"Summon RPG"
"Summon RPG" Character Creation System
Players start with 500 Character Points with which to build their characters. These points are distributed among Stats, Skills, Summons, and Spells.
The resolution mechanic is 2d10, to generate percentiles. In order to succeed at a task, players must roll under their skill rating in that skill. For example, if Bob the Pirate has 62 fencing, and rolls a 67, he's failed, because his roll is too high. However, if Bob rolls a 62 or a 24 or something, he has succeeded.
STATS:
Summon RPG uses six stats: Strength (ST), Agility (AG), Health (HP), Intelligence (IQ), Summoning Ability (SP), and Magical Ability (MP). I think these are self-explanatory.
SKILLS:
I'm not done with the list yet, when I am I'll post it to another book page. Most skills, however, will be based on either AG (physical skills, such as fencing or pickpocketing [you gotta have pickpocketing]) or IQ (mental skills).
SUMMONS:
Summons are magical beings that you create alongside your character. They can serve many purposes: Beatsticks, Spies, Interpreter--pretty much anything. A character may not have both summoning and magic.
MAGIC:
Magic is magical spells. A character may not have both magic and summoning.
SPENDING THOSE POINTS:
Players first purchase their Stats. Stats cost double the points cost to buy. For example, to get a 60 in ST, you would have to pay 120 of your 500 points. To get a 30, it would cost 60.
Players next purchase Skills. Skills work thus: Say Bob (remember Bob?) is getting Fencing. His AG is 55, and Bob wants a Fencing rating of 62. In order to get that, Bob has to spend 7 points. In other words, the amount required to purhase skills is equal to what you want your skill level to be, minus your level in its governing stat.
Next up is Summoning. Summons are built like characters, only they're subordinate characters to your main character. Summons are purchased thus: You put a number of points into the summon less than or equal to your summoning level. Multiply that number by 20. That's how many points you get to spend on the summon. Summons purchase skills and attributes the same way characters do, except they have additional special traits which describe how often they must be used and what special powers they might posess. A basic summon comes with the privilige to use it once per day for five minutes. Additional uses or minutes costs a certain number of points.
Example: Bob the Pirate wants a Parrot summon for a sidekick. Bob has a summoning skill of 25, and 25 character points left. He decides to put all 25 of these points towards his parrot, granting him 500 points to spend on it.
And last, I have not yet, to be honest, fleshed out spells to any signifigant degree.
[ridiculously verbose introduction]
Summon RPG is a roleplaying game focused largely on heroism and fantasy. It doesn't strive to have a realistic world--indeed, I don't plan to define a world just yet. Nor does it strive to emulate real life; it's meant to emulate the "reality" of heroic fiction where Luke Skywalker always beats the Emperer (sp?), Tintin never dies, and the Hardy Boys get them in the end. I don't mean by this to imply that this game will always end up with the PCs winning or emerging unscathed; I merely wish to say that, in general, players play to win and "be cool" and games should help them achieve that goal.
First of all, I have to warn you: I'm not much of an RPer. By which I mean that first, I'm not very good at it and second, I don't do it very often.
I am, however, very into RPing systems. I really like reading them, and figuring out interactions among game mechanics. So it was inevitable that I would try my hand at creating one myself.
"Summon RPG" is so named because I've been trying to create a good summoning system for a while, and getting one is one of my goals.
2d10
oh, i am not sure if it is the best way how to decide if success or not. Just think about using Randomness without Replacement as a David Kennerly in his article
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2206.asp
Clarification
What WormCZE is suggesting is maybe it might be nice if you generate the percentile numbers with a deck of playing cards, minus the face cards and jokers, or to assign the face cards and/or jokers some unusual significance.
The benefit to this mentioned in the article is that it becomes very unlikely for someone's "luck to hold". A streak of good or bad luck is much more likely to end quickly. This is slightly less true of percentile cards since it is entirely possible to go through the entire deck and never get a number above 89, for example. All the nines end up in the ones position, and never in the tens position.
Personally, I think it might be nice to switch over to cards if the setting benefits by it, like if its a modern spy setting (I like the new Bond), a wild west setting, a gangster setting, or even a pirate setting. Hey the game is about summoning, how about Tarot cards (again without the face cards or major arcana)? Otherwise dice is fine.
cards X dices
Oh, sorry but my suggestion wasn´t about using two decks with 10 cards but about one deck with 100 cards. it is same like 2d10 but it greatly reduce chance of a streak of good or bad luck.
Busywork
However, you have to consider the pyschological upsides of dic e.
First of all, dice feel more "fair" in many ways. Occasionally , a player will get screwed by random dice rolls. However, with a deck without replacement, a player stands almost as much chance of getting randomly screwed, if he happens to draw a lower number late in the pile. For example, if you have a very strong character, and a weak character gets a good run earlier in the pile, that strong character might be screwed by a lack of high-level numbers left in the pile. While the chance was the same, it won't feel that way to the player.
That's not the main problem, however. The main problem is that cards add quite alot of busywork to the game. For example, if you're using percentile cards, you will either have to buy them (they're rare, and thus rather pricy) or create them yourself, which takes a ton of time that most players would rather spend playing. Moreover you have additional work in the form of shuffling constantly (for a discussion of busywork, see "Removing of Busywork" http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/rg1).
So, any comments on the ideas themselves?
No Magic Spells
On the ideas themselves--
Remove magic spells from the game altogether.
The problem is, nobody will want to learn Fireball, unless it is really easy to use and tremendously powerful. I mean, they can summon a fire elemental once a day for a full five minutes, why would they opt for magic if they have summoning? Alternatively, you could make summoned creatures much less useful, which would give spells more appeal, relative to summoning.
But without spells the setting does seem more universal. The pirate has his parrot or monkey. The spy has his contacts and resources. The wizard; demons and elementals. The space man; his gadgets and droids.
Include a trasnportation clause in the summoned creater rules about lasting more than five minutes if the summoning is just carrying the character, and then you can have genies, magic carpets, angels, pirate ships, space ships, cowboy horses, etc.
If you can only fight ship to ship for five minutes then that gives an excellent excuse for exciting boarding actions.
Personally, I use playing cards all the time for d10 dice pool systems. I could scrounge for mismatching d10s just so I can have barely enough for the rolls, or I can just flip 10 cards, put them back and give a quick cursory shuffle.
For percentile dice, there's no point, other than mood to use cards instead of dice. Your chances of a run with percentile dice are so astronomically small that cards wouldn't add anything mathematically.
You also might want to play with the point buy ratios a bit once you have your attributes/skills/summons decided in more detail.
2 starting points = 2 skill points = 1 attribute point = 40 summon starting points.
If the ration is off then savy players will invest all their starting points wherever they can get the most use, and you'll have characters with really high stats and almost no skills or vice versa, or several powerful summoned creatures and no abilities for themselves.
You could totally ignore the ratio by stipulating how many stat points and skill points and summon points there are for each character.
his paragraph
i like your idea and i get what your saying about the whole magic thing.
This is a good idea.
I like the way it's has some randomness, chance, and mechanics in the system. Great Job!
stormbringer
I know you said you're not much into RPGs, but I would say that your best bet would be to look at the Stormbringer RPG system, which has excellent summoning rules. Summoning and binding creatures into objects or as servants, the system is open and fluid and (most importantly) cool.
summoning really does work best imo, with a world to draw from. Summons are pulling from a world's mythos to some great effect. Right now the system seems like it's just having extra characters for a time.