concept:
As humanity grew, so did big business, and eventually, megacorporations came to dominate 90% of human wealth and productivity. Such megacorps could easily buy and sell entire governments, provided they were not checked by another megacorp in the process, and as a whole, governments came to place the needs of the corps first. Such businesses ruled their demesnes with an iron fist. Eventually, corps began to see greater profit in international tension and contrived to start a series of brushfire wars. Some dead troops, some dead rebel militants who didn't buy into the system, whatever, who cares. Profit!
They didn't expect this series of wars to ever go nuclear. But, the best laid plans of mice and men and all that.
Now, humanity has begun to reclaim the nuclear wastes. Some hid in shelters, some just weren't near the blasts, but for whatever reason, humanity survived, although not without change and adaptation. Mutation has set in, and humanity has divided into several stable strains of mutations, most now different enough to claim status as new species.
Humanity wasn't alone in mutation. The planet's wildlife has changed as well. That which was already threatening has become moreso (protip: avoid Australia!) and even common animals have become dangerous.
Even reality as its known has changed. When the bombs hit, something happened. No one knows what or how, and few are left who have the scientific background to figure out the mystery – and now, magic has crept into the world. Humans and near-humans can cast forth mysteries and weave magic that was previously the domain of fantasy works. Every silver lining is attached to a mushroom cloud, however; where previously the small folk were just fairy tales, now they are real – all too real, as is their sadism and cruelty.
Magic Stuff
Magic items are few and far between, and largely based on the legend of their wielder. Thus, hardcore warriors have hardcore magic items rather than being powerful because of their shinies.
Each PC can have as many levels of effects as they have levels, no more than half that total put towards making any one item magical. So a level 10 PC can have 5 levels worth of enchantments on their swords, and assign the other 5 elsewhere. These levels of enchantment must be spread between 3 or fewer pieces of equipment.
Blood is the life. Blood and sacrifice can be used to power rituals with a wide variety of effects. However, overuse of rituals or sacrifice of the unwilling can taint rituals and whatever they are meant to affect. As an example, enough fertility rituals will eventually give farmland The Bad Touch and give you a patch of dystopic Hell on Earth. The end result is a malignant creepy-ass presence and places nobody wants to go.
This can, in time, lead to sentient forests, forts, etc. By that point, ritual cleansing isn't enough. You have to go in and kill the spirit that corruption has spawned. (Yes this is an adventure hook.) Forests will be creepy as fuck. ROUSs, dire wolves, giant-ass spiders, all that awesome shit. Something is always watching you. Forts will have walls dripping blood, animated armor, torture equipment scattered around and the like. Towns will be infested with zombies, have blood fountains in their city squares, etc. Lots of undead, corrupted stuff. Everything is just painful to look at. Or maybe it's totally different. Maybe it's like medieval Silent Hill. The point is, these aren't pleasant places to be.
In addition, ritual and sacrifice can be used to empower equipment. Willing sacrifice leads to 'white magic', with magic items that compel users to be all goody two-shoes and shit. Unwilling sacrifice, which, humanity being what it is, is rather more common, leads to powerful blades that will harm their wielder, armor that will shit the bed when you need it the most, etc. Mechanically, you can get up to 3 more levels of enchantment on a piece of equipment by cursing your stuff, but it also gets curse levels, powerful maluses that will ensure you pay more than you receive without exception. Still, it's fast power, and someone will always find that worthwhile.
Potions, poisons and combat drugs are totally a thing. Creating them is simple, you throw some shit in a pot and watch it all day, enhancing them with your magic at certain stages of the process and fueling the reactions that make it a potion/poison/combat drug rather than just some shit thrown in a pot. Anyone can make them, though their effectiveness does rely on skill. In addition, bolts and arrows whose heads are made to carry poison effectively are totally a thing and can be bought without making people ask awkward questions, because using poison against mutated beasts isn't at all uncommon. Random redshirt guardsman #3 needs every single edge he can get against the Rampaging Dickwolf. That said, only four consumables can be carried at a time before their magic auras start to interfere with each other and break down.
Mechanically I want for potions to be awesome and useful. Enough healing to be worthwhile, enough of a combat buff to warrant carrying, enough damage and easily-enough used to be worth taking a moment to try to poison enemies, so forth and so on. But with a hard cap on how many can be carried so that teams don't spend a few minutes sucking down potions before major encounters and trivializing them completely. At the same time, the cap has to be high enough that players don't worry much about actually using them.
Advancement
Advancement is level-based because characters are supposed to turn into Big Damn Heroes. If someone is badass enough to have character levels, they don't care about stupid stuff like rads (except in ridiculous doses) or the sniffles. They matter too much for petty little things to affect them. Even if they take way too many rads wandering the wastes, they don't die; they just turn into Super Mutants or whatever, because Big Damn Heroes becoming Big Damn Villains is cool.
Divinity
Gods are trying to rise again. With effort, you can steal their divine rank and spark of divinity.
Gods get power from being worshipped. Worship starts by being awesome and reknowned as mortals. You can reduce their power by slaughtering their followers. Yes, this is IC justification for crusades.
Divine power doesn't really mean all that much, initially. A bit more magical 'oomph' for stuff relating to their reputation, defense and HP bonii. That's what it means as a mortal. Their mortality still limits their full power, but after they stop being a mortal they get all kinds of cool benefits, at the cost of their interactions being secondhand through an avatar or worshipers.
To steal the power of the gods, you must incapacitate them rather than kill them, and keep them alive and incapacitated for a ritual of sacrifice. And yes, using unwilling gods does indeed taint the ritual and make the recipient of that power vaguely demonic. And yes, because of this, there are some very hardcore demons out there. As well as hardcore gods who won't hesitate to hunt them, or mortals interested in divinity. For gods who are beyond mortality, the use of their avatar or a truly significant number of worshipers suffices.
So, what do you think? Is this BRUTAL and METAL enough? How can I make this more BRUTAL and METAL? Are there any parts that give a strong "one of these things is not like the others" vibe?