A different RP discussion thread!

[SwordswornFox]

Reading people's thought's had me also considering Cypher System by Monte Cook with its Narrative focus...particularly 'The Strange' because it has ideas/mechanics for changing one's Theme/Focus and using those to help represent the job change mechanics.

[VeradBV]

I've played a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse games that I've really enjoyed. I generally prefer systems like that where the rolls are simpler and more open to GM/player interpretation (granted this can be the case in any system if you want, rules are only real if your group wants them to be). There's a fun Kingdom Hearts inspired one called Interstitial that my friends and I had a blast with.

PbtA is my current FF14 project actually. Crisis Core (because I am unimaginative) with an emphasis on growing levels of character stress as situations escalate to allow the GM to make some more powerful actions. Playtesting is ongoing; I'm taking an approach with move selection closer to Kult instead of the playbook system common to most games.

[VeradBV]

Reading people's thought's had me also considering Cypher System by Monte Cook with its Narrative focus...particularly 'The Strange' because it has ideas/mechanics for changing one's Theme/Focus and using those to help represent the job change mechanics.

Cypher is a possibility. From a read through, a lot of the magic tags in its system are mental in nature, which is not something that comes up a lot in FF14 magic, so it would take some adjusting. I've also heard good things about Cortex Prime if you don't mind using an outside roller, given its focus on interpersonal relationships (another big thing in online RP).

[Nayout]

It surprises me that people who are so active in the forum continue to eat the baits of a certain character despite the fact that much of their comments are garbage like the threads that a person created that we all know who he is.

[SwordswornFox]

It surprises me that people who are so active in the forum continue to eat the baits of a certain character despite the fact that much of their comments are garbage like the threads that a person created that we all know who he is.

Are you referring to me as the OP or MPK's little troll response which was easily waved off by all involved?

[DreadCrow]

Oh hey it's that thing I wrote, good to see it still around.

Porting stuff to FF14 RP means finding systems that fit how freeform RPers actually behave. D&D is not a very good fit for that. I take into account these things:

-Making a new character can mean a significant time and money investment and is more complicated than rerolling, so character death is either off the table or a matter of player choice. Game needs to have other consequences to ruin PC lives.

Character death is something very rare in modern tabletop games, outside of some games (Warhammer Fantasy, Call of Cthulhu, most OSR games) and if you're making a game where character death is easy... Warhammer is really the only one where character creation takes a while.

-Scenes will take longer because everybody's writing in prose format so rules have to be adjusted away from the basis that a 4-5 hour session will involve people travelling to multiple locations and doing a lot of different things.

There's a lot of ways to fix this, either by limited each post of a three to fix sentences, requiring people to pre-roll and pre-type in combat, do group initiative, etc.

-Players are going to be interacting with other system users and freeformers all the time, so if Dan Diceuser gets injured and Fred Freeformer wants to heal him, you need a way to address that.

Since this would be on downtime, if Fred Freeformer used healing magic, Dan Diceuser could easily roll the recovered hit points... Especially since it would be bad form for Frank Freeformer to be like "your character is fully healed because my magic is that powerful.

-RPers make individual concepts of unique character with weird powers and skillsets as a given, so class-based systems are doomed to failure.

In 2e AD&D, there was a NPC in the Ravenloft campaign setting named Rudolph Van Richten. Conceptually, he was a doctor, who's son was stolen by a vampire and killed, which set him on a quest to rid the world of supernatural creatures that prey on innocents. He wasn't a skilled warrior or magician, having to rely on other people for those things, but he was intelligent, learned, and a skilled tactician. Mechanically, he was listed as a Thief. The point is... Classes are broad strokes. Then again, having ran D&D for a long time, I sort of feel that 9/10 times when someone says there isn't a class that fits their concept, the player just wants to be Gary Stu.

Optionally, I prefer to make sure the system can be managed in the in-game dice roller, which was a real challenge when it was only a d1000. Makes it easier for players who are on consoles.

Take a d100 system. Add a zero. In something like Zwihander, if you have 65 as your score for melee, you'll hit on a role of 65 or under. If you converted, convert it to a melee score of 650.

[VeradBV]

Character death is something very rare in modern tabletop games, outside of some games (Warhammer Fantasy, Call of Cthulhu, most OSR games) and if you're making a game where character death is easy... Warhammer is really the only one where character creation takes a while.

There's a lot of ways to fix this, either by limited each post of a three to fix sentences, requiring people to pre-roll and pre-type in combat, do group initiative, etc.

Since this would be on downtime, if Fred Freeformer used healing magic, Dan Diceuser could easily roll the recovered hit points... Especially since it would be bad form for Frank Freeformer to be like "your character is fully healed because my magic is that powerful.

Take a d100 system. Add a zero. In something like Zwihander, if you have 65 as your score for melee, you'll hit on a role of 65 or under. If you converted, convert it to a melee score of 650.

A lot of these are fine for more granular systems like the ones you mentioned, but my baselines are built for broader narrative strokes and collaborative storytelling with risk instead of granular moment-to-moment resolution of combat.

The issue of characters wanting to do everything, at least in freeform play, is usually filtered out by the inclusion of dice at all, so I've only had one instance, in about seven years of experimenting, with a player who was salty their powers weren't a Solve Everything button. The classless nature of things just makes it easier for me to include non-combat characters who are more adept at social interactions (something these systems always incorporate), and helps me outsource the design of magic systems, which I am always too lazy to write in the exhaustive detail of D&D.

Regarding the d100, I did use a d1000=d20 on a 50/1 ratio for one system, and that works fine. Now you could just do /random 20 and there's no need for it anymore. Presently, I'm working on treating d1000 as 3d10, which opens up bell-curve probabilities and frees me from the tyranny of linearity.

[SwordswornFox]

Cypher is a possibility. From a read through, a lot of the magic tags in its system are mental in nature, which is not something that comes up a lot in FF14 magic, so it would take some adjusting. I've also heard good things about Cortex Prime if you don't mind using an outside roller, given its focus on interpersonal relationships (another big thing in online RP).

The Mental vs Physical for magic is fairly easily handled they do have a lot of magic style abilities that can be done off of Might or Speed, and offering certain jobs the 'may use X stat to pay Y costs' traits offsets the rest on that front. Haven't heard of Cortex prime so will need to dig there.

[TaleraRistain]

Oh hey it's that thing I wrote, good to see it still around.

Porting stuff to FF14 RP means finding systems that fit how freeform RPers actually behave. D&D is not a very good fit for that. I take into account these things:

-Making a new character can mean a significant time and money investment and is more complicated than rerolling, so character death is either off the table or a matter of player choice. Game needs to have other consequences to ruin PC lives.
-Scenes will take longer because everybody's writing in prose format so rules have to be adjusted away from the basis that a 4-5 hour session will involve people travelling to multiple locations and doing a lot of different things.
-Players are going to be interacting with other system users and freeformers all the time, so if Dan Diceuser gets injured and Fred Freeformer wants to heal him, you need a way to address that.
-RPers make individual concepts of unique character with weird powers and skillsets as a given, so class-based systems are doomed to failure.

Optionally, I prefer to make sure the system can be managed in the in-game dice roller, which was a real challenge when it was only a d1000. Makes it easier for players who are on consoles.

This only applies if you're using a pre-written scenario like a dungeon crawl. My hubby and I have used D&D rules in numerous campaigns over 20 years that happen over IRC, so we type everything in prose format and do our rolling with dice scripts in channel. Our groups often go off the beaten path in RP, too, so it requires a lot of on the fly adjustment. We've done fantasy games, modern games, superhero games, you name it. The general rules for D&D can be used for pretty much anything you want.

[VeradBV]

This only applies if you're using a pre-written scenario like a dungeon crawl. My hubby and I have used D&D rules in numerous campaigns over 20 years that happen over IRC, so we type everything in prose format and do our rolling with dice scripts in channel. Our groups often go off the beaten path in RP, too, so it requires a lot of on the fly adjustment. We've done fantasy games, modern games, superhero games, you name it. The general rules for D&D can be used for pretty much anything you want.

I'm aware it can be a pretty flexible system for people who want to use it, but in dealing with the primarily freeform userbase that we have on Balmung and in MMO RP in general, the number of players who are interested in more rules-intensive games like D&D as a system baseline are in the minority. It helps a lot as an outreach tool to use systems that give players more collaborative control over the storyline and has simpler roll results.

For comparison, a popular system for conflict resolution on Balmung is the Grindstone system, which is a simple /random rolloff on attack/defense with the high roller winning, and the first to take three hits is the loser. This has no connection to character ability or tactics or any kind of modifiers, and it's fairly widespread because it's easy to use and (mostly) handles conflicts quickly without a lot of OOC chatter so people can get back to the freeform. I try to work with systems that strike a middle ground between pure simple RNG like that and more rules-intensive systems like D&D.

If I had a crowd that did prefer more rules-intensive games, I'd lob a copy of Big Eyes Small Mouth (aka GURPS for weebs) into the room and let them sort themselves out from there.