Your favorite PnP RPG system?

[Freelance Henchman]

inb4 we had this thread already

Any particular system you like especially? And has it been used in CRPGs yet?

 

[Ancient]

GURPS

 

[Pussycat669]

Cthulhu, hands down. Although it's hard to find players who want to inevitable die a horrible death or end up insane. But I like the shifted focus from pure action to more investigative campaigns.

 

[SuicideBunny]

my current favorite is the 4th ed legend of the five rings system. about the only sorta class based system i can stomach and it would also work pretty well in a computer rpg.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

Do those systems differ in some significant way from D&D when it comes to skill rolls and such? I mean, do they stray from the "usual" roll x dice and add y Vs. some fixed difficulty to succeed?

 

[Ruprekt]

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

Good old MERP. Always had fun with this.

Didn't mind the original D&D either.

Moved on to tabletop wargaming after this, so never played any of the newer stuff.

 

[MicoSelva]

WFRP. Would be nice to see some CRPG based on it, eventually.
No, Age of Reckoning doesn't count.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Among the more or less recent stuff, my fav is D&D 4th ed. *Runs away*

 

[SuicideBunny]

wfrpg? for realz? the one with an even more random and shitty character generation than vanilla traveller?

Do those systems differ in some significant way from D&D when it comes to skill rolls and such? I mean, do they stray from the "usual" roll x dice and add y Vs. some fixed difficulty to succeed?

legend of the five rings is roll and keep system, which means you add attribute to a skill, roll that many exploding d10, then choose attribute score dice, add them together and compare that vs a target number.

you achieve special effects by declaring raises before the roll, which add 5 to the target number per raise. raises can be declared for special maneuvers like disarming, more damage, faster execution, better/more information gathering, and so on.
there is no critical success/failure bullshit and you actually have to dare something and increase the risk if you want to succeed in a better way, which i totally dig.

 

[commie]

I wish I had friends/mutants that would like to play such things. Always was intrigued by just how PnP gaming worked. Always thought too that I'd feel like a total knob pretending to be the Necromancer of Ix. :D

 

[ironyuri]

FATAL.

 

[Alex]

Right now it is Burning Wheel. I have recently been reading a few Old School Revival blogs and this led me to read a few retroclones, as well as the original (and Moldvay's) version of D&D. I played it a little with my brother and now it is my favorite gamist RPG, although I don't know that many of them and I think a well done sandbox Shadowrun game could be just as good. I guess Vincent Baker's Storming the Wizard's Tower could be even better when done, but it seems a little sandbox unfriendly, which is bad.

But speaking about games in general, Burning Wheel is certainly the best one I have played yet. It has nice, well thought out mechanics, solid core rules that may be expanded indefinitely (there are even two books that help the players do just that) and now with the Adventure Burner (a book that was released a few months ago) it has a very good, detailed explanation of how the systems and subsystems relate to each other. Apocalypse World also seems really good, but I haven't been able to play it yet.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

legend of the five rings is roll and keep system, which means you add attribute to a skill, roll that many exploding d10, then choose attribute score dice, add them together and compare that vs a target number.

What's "exploding" d10?

 

[MicoSelva]

wfrpg? for realz? the one with an even more random and shitty character generation than vanilla traveller?

The same one. With some house rules limiting the randomness, of course - as most sane people play it.

 

[Alex]

"Exploding" dice usually refers to throwing the dice and, if the dice comes at maximum value (in the case of d10, 10), throwing it again and adding the result to the total. For example, an exploding d10 might (but is unlikely to) come with the values 10, 10, 10, 7, giving a total of 37. Different systems may do it differently (like having the two greatest values "explode", or having the minimum value "implode" (cancel an explosion or subtract a roll)), but that is the gist of it.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

What's the reasoning behind the exploding thing?

 

[MicoSelva]

In WFRP it works like that for damage rolls and is called 'Ulric's Fury', with Ulric being the god of war. Basically, it's a different way of implementing critical hits.

 

[Alex]

Usually you want a random value that can be, very seldomly, very high. It has a nice effect when you throw a lot of these dice, since a few of them are likely to explode. I don't know for sure how it works in LotFR, but there is a similar mechanic in Burning Wheel. When it is used, it means that throwing a huge number of dice is even better than normal, so I guess the desired effect is to increase the importance of one step in the attribute/skill scale.

Are you thinking of incorporating something like that in your game, Freelance Henchman?

 

[Freelance Henchman]

I'm sort of collecting and looking at various mechanics for skills and combat to decide what to use. The thing with being able to increase the risk yourself and "daring" stuff that SuicideBunny mentioned for example is something I'd find interesting to try and incorporate.

Exploding dice sound more sensible than the flat 5% chance for a critical/guaranteed hit you get from rolling 20 in D&D, for example.

 

[Alex]

Nice! I was making a post for your game's thread, but ran out of time on tuesday and didn't have any time at all yesterday. I will see if I manage to post it today. In there I try to explain the gist of Burning Wheel's design philosophy, among a few other things.

 

[Phelot]

I liked MERP, but never got the chance to play it that much which is the case with just about every PnP I've ever played

GURPS is fun. Me and a few buddies tried the Myth GURPS for a bit, but that fell apart quickly.

My favorite was probably a fanmade Ravenloft module called The Wailing Sorrow that was a lot of fun. Unfortunately it's not finished, which sucks.

Now I mostly just download the various manuals for nostalgic reasons or to have something to read. I really like reading about settings.

 

[spectre]

Now I mostly just download the various manuals for nostalgic reasons or to have something to read. I really like reading about settings.

This, but personally, I like to pick up nice tidbits regarding game mechanics (I always house rule, cause there's always something not good enough.

My personal favourites:
Fantasy:
WFRP - mainly out of nostalgia. I remember not a single GM I played withhad any idea how to manage damage and critical hits (which kinda surprises me). I really dig the core profession and stat mechanics, but I generally house-rule the shit out of the rest of the rules.

Earthdawn - when I want something less grimdark (not that earthdawn cannot into grimdawn).

Modern:
Cyberpunk 2020 hands down. Nothing comes close here.

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

Cthulhu, hands down. Although it's hard to find players who want to inevitable die a horrible death or end up insane. But I like the shifted focus from pure action to more investigative campaigns.

Cthulhu is awesome, we're playing a campaign right now and everybody would already be dead if not for godly CON numbers and one lucky shot. However we have had some pretty retarded stuff in the past, like a character who got the minimum amount of skill points and invested most of them on head butt. So he just went with headbutting deep ones.

wfrpg? for realz? the one with an even more random and shitty character generation than vanilla traveller?

Bawww I must have total control of character creation because otherwise it's not deep

Anyway, I like WHFRP, because we have had some of the closest battles and most brutal campaigns in that one - brutal as in I had to replace both of my hands with rusty hooks as I am poor, now how am I going to catch those rats, guess I should change careers. And I like random character creation, we have done too much of that allocating points shit in the past and it got stale. Guess we're not sane, we didn't need any house rules on that one save that we added Pendragon's virtue system, or whatever that Forgivness 10 - Vengeful 90 system is called.

And isn't Traveller that awesome game where you can die during character creation?

I also like our heavily house ruled Vampire the Dark Ages revised, it just flows well save for combat encounters which take forever.

 

[Jasede]

AD&D, and it's been used a lot.