ORPG

In the course of every hard core tabletop gamer, there comes a time when you make your own system of rules for gaming, in the hopes of making it big and retiring famous covered in billions of financial assets. No, no that's not true. But I do want a system that's public domain that Makes Sense and is easy to remember and extend. So I'm crafting a system that's the synthesis of many RPG systems I've studied. Hopefully I can take the best qualities from them. And though my journal's copyright is (by-nc-sa) Pandora 2006 , the system itself is so intuitive and generic it would be laughable for me to try and patent such a thing. So, if I ever get it smoothed out, public domain totally. Profit from supplements, not from strongarming systems.

Another reason this system is PD is that I managed to sketch it out in 15 minutes on a single sheet of paper. Maybe I'll scan that later and post it up here.

First off is bits. Bits are things that make events more or less likely to happen. There are many kinds of bits, but since I can't think of a good general name for them all, I'm calling them bits. For instance:

Abilities: inborn bits. These cannot be learned, though may be discovered. They are talents.
Skills: learned bits. These are the things you study and practice, and know how to do.
Tools: assisting bits. We the great tool users have made ourselves see better, hear farther, and think faster with these buggers.
Powers: anentropic bits. This is stuff that can't be explained by conventional logic, cause and effect. These are the deciding factor in most people's fate.

Second off is dice. The nice thing about a d3 is it can represent plus, minus and zero. The nice thing about d6 is it's got twice as many sides as the impossible d3. So I'm going to define sign dice as d6 dice where 2 and 3 are -, 4 and 6 are 0, and 1 and 5 are +. You can roll a bunch of those dice, and the - and the + cancel out to 0, and what you have left over is your score. That produces a bell curve shaped randomness.

Another kind of die is the flip coin. You flip a coin, I know duh, if it's heads it's 1, tails is -1. Adding flip coins into the mix lets you change the sign by multiplying, and make what I call an inverted bell curve: a scheme that makes the most extreme results most likely, and the average results the rarest. You can imagine what kind of chaos that would cause. So roll n dice, get their sum, then subtract the abs of that from n. Then multiply by a sign coin. That's it, the number works on the same units.

Dice methods:

bell curve	`sum(dice(n))`
inverted bell	`coin()*(n - abs(sum(dice(n))))`

So on to actions. Every action has a difficulty. If your bits add up to higher than that, you win! Maybe. Subtract the values of the relevant bits toward that action, then roll some dice as above. Or use a computer to generate your randomness. Remember the more dice, the higher you can get bumped, but the lower you can get bumped, and with the bell curve the less likely it'll be higher, or lower.

Determining the difficulty of the action is often up to the GM. Other bits I haven't thought through yet, like tensile strength, crumbliness, weight, all pretty much go into defining the difficulty. Conflicts are a special kind of action whose difficulty is determined by another person attempting an action. When there is a conflict, two parties are involved: the 'aggressor' and the 'defender.' Who is who doesn't matter as long as it's consistent through the action. The defender adds up their bits to define a difficulty. The aggressor then treats that like a normal action. If the result ends positive, the aggressor wins. If negative, the defender wins. 'win' might be more transient than not though, as the next action could go the other way in an evenly matched conflict.

So that's... pretty much it. You determine your bits, i.e. the properties that characterize your character. The GM determines bits of the environment, and of any NPCs. You pull out some sign dice, and perhaps a coin, and get started. Another thing I need to do is make an example campaign, to show how one goes about using this system in a definite example. And that's my secret goal really. I'm hoping in writing a tutorial on how to use this system, I'll fool myself into actually putting together a halfway coherent campaign. Just doing it without all that and failing has resulted in much frustration in past years for me.

Oh, can I call it the Open Role Playing Game? That's pretty much what it is. ORPG. ORPS? ORBS? Open Role B...being... System?

ORPG

Journal started Oct 4, 2006