Alright, it finally happened today. Two of my friends came by and I sprung FREAKS! on them. They said sure, I switch around systems a lot anyway. They both made up some characters and it worked pretty well. Here's their character sheets. Here's what my first guy said.

Helios, Fire Elemental

Monstrous Qualities
When I see something flammable, I must burn it.
When I'm dancing in the flames, I'm in my own world.

Redeeming Qualities
All beings feel pain as I do.

Body
Save vs Plagues of the Body- Decent
Generate Fire- Expert
Might- Proficient
Absorb Sunlight- Proficient

Mind

Okay, finally. I don't know what took so long, but this has been the most difficult thing to do. It'll all be cake from here on out. So, monstrous and redeeming qualities.

First, there are levels of how monstrous a being can be. Here they are.

Starting at the bottom, you have the character as a full fledged monster. Here anytime you roll an action that corresponds with your monstrous trait you get a are able to bring the target number down by five. Essentially, only ridiculously hard stuff requires effort if it feeds your need to act monstrously. Also, people recoil from you, and any interaction with a non-monstrous person is at a -3 on all rolls you make. You have two extra expert skills that have to do with your monstrous abilities. On the downside, the Judge gets five attempts per session to make your vice control you.

So, today I was thinking about making characters, and the thing about my game is that it makes some things really easy on the GM. Things like monstrous and redeeming traits give the GM a lot to work with, plot wise. However, also it can turn off some players, namely players like my friends. They are dyed in the wool players of d20 who rank min/maxing characters as one of life's great pleasures. In this game however, things are very nebulous. You make up your own skills, you have to say what your character as a monster believes in and is addicted to. This was a hard concept for my buddies to wrap their head around. To help simplify the whole deal, I made a quick questionaire for my players. I gave it to one of my friends to make a character with, and I'll post what he put down later when he gives it back. Here are the questions, and why they're important.

Hi. My name is Legend (realy). I'm a bit of a closet gamer/geek. Most of my time is spent playing bass guitar, writing music, working, drinking beer, girls, and partying.
Most of my friends and band mates are the same way. But in my down time, I really like designing board/card games. Most of which are adventure themed and solitaire. Anyways, I have 3 games finished so far and one variant of another homebrew game. Here is my latest project though. A pseudo rpg called Dark Valhalla. This is just a skeleton of the game. My design doc. I was hoping to get some feedback. Please let me know what you think. (it's not complete and it's a little scattered.

I've just come up with a design for a new game. Unfortunately all I have at my disposal to create a computer RPG game is Game Maker from Yo-Yo-Games.
Basically Im going to call it Valor Quest for now(The more I repeat the name the more it sounds like Everquest. Anyways the basis for the game is similiar to Runescape wherein you can design your own character using preset character pieces. Which is going to be hard to make applicable with Game Maker. Then you go through a short tutorial in whihch you learn the skill to bait and defeat a dragon "saving" the starter city's princess. Then the King rewards you with 1000 (unit of money to be used in game) and sends you to the city your charcter set randomly assigns. once there you do what you did in the starter town, try and bait and kill a dragon, but this dragon is larger and more dangerous and requires you earning better armor and such.The reward for this dragon is reasonably higher and then you get sent on your way to the next town.

Hey all, sorry this took so long.

So as it turns out World of Darkness uses two traits called “Vice” and “Virtue” in their revised rule book and although this game’s intended to be free, if it does well and I want to make a limited edition hardcover version or something, I don’t want to have to get into a legal battle. Whattaya do?

Anyway, let's start out with materials. You don't need much.

-One dude willing to GM, here called the Judge
-Players, two to four is optimum
-A pair of dice for each player and a pair for the Judge
-Pencils, paper, yadda yadda, you know the deal.

Lyricist is an idea I had for a game that uses lyrics (preferably original) in place of dice.

As of this time, I've just began working but would like some feedback on the brief rules section.

Any comments or constructive criticism would be appreciated.

I hope you don't mind me starting a new thread - the old one had a lot of miscellaneous posts, so I figured this would be a better way to organize.

To begin - I really like the choice of 1845. Back when the west was really wild, unpopulated, and still prone to border raids. Decades before the 1873 New Model Army (Colt Peacemaker) and the railroad helped tame the west - black powder cap and ball pistols are still the main technology.

There are two points where some of your numbers don't make much sense:

• Given that its not a d100 based system, claiming each point in a skill gives you a % bonus doesn't really mean much. You're better off with just straight additions.

During a session of Excalibur, I encountered a problem and would like the opinions of my peers on RPG Lab.

There were more players there than I usually had and so I thought to myself, "Hmm... I'll increase the monsters proportionately to the number of players."

It went from a group of five orcs to fifteen. Needless to say, keeping track of where each orc was and which orc had which health with little less than a scrap sheet of paper and some scribbled digits. This frustrated me and the players. Many players had to wait for several minutes before they could even act.

In retrospect I believe increasing the numbers of enemies wasn't a smart move. Perhaps if I had just increased their health instead.

I was just wondering what you guys would recommend. The mathematics and numbers of the gameplay is what I most dislike. I would much rather feed it through a computer that would do all of the mechanics for me and allow me to concentrate my efforts on immersing the players into the game. Perhaps a program of some kind? I don't know.

I would like to hear what everyone here recommends.

It's a little early as I need to finalize some of the chunky bits and get some of the basic setting information out of my head.

However, I was wondering how most people go about finding play testers for your systems that aren't part of your regular group. Or if you bothered...

I think it would be valuable to have the feedback of a GM that wasn't the game designer :)

-Obnomauk