Post by acethesupervillain on Feb 5, 2020 21:20:29 GMT
I talked about this a little on Discord, but my thoughts have been scattered, and I wanted to try and jot down some better developed ideas. It'll still be incomplete, so I'm eager to hear anybody's thoughts about filling in the gaps.
So I liked building characters in table top RPGs, but I never really liked playing RPGs. I love playing wargames and skirmish games, so I wanted to think about making a similar character building process for those. Skirmish is best suited to this method. I think such a system could be used to portray various fantasy settings, but to narrow my scope, I'm mostly going to think about translating D&D3.5/Pathfinder into a simpler skirmish game.
There'd be 4 main components to each character, Race, Class, Equipment/Options and Level. Races would be fantasy stuff like elves, dwarves, orcs, etc, which each have some sort of inherent ability, like dwarves might have -1 speed, +1 defense, orcs have +2 attack, -2 to magic, etc. Classes would be like fighter, wizard, rogue, etc, which would each add their own abilities to the character, like a fighter might have the ability Cleave which strikes multiple targets in melee, the rogue has Sneak Attack, which deals extra damage to a distracted enemy, etc. For the sake of simplicity in a skirmish game, I think each class should try to have only 1 major thing rather than the lists upon lists of things from actual D&D. Equipment/Options would change things kind of like the upgrades in OPR army lists, like a fighter could choose from a sword & shield, two-handed sword or long polearm, and each of these have slight variations. For magic users, they probably choose which spells to learn, like a wizard chooses between magic missile or mage armor (probably they'd choose 3 spells from a list of 6 or something). Another classic mainstay of D&D are enchanted items, so you could spend points to make your sword into a +4 sword of flames. And there could be non-weapon items, like gauntlet of ogre strength, ring of protection, invisibility cloak, boots of speed, etc. Finally, Level would affect a character's quality rolls, total toughness or hitpoints and stuff like that. In D&D, you also get to make more attacks as you level up, so maybe they get to roll more dice as well. I'm thinking that the maximum level is only like 4 or 5. For the sake of a skirmish game, "Level" would not be something that you are trying to improve with experience in a campaign, but something you are spending points on at the beginning. So your team might be a bunch of lvl1 characters with a lvl5 leader, or a balanced team of all lvl3. Certain classes or races might unlock additional powers when they level up, like a lvl5 wizard might gain access to a better magic spell, or a lvl5 Dragonborn might sprout wings and be able to fly.
In D&D 3.5, they had a system where any creature in the Monster Manual could be used in the class system, so that DMs could build creative enemy forces or players could pick races from outside the normal selection. Likewise, I think this skirmish system should feature "enemy" races and classes like goblins or necromancers so that players can build teams like that and not just "good guy" adventurer teams. Also, I think any intelligent creature could take class levels, so even something like a dragon could be a dragon wizard or dragon paladin.
D&D 3.5 also had "templates" which could be added to certain characters to change how they operate. The most obvious were Zombie and Vampire, so for instance, you can spend a few more points to turn your lvl5 dragonborn necromancer with a +5 scythe of death into a vampire lvl5 dragonborn necromancer with a +5 scythe of death. There were a lot of these, and I don't remember most of them, but some other fun ones were "half-golem" (like a fantasy cyborg), awakened (an animal or monster that has gained human-like intelligence), plane-touched, various undead forms, mind controlled or transformed by illithyd or yuan-ti or the like, and various cross-breeds like half-dragon, half-orc, half-demon, half-celestial, half-drow, etc. Some of these I think could stack, like a plane-touched vampire half-orc dwarf with a golem-arm, but some would not, like I think you couldn't be both a vampire and a zombie (or ghost or skeleton), so I think you could make categories and you only have one template from each category.
One advantage of this system is that it's very straightforward to add onto. For example, if you want to add Centaurs, you don't need to number crunch an entire Centaur army, you just need to decide what a Centaur's stats would be and you can just insert them into the system to get Centaur fighters and rangers and vampires and whatnot.
There are two ways of calculating point totals that I see from here. To be faithful to D&D and to easier to calculate, you could try to make each race and class balanced, a 1:1 trade. So a Halfling Rogue costs the same number of points as an Orc Paladin, and you don't have to calculate points. Then you could decide upon a level total. So if your level total is 15, you could have a team of 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, or a team of 5, 5, 5, or 4, 4, 3, 2, 2 or whatever. Templates could count as "levels" too, so a lvl5 planetouched character actually costs 6 levels. In D&D 3.5, stronger races also count as levels, so like an ogre or centaur might cost 1 extra level, while a dragon costs 5 extra levels. Campaign games would start at low levels and you get to add levels as you. For equipment/options I'm not sure how that would work though, maybe those actually use a "gold" stat that works more like points.
The other way of calculating point totals would be to just do it as a normal skirmish game with points for everything. So maybe a human costs 10 points, an elf or dwarf costs 15 points, an ogre or centaur costs 25 points, a rogue costs 10+5/lvl points, a ninja costs 20+8/lvl points, a druid costs 100+25/lvl points, a sword costs 2 points, a zweihander costs 4 points, each +1 on equipment costs 10 points, a flaming enchantment costs 15 points, magic missile spell costs 20 points, fireball costs 50 points, adding the "enlarged" metamagic to a spell costs 10% of the spell's total, half-orc template costs 10 points, half-dragon costs 100 points, a golem-arm costs 5 points, a pair of golem legs costs 15 points, and so on and so on for everything. This I think would take more time for players to make their teams, but would allow creators more flexibility when creating content, since not everything has to be exactly balanced.
I'd love to start coming up with ideas, for races and classes and whatnot, but first I'd want to decide upon rules for the game itself as that would impact things greatly. In particular, I think it would be great to have some sort of Reaction mechanic, as that would greatly increase the potential for race/class powers. Other than that, I think different units should have different speeds for sure, to deal with creatures like dwarves vs centaurs. I always liked the idea of grappling in D&D, and I feel like they never did much with that, that could be fun especially if there are powers that modify it.
Also while I appreciate D&D, I don't especially care about its setting. I'd be totally fine and happy with using races and classes and items that aren't at all based on D&D.
I'm going to make a few lists of things to think about.
D&D Races:
Dragonborn - scale armor, dragon breath,
Dwarf - tough, slow, stonecunning?
High Elf/Eladrin - magicy,
Wood Elf/Sylph - keen senses,
Gnome - magicy, small,
Halfling/Hobbit - lucky, brave, small
Orc - strong, stupid,
Human - balanced or lower in cost
Tiefling - magicy?
Centaur - speed, large
Dracotaur - (like a dragon-born/centaur) speed,
Drow - same as elves?
Duergar - same as dwarves?
Golem/Construct - any size, mindless, (maybe needs to be near a magic-user to take actions)
Goliath - strong, stone-like, large
Goblin - small,
Hobgoblin - ?
Bugbear - ? (I think the D&D version is stupid, I would make it a kuwagamon looking thing)
Kalashtar - psionic
Kenku - nimble,
Kobold - small, dragon-like
Lizardfolk - teeth, claws, tail, scale armor,
Mind Flayer/Illithid - psionic, grapple
Owlbear - big, wise, beak, claws, (due to a misunderstanding, I always imagined owlbears as sentient creatures, better than bugbear anyways)
Shifter - teeth, claws, keen senses,
Swordwing - exoskeleton, wings, sword hands
Thri-kreen - exoskeleton, extra arms, strong, jump, venom, psionic
Troglodyte - stink-attack
Yuan-ti - venom, ? (there are different kinds)
Warforged - construct,
Templates
Vampire - speed, fangs, needs blood
Zombie - mindless, needs to be controlled
Ghost - very resistant to physical attacks
Skeleton - no flesh is harder to damage?
Half-golem - a limb or body part has been replaced with golem parts, could be equipment rather than a template
Golem - tough, mindless (i.e. a golem that's meant to look like another creature, i.e. a centaur golem or dragon golem)
Plane touched - (Not sure what the planes of D&D all are so I'm guessing they gain access to some spell or power from their planar realm)
Fire Touched
Water Touched
Air Touched
Earth Touched
Light Touched (good)
Dark Touched (evil)
Chaos Touched
Law Touched
(Half-Celestial and Half-Demon could be the same as Light-touched and Dark-touched?)
Half-Dragon - dragon breath, scales
Half-Orc - stronger, stupider
Half-Elf/Drow - keener senses, more magical
Half-Dwarf - tougher
Centaurine - (i.e. an orc, elf or dwarf with a horse's lower half) larger and faster
Lycanthrope - transforms?
(some of the templates might override some of the races, like a tiefling could just be a Dark-touched human, a dracotaur could just be a half-dragon centaur, warforged could just be golems, etc)
Classes:
Barbarian - goes berzker
Bard - focuses on help or hinder magic, rather than direct damage
Cleric - healing, buffs
Druid - transforms into beast
Fighter - heavy armor, shield, fighting feats
Monk - can't use weapons or armor, but gets martial arts super powers
Paladin - smite, heal, heavy armor
Ranger - bow or dual wielding
Rogue - sneak attack
Wizard - glass cannon spell caster
Duskblade - half wizard, half fighter
Beguiler - half wizard, half rogue
I'm not sure about D&D's magic system in a skirmish game. On the one hand, I'd prefer to split Wizard into jobs like Pyromancer or Time Mage, but on the other, you could just have a big list of spells and your wizard can pick, say 3 of them, and a wizard who picks all fire spells can be called a pyromancer, while a wizard who picks space-time spells can be a time mage. Same with cleric, a cleric who serves a fire god could just pick fire spells, a cleric for a chaos god could pick chaos spells, etc. A druid could just be a cleric who picks nature spells. I don't fully understand the difference between Wizards, Sorcerers and Warlocks so I left the extras out of the list.
Final Fantasy Jobclasses:
Knight (FFT) - gets "Break" abilities, break equipment or stats, can also use Knight Swords
Knight (FF9) - gets variation of Break, plus various things like Darkside, Thunderslash, Climhazzard, etc
Holy Knight (FFT) - Agrias and others get the Holy Sword skillset, with cool moves like Stasis Sword. In general, they are close to mid range AoE and cause status changes.
Lancer (FFT) - gets "Jump" disappears for a turn, then crashes down for double damage
Lancer (FF9) - gets Jump plus Dragon abilities like Lancer, Rei's Wind, Cherry Blossom
Black Mage/White Mage - an alternative way to handle magic than D&D
Red Mage - can use white and black magic and swords. In certain versions of FF, they get Double Cast, which allows them to cast two lesser spells in a single turn (because they can't learn more powerful versions of spells)
Sorceror/Mystic Knight - enchants their own sword with a magic spell, a magic-enhanced melee unit
Ninja - throwing weapons and dual wielding, there are often special throwing weapons like bombs or scrolls
Samurai(FF5) - throws money to do damage, catch a blade in bare hands, smack with side of blade, Iainuki hits all enemies with physical attack
Samurai(FF6) - Cyan's bushido ability does other things
Summoner - uses exclusively summon magic
Time Mage - uses space-time magic
Monk(FFT) - whacky things like Hamedo and Earth slash
Monk(FF6) - Sabin's various Aura skills
(of course there's a lot more, but the rest I consider similar enough to D&D or just not what I'm looking for right now)
(I don't particularly care about FF's races, although it would be amusing to play as a chocobo)
Another idea for races is anthropormorphic animal people. I thin it's more fantasy and more interesting to think about the differences between a cat person and a bird person than something like an elf and dwarf. I've made various lists in the past that I could try to remember, but the fun thing about animals is that there's just an endless amount. It's good to pick a theme, like wild west animals, kung-fu animals, piratey animals, etc. Animal people also fit well into a modernesque or futuristic setting. Because there's so many, I think it's pointless to make a list right now.
Besides classic fantasy, the race-class team construction could also be used for a sci-fi setting, cyberpunk, space opera, post-apocalypse, etc. Races could be mutants, cyborgs, aliens, psions, droids, etc. Classes could be things like Trooper, Hacker, Medic, Psyker, Ninja, Juicer, Gunslinger, Sniper, Brawler, Gadgeteer, etc. It might actually be easier to start with sci-fi instead of trying to keep up with all of D&D's stuff.
Anyways, that's something I've been thinking about. Had to put it to paper. Hope you enjoy.
So I liked building characters in table top RPGs, but I never really liked playing RPGs. I love playing wargames and skirmish games, so I wanted to think about making a similar character building process for those. Skirmish is best suited to this method. I think such a system could be used to portray various fantasy settings, but to narrow my scope, I'm mostly going to think about translating D&D3.5/Pathfinder into a simpler skirmish game.
There'd be 4 main components to each character, Race, Class, Equipment/Options and Level. Races would be fantasy stuff like elves, dwarves, orcs, etc, which each have some sort of inherent ability, like dwarves might have -1 speed, +1 defense, orcs have +2 attack, -2 to magic, etc. Classes would be like fighter, wizard, rogue, etc, which would each add their own abilities to the character, like a fighter might have the ability Cleave which strikes multiple targets in melee, the rogue has Sneak Attack, which deals extra damage to a distracted enemy, etc. For the sake of simplicity in a skirmish game, I think each class should try to have only 1 major thing rather than the lists upon lists of things from actual D&D. Equipment/Options would change things kind of like the upgrades in OPR army lists, like a fighter could choose from a sword & shield, two-handed sword or long polearm, and each of these have slight variations. For magic users, they probably choose which spells to learn, like a wizard chooses between magic missile or mage armor (probably they'd choose 3 spells from a list of 6 or something). Another classic mainstay of D&D are enchanted items, so you could spend points to make your sword into a +4 sword of flames. And there could be non-weapon items, like gauntlet of ogre strength, ring of protection, invisibility cloak, boots of speed, etc. Finally, Level would affect a character's quality rolls, total toughness or hitpoints and stuff like that. In D&D, you also get to make more attacks as you level up, so maybe they get to roll more dice as well. I'm thinking that the maximum level is only like 4 or 5. For the sake of a skirmish game, "Level" would not be something that you are trying to improve with experience in a campaign, but something you are spending points on at the beginning. So your team might be a bunch of lvl1 characters with a lvl5 leader, or a balanced team of all lvl3. Certain classes or races might unlock additional powers when they level up, like a lvl5 wizard might gain access to a better magic spell, or a lvl5 Dragonborn might sprout wings and be able to fly.
In D&D 3.5, they had a system where any creature in the Monster Manual could be used in the class system, so that DMs could build creative enemy forces or players could pick races from outside the normal selection. Likewise, I think this skirmish system should feature "enemy" races and classes like goblins or necromancers so that players can build teams like that and not just "good guy" adventurer teams. Also, I think any intelligent creature could take class levels, so even something like a dragon could be a dragon wizard or dragon paladin.
D&D 3.5 also had "templates" which could be added to certain characters to change how they operate. The most obvious were Zombie and Vampire, so for instance, you can spend a few more points to turn your lvl5 dragonborn necromancer with a +5 scythe of death into a vampire lvl5 dragonborn necromancer with a +5 scythe of death. There were a lot of these, and I don't remember most of them, but some other fun ones were "half-golem" (like a fantasy cyborg), awakened (an animal or monster that has gained human-like intelligence), plane-touched, various undead forms, mind controlled or transformed by illithyd or yuan-ti or the like, and various cross-breeds like half-dragon, half-orc, half-demon, half-celestial, half-drow, etc. Some of these I think could stack, like a plane-touched vampire half-orc dwarf with a golem-arm, but some would not, like I think you couldn't be both a vampire and a zombie (or ghost or skeleton), so I think you could make categories and you only have one template from each category.
One advantage of this system is that it's very straightforward to add onto. For example, if you want to add Centaurs, you don't need to number crunch an entire Centaur army, you just need to decide what a Centaur's stats would be and you can just insert them into the system to get Centaur fighters and rangers and vampires and whatnot.
There are two ways of calculating point totals that I see from here. To be faithful to D&D and to easier to calculate, you could try to make each race and class balanced, a 1:1 trade. So a Halfling Rogue costs the same number of points as an Orc Paladin, and you don't have to calculate points. Then you could decide upon a level total. So if your level total is 15, you could have a team of 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, or a team of 5, 5, 5, or 4, 4, 3, 2, 2 or whatever. Templates could count as "levels" too, so a lvl5 planetouched character actually costs 6 levels. In D&D 3.5, stronger races also count as levels, so like an ogre or centaur might cost 1 extra level, while a dragon costs 5 extra levels. Campaign games would start at low levels and you get to add levels as you. For equipment/options I'm not sure how that would work though, maybe those actually use a "gold" stat that works more like points.
The other way of calculating point totals would be to just do it as a normal skirmish game with points for everything. So maybe a human costs 10 points, an elf or dwarf costs 15 points, an ogre or centaur costs 25 points, a rogue costs 10+5/lvl points, a ninja costs 20+8/lvl points, a druid costs 100+25/lvl points, a sword costs 2 points, a zweihander costs 4 points, each +1 on equipment costs 10 points, a flaming enchantment costs 15 points, magic missile spell costs 20 points, fireball costs 50 points, adding the "enlarged" metamagic to a spell costs 10% of the spell's total, half-orc template costs 10 points, half-dragon costs 100 points, a golem-arm costs 5 points, a pair of golem legs costs 15 points, and so on and so on for everything. This I think would take more time for players to make their teams, but would allow creators more flexibility when creating content, since not everything has to be exactly balanced.
I'd love to start coming up with ideas, for races and classes and whatnot, but first I'd want to decide upon rules for the game itself as that would impact things greatly. In particular, I think it would be great to have some sort of Reaction mechanic, as that would greatly increase the potential for race/class powers. Other than that, I think different units should have different speeds for sure, to deal with creatures like dwarves vs centaurs. I always liked the idea of grappling in D&D, and I feel like they never did much with that, that could be fun especially if there are powers that modify it.
Also while I appreciate D&D, I don't especially care about its setting. I'd be totally fine and happy with using races and classes and items that aren't at all based on D&D.
I'm going to make a few lists of things to think about.
D&D Races:
Dragonborn - scale armor, dragon breath,
Dwarf - tough, slow, stonecunning?
High Elf/Eladrin - magicy,
Wood Elf/Sylph - keen senses,
Gnome - magicy, small,
Halfling/Hobbit - lucky, brave, small
Orc - strong, stupid,
Human - balanced or lower in cost
Tiefling - magicy?
Centaur - speed, large
Dracotaur - (like a dragon-born/centaur) speed,
Drow - same as elves?
Duergar - same as dwarves?
Golem/Construct - any size, mindless, (maybe needs to be near a magic-user to take actions)
Goliath - strong, stone-like, large
Goblin - small,
Hobgoblin - ?
Bugbear - ? (I think the D&D version is stupid, I would make it a kuwagamon looking thing)
Kalashtar - psionic
Kenku - nimble,
Kobold - small, dragon-like
Lizardfolk - teeth, claws, tail, scale armor,
Mind Flayer/Illithid - psionic, grapple
Owlbear - big, wise, beak, claws, (due to a misunderstanding, I always imagined owlbears as sentient creatures, better than bugbear anyways)
Shifter - teeth, claws, keen senses,
Swordwing - exoskeleton, wings, sword hands
Thri-kreen - exoskeleton, extra arms, strong, jump, venom, psionic
Troglodyte - stink-attack
Yuan-ti - venom, ? (there are different kinds)
Warforged - construct,
Templates
Vampire - speed, fangs, needs blood
Zombie - mindless, needs to be controlled
Ghost - very resistant to physical attacks
Skeleton - no flesh is harder to damage?
Half-golem - a limb or body part has been replaced with golem parts, could be equipment rather than a template
Golem - tough, mindless (i.e. a golem that's meant to look like another creature, i.e. a centaur golem or dragon golem)
Plane touched - (Not sure what the planes of D&D all are so I'm guessing they gain access to some spell or power from their planar realm)
Fire Touched
Water Touched
Air Touched
Earth Touched
Light Touched (good)
Dark Touched (evil)
Chaos Touched
Law Touched
(Half-Celestial and Half-Demon could be the same as Light-touched and Dark-touched?)
Half-Dragon - dragon breath, scales
Half-Orc - stronger, stupider
Half-Elf/Drow - keener senses, more magical
Half-Dwarf - tougher
Centaurine - (i.e. an orc, elf or dwarf with a horse's lower half) larger and faster
Lycanthrope - transforms?
(some of the templates might override some of the races, like a tiefling could just be a Dark-touched human, a dracotaur could just be a half-dragon centaur, warforged could just be golems, etc)
Classes:
Barbarian - goes berzker
Bard - focuses on help or hinder magic, rather than direct damage
Cleric - healing, buffs
Druid - transforms into beast
Fighter - heavy armor, shield, fighting feats
Monk - can't use weapons or armor, but gets martial arts super powers
Paladin - smite, heal, heavy armor
Ranger - bow or dual wielding
Rogue - sneak attack
Wizard - glass cannon spell caster
Duskblade - half wizard, half fighter
Beguiler - half wizard, half rogue
I'm not sure about D&D's magic system in a skirmish game. On the one hand, I'd prefer to split Wizard into jobs like Pyromancer or Time Mage, but on the other, you could just have a big list of spells and your wizard can pick, say 3 of them, and a wizard who picks all fire spells can be called a pyromancer, while a wizard who picks space-time spells can be a time mage. Same with cleric, a cleric who serves a fire god could just pick fire spells, a cleric for a chaos god could pick chaos spells, etc. A druid could just be a cleric who picks nature spells. I don't fully understand the difference between Wizards, Sorcerers and Warlocks so I left the extras out of the list.
Final Fantasy Jobclasses:
Knight (FFT) - gets "Break" abilities, break equipment or stats, can also use Knight Swords
Knight (FF9) - gets variation of Break, plus various things like Darkside, Thunderslash, Climhazzard, etc
Holy Knight (FFT) - Agrias and others get the Holy Sword skillset, with cool moves like Stasis Sword. In general, they are close to mid range AoE and cause status changes.
Lancer (FFT) - gets "Jump" disappears for a turn, then crashes down for double damage
Lancer (FF9) - gets Jump plus Dragon abilities like Lancer, Rei's Wind, Cherry Blossom
Black Mage/White Mage - an alternative way to handle magic than D&D
Red Mage - can use white and black magic and swords. In certain versions of FF, they get Double Cast, which allows them to cast two lesser spells in a single turn (because they can't learn more powerful versions of spells)
Sorceror/Mystic Knight - enchants their own sword with a magic spell, a magic-enhanced melee unit
Ninja - throwing weapons and dual wielding, there are often special throwing weapons like bombs or scrolls
Samurai(FF5) - throws money to do damage, catch a blade in bare hands, smack with side of blade, Iainuki hits all enemies with physical attack
Samurai(FF6) - Cyan's bushido ability does other things
Summoner - uses exclusively summon magic
Time Mage - uses space-time magic
Monk(FFT) - whacky things like Hamedo and Earth slash
Monk(FF6) - Sabin's various Aura skills
(of course there's a lot more, but the rest I consider similar enough to D&D or just not what I'm looking for right now)
(I don't particularly care about FF's races, although it would be amusing to play as a chocobo)
Another idea for races is anthropormorphic animal people. I thin it's more fantasy and more interesting to think about the differences between a cat person and a bird person than something like an elf and dwarf. I've made various lists in the past that I could try to remember, but the fun thing about animals is that there's just an endless amount. It's good to pick a theme, like wild west animals, kung-fu animals, piratey animals, etc. Animal people also fit well into a modernesque or futuristic setting. Because there's so many, I think it's pointless to make a list right now.
Besides classic fantasy, the race-class team construction could also be used for a sci-fi setting, cyberpunk, space opera, post-apocalypse, etc. Races could be mutants, cyborgs, aliens, psions, droids, etc. Classes could be things like Trooper, Hacker, Medic, Psyker, Ninja, Juicer, Gunslinger, Sniper, Brawler, Gadgeteer, etc. It might actually be easier to start with sci-fi instead of trying to keep up with all of D&D's stuff.
Anyways, that's something I've been thinking about. Had to put it to paper. Hope you enjoy.
