A different RP discussion thread!

[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.