Omnificent Role-playing System ruleset free to download
dreamborn:
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Jan writes 2 problems I've experienced in games where use and are the main ways of gaining skills and improving stats...
(1) we were playing a game with no levels or classes where no player knew any rules or his characters stats. all he had was a description and knew when he wanted to do something he'd roll 3D6.
I think players need to know their characters and a general understanding of the rules. That is why I wrote the 4 rulesets. In regards to stats, in ORS the character will know his z-score for each of his abilities. This tells him more than in most gaming systems. For example (page 6 of ORS Standard Rules) an Agility z-score of 1 would mean that the character is 84% better than the rest of the population. Population here is the statistical sense, in other words his Agility is 84% better than all the entities on the planet! A z-score of 2 would mean he/she was 98% better than ALL the entities on the planet. Skills (craft, trade, activity in which the character his competence and experience) are also z-score based.
So you can see that the player knows quite a bit about how he stacks up to other entities in the world. Now if the world has 3 billion people then even a z-score of 2 means there are 60 million people who have a better agility than he does. To relate something tangible in our world, Olympic athletes have a z-score in a particular skill greater than 3, which corresponds to greater than 99.8% better than the rest of the population.
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Jan also writes, “The nature of the world was a puzzle… Jan’s character took up jogging and became the embodiment of jogging and endurance.”
In ORS, as in real-life, your ultimate skill would be limited by your abilities and traits. Yes, skills do feed back into abilities but there are limits based upon your initial starting values (Assuming no magical manipulation).
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Jan also writes, “The other I think was Runequest. my memory is a permanent haze. while the Gm tried hard to run a scenario and get the players to follow the adventure. the players usually only had their characters do something in a skill they wanted to get better at. and so instead of playing a RPG we were 100% focussed on trying to do only those things that increased the skills we wanted. to me that aspect of the game crippled the whole point of gaming.”
In ORS, skills increase with usage and decease (at a slower rate) with non usage. In ORS, the number of skills are vast and, just in real life you are using multiple skills everyday without even thinking about it. If the GM ONLY designs a stereotypical dungeon crawls then your fears may become a reality. But this is NOT a problem with ORS it is a problem with the GM. Furthermore, if the GM and players like this then ORS can accommodate this type of play. Personally, as a GM, I would never design such an adventure, I would be bored to tears. You might as well play a computer game, BUT that is a personal choice and ORS does not force my tastes in game play on others.
Kent Krumvieda
www.dreamborn.com
SteveCooper:
Quote from: ssem on March 01, 2011, 08:26:36 AM
the players usually only had their characters do something in a skill they wanted to get better at. and so instead of playing a RPG we were 100% focussed on trying to do only those things that increased the skills we wanted.
I'd forgotten that aspect of that mechanic. I have another two examples;
Call of Cthulhu gave you a tick in a box when you passed a skill check, and you rolled up at the end of the adventure. Consequently, you got maximum benefit by maximising the number of different skills you use in an adventure. There was always a temptation to try to fast-talk strangers or randomly read an ancient Hebrew scroll as the game continued...
Some computer RPGs work the same. I remember playing Oblivion, in which you gained athletics skill for jumping; so the natural way to move around the landscape is to pogo back and forth for miles. If you weren't leaping, you were losing.
dreamborn:
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Steve Cooper writes, Call of Cthulhu gave you a tick in a box when you passed a skill check, and you rolled up at the end of the adventure. Consequently, you got maximum benefit by maximising the number of different skills you use in an adventure. There was always a temptation to try to fast-talk strangers or randomly read an ancient Hebrew scroll as the game continued...
Some computer RPGs work the same. I remember playing Oblivion, in which you gained athletics skill for jumping; so the natural way to move around the landscape is to pogo back and forth for miles. If you weren't leaping, you were losing.
Well the ORS engine doesn't prevent this. If the GM wants, the event driven interrupt, that allows the players to do things, could be set to streamline gameplay and effectively limit this. Now in the real world I could see that if a bunch of characters were traveling by wagon or coach, then they might try to read a book/study on the way there. And every break/evening they could practice their weapons techniques. Fantasy fiction is ripe with this type of non-encounter action, I personally think that is ok. Yes it could be abused BUT I ask you, do you want the Roleplaying System try to control this or is this a GM responsibility? Remember ORS doesn't eliminate the GM, it just makes his job easier.
In regards to leaping and jumping around, ORS does handle this in automatically computing a character's exhaustion. So if the player wants to do this GREAT, good for them. They will eventual tire and game flow will progress. Furthermore, should an encounter happen while they are exhausted or tired then they will learn quickly. Should they survive. Nature has a way of culling stupidity out of the herd. :^)
Kent Krumvieda
www.dreamborn.com
SteveCooper:
--- Part the First
Quote from: dreamborn on March 02, 2011, 07:53:10 AM
Yes it could be abused BUT I ask you, do you want the Roleplaying System try to control this or is this a GM responsibility? Remember ORS doesn't eliminate the GM, it just makes his job easier.
How would this make my life easier? My life is pretty easy already. I'm pretty sure I don't need a formal system at all to handle this sort of thing.
For instance, in the game rolling around my head at the minute, skill progression is just the GM and the player discussing downtime, and noting a few words on a character sheet. For instance, if a land-lubber character were to spend a few weeks on a sailing ship, the player and I might have a conversation, like so;
[player] I'll try to pick up whatever I can from the experienced sailors on the journey.
[gm] that sounds reasonable. You make friends with the first mate, Stubb. He explains how the rigging works and lets you know how to avoid being hurt.You get used to the constantly-rolling decks and overcome your initial seasickness.
[player] Do I get anything on my character sheet?
[gm] write down 'apprentice sailor'
The conversation will take about twenty seconds and is a very simple way to handle progression.
Now, a complex mathematical model -- no matter how automated -- isn't going to be faster or more reasonable than that.
--- Part the Second
I'm starting to realise what it is that's been bugging me about the system. What you seem to be doing is building a very fine-grained mathematical model ; the z-scores, action templates, and event modelling are a way to build a simulation. However, a simulation is not a game. What you need is a system for inviting a group of people to imagine things together. The simulation is the servant of the imaginitive act. What's great in RPGs is when a GM throws a difficult world at the players, and the players react in wonderfully creative ways. If a system encourages that, it's a winner. If it discourages it, it's a bad system for an RPG, even if it's an accurate model.
Now, the way I understand ORS, it's not going to be easy for a GM to use it to run a game of his own design. If I decide to write a magic system, I think I'm going to have to also write it as a computer program. And that limits the imagination of my players to algorithmic, systematic, formal thinking, which isn't something I want to see in my magic system.
What bugs me is that I can't see how I would run a game which encourages the players to imagine and try things that are beautiful, dramatic, or awesome. I can only see an invitation to model unreal things 'accurately'. The focus of attention seems to be on physical movement, carrying objects, and skill checks. You can't take those pieces and get something story-like, in the same way that you can't use the Newton's laws to model emotion.
Ari Black:
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Personally, as a GM, I would never design such an adventure, I would be bored to tears. You might as well play a computer game, BUT that is a personal choice and ORS does not force my tastes in game play on others.
Dreamborn,
I'm working on an RPG system with a similar goal to yours; essentially, one system to rule them all. I'm also using a skill based system with improvement through use. My approach was different from yours, as I wanted to make the system as basic as possible, with as few rules as possible, so that it was more flexible for different types of games. After completing most of the ground work, I started thinking about how I would play the current game I'm running with the new system that I'd created.
I saw that I would have to rework the mechanic of magic to use the system I had created. This was fine with me, because I expected that GMs would have to add personalizations here and there to make their specific game work. But I realized that, as long as I was creating a set of formal rules, no matter how abstract, I was forcing my tastes in game play and mechanics on the people who would be using the system.
This is not a bad thing, every RPG system does it. Even if a group was doing pure free-form RPG, they would likely develop a set of house rules to adjudicate even if it was just a basic social contract among the players. A game design friend of mine put it a different way, a way I didn't like at first but now think is probably true for the most part, "People need rules so they know what to break. So they have something to rebel against." Creativity comes from the players and the DM. The system is just there to act as a springboard.
You can't make a system that will work for all of the people all of the time. To do so, it would have to be all of the systems and none of them all at once. The best you can hope for is to make a system that's approachable; complex enough to allow for variability and challenge but simple enough for the learning curve and in-game use to not be restrictive. But, at best, it will only appeal to some of the people some of the time.
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