It was an occult civil war game. It took place during the american civil war alt history where the change was that Europeans discovered a 3 mile tall stone wall enclosed most of North America. What was inside the wall were bodyhorror human-ish monstrous things, and you fought them using religion. People had gotten on top of the wall and had occasionally entered the interior, but never returned.
The wall cut through the great lakes to the east coast was intact. So people settled, heard about a wall from the natives, thought they meant mountains and headed west until they saw it for themselves.
See pic related. Chicago was a border town built at the wall's base.
Yes. The truth was it was Garden of Eden 2.0, that God made a second one in North America after the first one failed. The monsters were pre-original sin humans essentially.
What's the deal with sinlessness appearing to us monstrosity? Are we simply so used to our fallen state that innocence is repulsive? Assuming Trees of Power were left lying around finding Good/Evil and force-feeding to some latter-day Eve would be a good campaign goal, could be extended further if the newly exiled people are cast at the feet of still racialist and genocide-happy settlers.
7 months ago
Anonymous
it's just misanthrope cope about how sin is based on the knowledge of good and evil, so a sinless person is still evil, just ignorant and thus sinless
I understand perfectly. I, myself, am incredibly obsessed with another kids' cartoon, though I cannot post it. Something about a global rule 15 and a certain purple dinosaur
Classless dnd 3.5 (everyone gets Fighter feat progression, no level limit) with spells changed to dumb shit like Recursive Hyperdeath, Split Atom, Collapse Epidermis, and Duplicate Organ (hostile).
Setting is the future where we can simulate realities, which can themselves simulate realities, but the whole thing is collapsing in on itself and essentially the super-internet is leaking into reality (which probably isn't all that real to begin with).
I have an automated system to release the document in the year 2069 assuming I haven't achieved some kind of immortality.
D100 based, war game phase based, High Fantasy over the top nonsense where by the end everyone has access to some silly shit. One example is an early bard ability 'failing upwards' where if during the conflict phase you missed a basic strike then during the reaction phase you turn that failure into an embarassing blunder provoking a mandatory threat attack, if the opponent misses then they cause the same blunder provoking a threat attack and at the final class level (classes and races both have ten levels of progression) bards get fail together which gives everyone an infinite number of reactions to cause threat attacks and allows failing upwards to essentially be an infinite loop so long as someone is missing their threat attack. Theres more the bard can do but that was just some fun nonsense for them. I wrote 120 of these things because i just likes writing classes. It also means it took me twice the time to write a bestiary than it did the core rules because i just wasnt as into it.
I read through your demo. I was interested in your core concept, considered buying it until I read a bit more. Your execution was bad. The classes and their abilities are poorly written with confusing language, and a lot of typos/grammar issues that I think even chatGPT would have caught and fixed. The real deal-breaker was when I got to the monsters and saw how shit they would be to make or run against a group. The idea of having a ton of actions per phase for a ton of phases needed refined too.
You could turn that into something good, but it's not now.
I disagree about the writing but hey, authors bias. I'd be interested in the typo's/grammar issues you saw. What makes you feel like the monsters are shit anon?
I read through your demo. I was interested in your core concept, considered buying it until I read a bit more. Your execution was bad. The classes and their abilities are poorly written with confusing language, and a lot of typos/grammar issues that I think even chatGPT would have caught and fixed. The real deal-breaker was when I got to the monsters and saw how shit they would be to make or run against a group. The idea of having a ton of actions per phase for a ton of phases needed refined too.
You could turn that into something good, but it's not now.
I disagree about the writing but hey, authors bias. I'd be interested in the typo's/grammar issues you saw. What makes you feel like the monsters are shit anon?
So, since this is kind of like an invitation to shill thread and someone from a previous thread actually wanted to provide feedback (even if it was a little to vague to be useful) i'm gonna post the preview version of my game.
Starting with the core rulebook preview, it has 12 of 120 paths, a few of the 24 races and is missing custom race building rules but otherwise is a complete preview of the game. It's a rather simple game, cutting all those races, paths and the race building rules brings it from 225k words to 38k.
I'd love if anyone has specific feedback, stuff like the previous anons impressions are cool to read even if they're negative but aren't actually helpful in making my game better. Of course, this is Ganker so vitriol about the game and name calling is expected and not a big deal, but I won't be responding to it.
Bestiary Preview, has just the level 1 monsters, missing 2-20, custom monster building rules and encounter building guidelines, I think it goes from like 205k words to under 5k. Part of that is because monsters get more complicated as they level (they have 2 abilities plus their basic strike per level.
Eh guess it doesn't hurt to post a level 20 monster that I posted a few times while I was still working on the game just so there's a comparison from the level 1 preview.
It's D&D 3.5e with homebrew variant systems we have decided to use on our table.
One example: Familiars are animals possessed by outsiders who are summoned by wizards as part of their initiation to the class. They are their magical conduits, a wizard with no familiar is effectively worthless.
Im currently trying to build a system and setting based around the Dominions series of vidya games. In a design sense im basically cribbing systems I like from different games and trying to combine them together, while also figuring out the best way to translate rules from an incredibly autistic wargame into an RPG. For example, I am just yoinking the 3-action turn system from Pf2e because i think its a very elegant way of detailing what someone is allowed to do on their turn, as well as their concept of most "non-combat" skills giving some sort of in-combat action or utility.
The most unique piece, that ive worked on so far, is probably the magic system, but thats largely just cribbed from the video game with the addition of a manner of progression.
lmao, i have over 220 hours in Dominions 5 and over 100 in 4 before it, and I still think im hot stinky garbage at the game. I can win singleplayer games against normal AI with a couple specific factions, but thats about the peak of my skill level, never bothered with multiplayer. The only real tip I've would be to pick a specific faction that you like, and play them a bunch to learn them or look up guides.
I'm not making a TTRPG based off them because I'm a savant at the games, I'm just doing it because i think the snippets of worldbuilding it gives ( and it really is mostly snippets that make a FromSoftware game look story-based) are really interesting and I want to expand them into a cohesive setting and I like the magic system.
Start with a fairly straightforward nation until you come to terms with the dogshit UI and game progression - MA Ulm, MA Abysia, EA Mekone, are heavy infantry nations with simple supporting magic that'll basically expand on their own with low attrition without you needing to set up advanced formations or anything. Build heavy infantry for a couple turns, find the smallest looking province in your cap ring and smash all your troops into it. Then repeat that, pop out a new expansion party every other turn and keep taking provinces. When you can afford the gold for it, start recruiting mages to begin researching magic. When you have more gold, build forts and labs around your lands to recruit your national mages and such. As a beginner, just research something like Conjuration 5, Evocation 3-5, and Alteration 5. That'll let you cast most of the 'normal' spells like Fireball, Summon XPower, various elementals, and some buffs. Once you've got a bit of research under your belt, start mixing in mages into your armies, and play around with mage scripts to see how things work. Once you 'get' the basics, look through the different nations to find one you think is cool, try them out in single player, then find a multiplayer game recruiting. The AI just cheats a million shitty units so single player is generally a pretty mindnumbing experience, but the game becomes a lot more interesting once you add in diplomacy with other players and adapting to their strategies.
Similar to something like Dwarf Fortress, the game is actually really simple to read once you know what all the hotkeys are and what you can actually do, but it's made by two Swedish professors so it's not exactly polished.
>Want to make system for own sci-fi setting >Work on for awhile because want to make gunfights more fun than previous system we used >Take break, play in someone else's gurps game >Get mad at gurps, homebrew some fixes >Go back to work on homebrew >Realize it's not really that great and the work we did on gurps made that more fun
In any case, it was a 2d20 roll under blackjack system. With the idea being inc ombat one die was damage, one was chance to bypass armor, you wanted both to be high but something had to be under your to-hit number to actually hit.
Automatic weapons or cover both added a third die. Rapid fire just got you a spare chance to hit (thus uncapping both the positive roll outcomes from to-hit chance.) and cover makes that third die also have to be over a certain number to not strike cover. (With very high penetration weapons like railguns lowering the cover number.)
It was elegant, and I won't say that it didn't work, but houseruling gurps into the ground just got us closer to where we wanted to be.
The only time in my life when I was homebrewing system, I was 12 and I was tasked by friends to "fix" pic related over stuff we simply didn't understand, solely because I was the best at math out of them. The end result was adding classes to it, extreme HP bloat (we were playing a lot of UO back then, too, so having HP counted in at least dozens was only natural). And using BG2 manual to add more spells to the game. Needlessly to say, I've created ten times more problems than I've solved.
It was a valuable lesson in the end. I've learned that effort put into something doesn't make it good, and that you first need to identify the real problem (like reading the rules and grasping them) rather than trying to fix a "problem" (our misconceptions about char-gen and char-progression).
I still have the notebook in which I've made all the notes, as a mementum, 21 years later.
No, wait, I made a simple percentile system for a Vallehru game. It was a simple race-class-profession system (since Vallheru already uses class-and-level system) with perk-like system to it, requiring specific level of related skills to get them and receive the bonus. Everyone kept praising it, which I find hilarious, because it was just a brain-dead d100 roll and either d3, d6 or d10 for damage rolls, while the implementation into the game was done by the admin of the server, so they were praising his coding and the fact you could make a roll in a middle of a post, get outcome and write rest of the post from there as my ability to design the most brain-dead shit.
Good times. Vallheru-like games are probably the reason why I've sticked with the hobby for so long, because 00s were absolute shitfest of endless edge and grimdark at actual tables.
A 'buy ranks in classes for XP' style system where there are three primary classes, each of which has their own various customizable abilities:
Adepts get 'Maneuvers', where they can trade negative qualities with a certain move/attack in exchange for positive qualities. Like an attack that has less accuracy but more damage. Or an acrobatic move that always succeeds but can only be done X times per day. They eventually get access to 'Styles', which give permenant buffs at the cost of permenant drawbacks. Such as a 'monk style' forcing you to be unarmed and unarmored. but improving your damage and defense rolls.
Evokers have mana pools, but mana comes in different flavors. Each type of mana works does something different if you use it internally, if you blast people with it, or if you blast areas with it. But you might not always have access to the healing mana, or the fire mana, or the like. You have to find wellsprings of energy in the area. They can also eventually design 'rituals' for more powerful magical undertakings that take multiple manatypes and have to be slowly built in order for the ritual to be actualized.
The last pseudo-class, the Scholar, prepares a metacurrency called Lore and devotes it to different categories. Then he can just spend Lore to get bonus dice on anything dealing with that subject. You know you're fighting a dragon, you can burn a bunch of Dragon Lore to hit it in the reverse scale. Then they also have a secondary ability to learn various monster traits and monster abilities, FF5 Blue Mage style. Learning Pack Tactics from wolves, etc.
Oh, I forgot to mention. Each of these classes can be mixed and matched. Adept/Evokers can make maneuvers that use mana or are based on spellcasting, while Scholar/adepts cross-classes can use the Secrets mechanic (the blue mage thing) to steal other people's manuevers.
Evoker/scholars get access to magical monster abilities, like a dragon's ability to breathe fire or a Hydra's ability to regenerate. They always have a mana cost, though.
Then there are a handful of other, much smaller classes. A normal path has 5 ranks, but some subclasses could have anywhere from 1-3 of them which cost different amounts of XP. One example is a Beastmaster Class, where you have a secondary creature you boost by spending XP, or a split from the Scholar that has the limited ability to teach other characters their Secrets.
it's a mix genesys/gurps/D&D/osr with lots of stuff stolen straight from final fantasy, mmos, and fighting games like street fighter.
It has limited resources like food and water, limited healing based on a maximum amount you can heal without resting in a safe place, special moves, desperation moves, cooldowns, 6 different magic skills, a system where you can build your own weapon from various templates stolen from fragged empire, active defenses stole from gurps, it has mmo roles like DPS, tank, and healer, and has magic items as something common that players get regularly.
In sum, it is the diametrical opposite of everything /tg/ stands for.
It is >conceptually inspired by Mario, Wario, and Zelda, and even Sonic to a slight degree, but without the titular characters and set in its own world in which the concepts are worked to fit cohesively, instead of just thrown in the kitchen sink >focused on exploring wilderness and fighting the local monsters, undead, and dragons; the game is more about what the characters do, than where they came from or who they are >heavy on combat options, resource/status tracking, mathematics, and character setup; there is always a result to an action, and it is always codified rather than left up to some butthole to make it up randomly >made strictly to my preferences and specifications, because that's what everyone tells you to do for every !game that's criticized anyway
therefore, >not something /tg/ would enjoy
It is also >not finished
I've been working on it for a few years, running playtests and refining it significantly from the earliest drafts, and making tangible progress on the design and mechanics. My biggest problem is that I don't have a document of any kind worth sharing yet, and also I'm not going to post anything more specific about it on /tg/ because, honestly, frick this shit hole.
>only players roll >roll 1d6 >+1d6 if you're good at the thing >+1d6 if the conditions are favorable >pick the highest >if equal or higher than target number, you win (2 is easy, 6 is hard)
rate my system
It's a beer and pretzels ruleslight called Frat Wizards.
Frat Wizards is a dice-range system where you can fail in both directions (as in your default range of success on a 3d6 is rolling 8-13 with numbers above and below this being two different forms of failstate). The players are novice wizards attending wizard college who awaken each session in the aftermath of a hellacious bender and each randomly roll their prepared spells (3 is generally a good number) from a table, after which they are, as noodle-armed casters, charged with solving whatever problems they encounter/have caused with only use of those spells.
Each spell has three variants for success, low-failure, and high-failure. Frat Wizards only have two numerical stats which are bottom-range (power) and top-range (control) with each spell generally benefiting more from one or the other (power is important for fireballs, control is important for summons etc.)
Hoping to properly compose it into a pdf soon and post.
>Frat Wizards only have two numerical stats which are bottom-range (power) and top-range (control) with each spell generally benefiting more from one or the other (power is important for fireballs, control is important for summons etc.)
You should check out ORE if you haven't looked at it already.
Alternate player's handbook for D&D 5e. Just humans, 13 classes, no spellcasters. It was conceived to be sort of a design challenge, to make all the classes distinct without relying on magic or mysticism to explain my class features, but somehow it's closer to being finished than anything else I've worked on recently.
Overall I'm feeling pretty tired of 5e D&D, but I'm not tired of this, I need to finish this first.
>get sick of trying to do what I want in existingSystem >work on my own system for a month or so >start playtesting system with friends and find problems >decide it's easier to just use otherSystem >get sick of trying to do what I want in otherSystem
The impressive part is I never learn.
>2d8 + adds core mechanic vs 10 default target number >classes including alchemist, runethane, etc >subtle magic if any >heavy armor focused class >light armor battledancer class >classes give you +3 to one skill and +2 to another. You then get to distribute +2, +1, +1, +1 among other skills >no stats >you pick a class, pick distribute your unpicked class bonuses, pick a few perks, and your equipment >combat is a major and a minor action, which is a mix of "bonus action" and "reaction" in 5e D&D, effectively >it can be used to do a few default things but mostly is powered by different feats that let you do stuff like react to move to intercept an enemy moving to attack you >ranger class can help you avoid random encounters and gather ingredients for alchemists >alchemists can make potions but also items and golems >the idea is that characters will cooperate to stack debuffs on an enemy to finish it off, or take actions to complement each others' abilities >each class has a starting perk and two perks it can take at odd numbered levels. Or you can take generic ones instead. You get a new perk at each level >every other level, you increase four different skills by 1 point each >damage mechanic is, you roll 1 to 3 d8s based on your weapon >each creature has an armor rating. Unarmored is 4, and light/medium/heavy armor are 5-7 >each d8 that comes up >= the target's Armor reduces their health by 1 >most people have 1 health, characters start with 3 to 6 and gain +1 at each new level
Might switch to a d10s based system, with 2d10+adds for checks and to-hit, and d10 dice pool for damage, so I can shift the Armor values a bit higher and make 1 hit point minion creatures a bit less squishy. Which they're kinda supposed to be but I'd like to be able to have bookkeeping-free mass combat and meatier combat in the same system with this damage mechanic.
Latest is hacking tricube tales to have a real skill system where every skill has a paired skill it has to split 4 points with at character creation, so you can have 3 melee ranks and 1 ranged rank, or 2 of each.
My buddy and I were joking about making a system where the GM is a secret agent like Solid Snake and the players are all his combat team a la Colonel Campbell and Otacon and they have to successfully guide him through dangerous scenarios. But we’ll never make it. Would be best as a little pamphlet game like hell vice merciless maybe.
Hnnnghh metal gear
It's a little board game called Ganker. The rules are simple >you roll an AI-generated thread from the slop machine >you post it on /tg/ and try to get people to start a flamewar in it >you're not allowed to reset IPs - if you're too obvious and the jannies ban you, you have to live with it >bonus points if a threadschizo takes residence and starts having meltdowns >whoever gets a thread to autosage first wins
This is a system I've been messing around with recently. It's a Black Company inspired, low magic, high lethality skirmish game.
The interesting part at least to me comes from the equipment you equip your mercenaries with. Each piece of equipment has an ability you can use. The abilities are either an active, passive, or both. Actives you can only use once a turn and Passives can be used whenever they are triggered. The idea behind it was based off of Dark Souls weapon arts/ ER Ashes of War, where each weapon has a special attack that does more damage, casts a spell, moves the character, etc. The overall goal of the Equipment system was to add lots of little things that can happen during combat in the right circumstances, and also to allow players to still influence combat when its not their turn.
Comments, questions, and concerns welcome.
No, I haven't tested it yet. My group is busy playing bg3, but we are mercifully almost done with that.
Not exactly a system, but I've been spitballing an engine builder board game for a few days, about space witches brewing the ultimate witch's brew. Book of Hours came out recently so I wanted to make something that did a similar vibe of slowly collecting small pieces of power to slowly grow into something big, though it's pretty simple stuff at the moment.
When I was young I played on a forum where people made shitloads of homebrews. My own was some sort of d20 where most skills were governed by two stats instead of one. And that's kind of all I remember about it. We played immoral space pirates, near future cyborg warriors, and one time a buddy and me conspired to play Victorian Steampunk characters on a quest to find the queen in a semi-serious post-apocalyptic setting. The GM was cool with us, so there was no problem. All in random systems bodged together by who-ever was running it. Lots of adaptation of Vampire, too. Turns out the system translates really well to science fiction.
Currently, my homebrew only exists as a bunch of notes. I think it may be a little too ambitious.
2d6 Xianxia/Wuxia game. Tick based combat with more powerful characters having more ticks.
Its an autistic mess.
Has rules for travel that take into account sailing upriver vs down river.
Has encumbrance rules that tie into overland travel and combat and fatigue.
Has rules for dying of thirst and starvation (and hunting and finding water as a way to not die)
Is designed so it could model you playing as a chinese rice farmer who doesn't go adventuring (boring as that game might be).
I'm still writing up all the taos (basically wushu powers) and it's slow going (85 written and another 30 or so to go) because the source material isn't exactly designed to be balanced for enjoyable combat gameplay...
It's basically a d&d-like with a different resolution mechanic at this point. i.e. it's very combat focused. I need to find systems with solid non-combat mechanics to borrow from.
Mine too except I can’t figure out if I should make mythology inspired spell casters or just go with dnd kitchen sink slop.
For example my summoner class only knows how to summon creatures; they can’t solve every problem with a spell like in dnd.
Summoners can only summon Demons (which are actual spirits in my setting) Fey, and elementals.
I plan on going the Avatar route and just giving players very basic "flavors" of magic. In this case, instead of the four elements, it'll be heat, cold, and force.
Lol, close. It’s some rapid prototyping for a... I guess it’s a spell selection list. But you build it from scratch, charting a literal path across procedurally generated magical “territory”.
At one point I was looking to include Penrose tiling in it. Not entirely sure why. But that’s probably partially why it looks batshit.
so spell selection operating sorta like an incredibly complex version of a video game skill tree, thats actually a really cool idea, although adding in some esoteric pattering on top of that is some advanced autism
Since this is supposed to be baby mode Rolemaster shitbrew, it will follow the philosophy of only 1 damage table (which I stole from a post from ICE forums). The critical table may be worked more but I still want to leave it vague enough for people to interpret their own gory kills and own death.
I started with Risus for a mecha game and now I have an unholy abomination of a system. >Core mechanic is both dice pool and step die, using a standard set of polyhedral dice. So if a system had a d8, you would roll a d4, d6, and d8. >Highest die of the set is compared to opposing roll, ties move on to the second-highest die, further ties keep going until a winner is found or someone runs out of dice. >Tags on systems and mechs to modify effects of combat. Mech frames are mostly barebones and most of the customization is slapping systems and weapons on them. >Random hit locations instead of standard Risus damage, can do called shots but you can only use your highest die instead of your full dice pool. >Game is set in a vaguely Solatorobo style universe so gameplay would involve going on comfy airship adventures while fighting monsters and other mech pilots >Abstract zone-based battlemap system >Not really Risus anymore but still has concepts like Pumps and simultaneous combat turns (called 'Clashes') now
I have no idea what I'm doing but I have enough to start writing up mechs and playtesting them.
That sounds neat. I’m not really a mecha guy but I like the idea of using the skeleton of Risus and nudging the mechanics to produce different interactions. I’d totally give this a try.
>Random hit locations instead of standard Risus damage, can do called shots but you can only use your highest die instead of your full dice pool.
I’m curious how this would play out. Maybe I’ve misunderstood something fundamental or maybe I’m not getting your intent. How much of a disadvantage is this given that the highest potential result stays the same and the mean and median actually increase? You only take the best result from the dice pool, correct? I mean I get that you now have only one potential outcomes but that outcome skews higher now. Again, maybe I’m misunderstanding how potent a called shot is meant to be. I suppose if the benefit is choosing the system you target but you can only apply one ‘success’ of damage then that makes sense on its face.
I am too. I'm not a math guy but I know just enough about probability to be dangerous. To me, since you're only using your highest die type, you lose the clash if you tie or the opponent's roll is larger than yours. There's no backup dice in case you tie, or hope one of your lower dice roll better, so the outcome is swingier if you want to aim for a specific mech part. It's still 1 damage baseline, but tags can increase the damage. I'll have to workshop it more.
It may also be useful as some parts can take damage for other parts, or the weapon you're using can bypass another part's tag.
Ok, you’ve got more underlying interactions than just comparing dice faces. Ties automatically resolving against the attacker is significant and even without knowing how tag effects work I can imagine less dice being impactful in that regard.
This sounds very interesting. I’ve fiddled around with pool based dueling systems influenced and adjacent to Risus for years. I’ll keep an eye out for your progress report should you post one.
This seems pretty clean.
Would there not be greater benefit if Pull Punch capped damage or reduced crit effects to only produce stun results? You can go all out with your OB but you won’t get bleed, extra CH damage, or crit effects. As it is now Pull Punch automatically generates a Parry, which may be by design, but doesn’t present the possibility of a single focused strike meant to disadvantage the target without being lethal. Given how overall damage is a combination of stun, bleed, and raw hits, as well as the effect of crits, just reducing the OB seems like a half measure as an option that isn’t just a bi-product of parrying.
Have you considered splitting OBs over +10 to gain extra attacks? I don’t remember if it was a house rule when we played RM or if it was in one of the Companions but, in RM terms, if your OB was 50 or more you could break it up and make multiple attacks with a -20 penalty to the attacks. OB couldn’t be reduced below 0 and still be effective.
I'll be very honest with you and say I just called it that because I wanted a cool name for the "saving OB" option. I was thinking of non-lethal combat just to be a normal roll, but the criticals are capped at A and there is no bleed. I was gonna keep the raw rules for number of attacks per turn since this is how I played it when using AL for AD&D. This isn't exactly a 1x1 of AL, it's mostly how I remember playing it with AD&D with some stuff I got from other games.
Dropping this... not quite a homebrew but it's a boardgame/wargame some anons and I have been working on for almost 2 years now. Train based combat in a low-fantasy post post-apoc. Still a fair chunk of work to go but we're definitely making serious progress.
Yeah, started as a shit post in response to a bait thread. The thread derailed perfectly, the way that tg has perfected to an art form.
https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/82832773/
It is, but it's ended up being fairly "component" heavy/dependant (cards, engine control, custom dice, etc). I'll try and tidy up our mega folder and upload components for printing if anyone is interested. If you have the pieces, it plays well. Played a demo round on tg about a month ago. Was pretty good.
Literally GURPS, but with FATE dice and FATE aspects (and a bunch of other homebrew rules) in order to deceive my players who say they hate GURPS into playing and loving GURPS.
I made a 5e homebrew to convert the game to the Hero System, basically. The whole point is you can do it without touching or learning Hero directly, but it takes some GM legwork to rejigger his NPCs and monsters.
I made games for a while, started simple with mutating ones i had then making new ones.
I was super poor so I made a lot of games.
Now I still do, often small, sometimes big.
Mostly wargames and board games.
Now I'm learning to make components to be the real deal.
I designed a wargame with simultaneous turns, and instant combat resolution using no dice or chance, inspired by Erfworld, including a magic system, in 2015, and told no one.
I kid.
I tried getting a few people on the erfworld forum to play but it fizzled out.
Then Erfworld died a few years ago.
Setting is the kitchen sink to end all kitchen sinks.
Mechanics are 1d20 vs 1d20, unmodified, with a sliding difficulty vs strength scale that determines whether you can fail upwards or succeed downwards, and it applies to all ambiguous challenges, from combat to crafting to luck to room generation, where the first roll is the player-character, and the second roll is whatever is opposing them (Enemy, Crafting Material, Lady Luck, ect ect)
So a Master Fire Wizard can fail a spell beyond his control without it exploding in his face, but just being weaker than normal, while a Novice Fire Wizard can succeed at a spell beyond his control, which just means it exploded in the bad guy's direction too.
I used to have this amazing, unique homebrew system with unfolding rules based on a collection of the best D&D house rules and dice mechanics I could think of that ended up being fast, easy to play, deep enough for choices, and represented the fantasy world too.
Then I stopped playing TTRPGs for a while and forgot most of it. No, I didn't write it down either.
I have 3, all abandoned. 1 was a game about every character having a death clock that inevitably ticked down each session I came up with that one on a whim though, another was a glorified character creation lifepath solo rpg, and the last one was an RPG i was trying to make to replicate a post apocalyptic wandering in a weird post apocalyptic world with my inspirations being Gone with the Blastwave and Romantically Apocalyptic.
Trying to do a total re-work of dnd 5e. Because I’ve never liked wotc’s system much. Basically I’m stealing rules from other, better, games like Cyberpunk, BECMI, Pathfinder, and DC20 RPG. And just sort of glorping them together on a much more flexible chassis of fundamental math. Also there’s a lot of things I’m fleshing out that 5e just shat the bed on. > Formalized Dungeon exploration and dungeon turns. Currently lifted from OSE. But I’m gonna see if I can adapt then to function in any hostile environment. Not just dungeons. > 4 action based action economy. Like Pathfinder but any action can be used as a reaction. Just with a much simpler Multi Action Penalty. So all you have to do is stack disadvantage instead of remembering a seemingly arbitrary string of numbers. > 3 kinds of critical hits with different triggering requirements. To make weapon combat more dynamic while keeping the core gameplay loop as simple as possible. > Mana system instead of spell slots. Spells are still powerful, but spellcasters operate with heftier restrictions.
Currently, it's a TCG that is exceptionally counters heavy, because when I did testing with the guys at the LGS people really fricking love moving counters around.
Currently it's just: >6 colours, fashioned after the typical high fantasy low complexity element table of dark light fire water air earth >mana system is most similar to lorcana, no dedicated resource cards, any card is playable as a resource instead of as a board piece >initiative pass and reserve mana systems stolen from LoR, only with the capacity of loaning mana from the future, not just saving mana now for the future >manually activated abilities go on the stack but triggered abilities are instant with automatically selected targets instead of spawning new decision points >30 life, 30 cards, 3 cards per name >decking out causes fatigue damage instead of instant loss >resources are generic and decks are hard locked to 2 colours >removal is intentionally mediocre to encourage playing the board >no lock/prison pieces, but yes alternate cost or punishment pieces >no legendary creature/unique cards everything is stackable
The only thing that I'm really concerned about is that during the alpha test fire was stupid overpowered, but it was also the most fun to play according to feedback
Oh, important additional wrinkle >adding a card from hand to your resource section (which is hard once per turn) also causes you to draw a card
This is because I wanted what I think the bare minimum of what a turn should be, incrementing your resources by 1 and playing 1 card, should leave you card neutral. Merely playing on curve shouldn't cause you to consistently go card negative. On the flip side, no colour has unconditional "draw X cards" effects. Every single one has a means of gaining additional cards, and every one of them has to jump through different hoops.
My current homebrew is Agartha Second Edition. Its an hexmap skirmish wargame where you recruit an Expedition of 5~20 men and lead them to fight other Expeditions and horrors in the underground layers of the world.
Feel free to come and check the work we are doing, we are always looking for more reviews and opinions and people to playtest.
[...]
We currently got the main rulebook mostly done for the main engine, 6 factions playable with a roster varying from 8-25 units, a "world" book in the works for the lore, and we are looking into building a campaign mode eventually.
For the moment its a wargame but we have been talking into having a RPG variant with it.
>I've stopped talking about the game I was working on because the system is homebrew that I put together but I'm too worried everyone will think it's stupid and terrible so I can't show it to them by actually running the game.
The harsh truth is that you haven’t been working on a game, you’ve been jerking off to tables and maths. Development is a cycle of writing->testing->writing->testing. If you haven’t playtested, you haven’t even properly begun.
Test early. Test often.
I've made a few attempts at a hack of the Song of Ice and Fire RPG (the d6 dice pool one), built for a more pulpy sword and sorcery setting, and tried to tack the psionics rules from Stars Without Numbers onto it as a magic system, but never got very far into it. But I mostly run OSR games, and I'm fairly content with them, so I'll probably never get around to it.
It was a strategic historical campaign using modified ADLG rules for simple large scale combat with the players representing various leaders (mercenary captains, nobles, kings). Out of combat resolution used 2d10 roll under with player stats covering three broad categories, social, intellectual, and martial. Social was negotiation and shit intellectual was everything from problem solving to organizing troops during marches, and martial is actual combat duels, or avoiding dying or getting maimed in battle.
I'm too indecisive to ever finish my system so I'll just dump my concepts:
Overall inspiration was Cypher/GURPS
Design philosophy is universal system with rules focused around the three gameplay pillars combat/social/exploration but with player sided rolls only to allow ease of GM.
A level based classless system with perk trees tied to skills. The skills had hardset overall categories but freeform specializations.
Played with the idea of having classlike special abilities tied to items. Then if you found a class artifact you could mix/match or switch out classes.
Wanted a system that mixed temporary and lasting damage.
Originally this was a Vitality pool segmented into three separate chunks which fueled actions/abilities as well as take damage. Depleting a chunk was a level of exhaustion. 5 minute rest would refill current chunk. Nights sleep would heal an exhaustion allowing to refill up to the higher segment.
Currently I'm more on the idea of having three separate pools for Sanity/Health/Energy which each have their own semi-permenant damage that is harder to heal and each can be spent to fuel different types of actions.
Could never decide on a dice mechanic.
Originally was going to do a unique system of a 2d12 roll over but the TN was based on your skill and any environmental difficulties. Mods only changed TN. This allowed a blackjack style gambling system of trading your resource pool to roll closer to 24. Every 4 over your TN gave a bonus to the effect roll but rolling over 24 was a critical failure.
The effect roll was d6s keep three and had it's own TN such as a monsters armor or a lock difficulty.
Thought this system was too finnicky for most players so I've been toying with a aSoFaI style tiered Dice system (1d12+skilld6 v TN), a Cortex Prime style mixed dice pool with die size based on skill, and a d6 pool keep system with tricks based on unused dice vaguely reminiscent of the AGE system.
In the vein of Cypher it would have tons of single use items
roll above DC d20 system, players roll against Attack and Defence DC of enemies. Roll modifiers are Attribute + Skill, but Skills are each a category (Martial, Cunning Survival...) and are not attribute locked. Their "class" is a set of dice they put on Damage, Energy, Speed and Vigor.
I made a dungeon crawl on the TI-99
Room 1 you got the sword, the gold, or the key
Room 2 there was a monster, a locked door, or empty
Room 3 GAME OVER
A famous game company published a system, but it was incomplete so I homebrewed a bunch of stuff to make it playable. It's called Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition.
Its a classless D20 fantasy adventure game built out of the skeleton of AD&D2e trying to evoke the atmosphere and style of the King's Field games.
Players build their own ability kits and spells are MP based, with an emphasis on exploration and finding magic items to mix and match. I have about 160 pages and have done some playtesting for it, but it still has a ways to go before I try publishing it for real. Probably going to release a playtest document in a few weeks though.
>We don't have a proper game design general because this dogshit thread exists.
Can you walk me through your logic here? I understand that it's impossible for you to make a /GDG/ thread while OP's thread exists, but can you elaborate on why this is so?
I just wanted a system where basically every class is a martial style (knight, thief, hunter, monk) OR a magic type (arcanist, priest, druid, psion), with an emphasis on multiclassing. the goal being you could play solo classes or you could multiclass to do stuff like holy knights, nature rangers, elemental monks, psychic assassins, etc.
I had a rough concept for a system like that where at chargen you make a 3 stack from any combo of martial, finesse, and magic. Each one would have a bevy of ability options and you either tier them so you can only choose options for the rank of your character or you choose a number of the options equal to rank for each level up. So a rank 3 martial can only choose martial abilities while a 2M1F will have mostly martial abilities with a smattering of finesse abilities.
Honesly I'm a big fan of level based soft classless systems. Really inspired by pic related and Morrowind, where you are setting intentions at the start but are not limited to set abilities. I like the idea of creating a unique concept for your "class" from the start and giving it it's own name.
you seen to get something wrong
the scale on the side shows how much something is.
100 mageness is the wizard (lower right corner)
while 0 mageness is the warrior
Battlemage is 50 mageness.
I just wanted to make a freeform magic system for my all-wizard game and ended up creating a hex system that required undergrad math units to make sense of. It worked for the 30 or so sessions and then I never wanted to touch it ever again because it was fricking riddled with fixes and changes that I made no changelog for and could not remember for the life of me what I was thinking when I made them.
ok >players sit in a circle >each take a turn rolling a d6 >number that comes up determines how many times the roller has to punch himself in the testicles
last person to faint wins.
Gladiator game. Turns out there's not that many out there. There's GURPS, but it's GURPS. Mythras actually sucks at combat. It's detailed, it's dangerous and deadly, it works for what it wants to do, but at the same time, if you think a turn in D&D is slow, Mythras is slower. Blood Red Sand doesn't actually work that well. Tried it. Doesn't work. Same with Eternal Contenders and it's card system. And then the rest are just settings or splats for RPGs that do other stuff. And even then there aren't many. DarkSun, but D&D doesn't do gladiatorial combat well. It's too spongy. Savage Worlds, but I'm not a fan of their system. And a bunch of narrative only systems. I want combat.
So, seeing that I made my own. It's a d12 sorts dice pool. But not really. You roll a number of d12s equal to your stat, then you add your stat and other bonuses to each roll. Then you compare them highest to lowest. It's quick, it's snappy, it's very much flow dependant. If you're lucky enough (and your build is good enough against the type of gladiator your opponent is), then you get to take control of the flow. But if you get a bit unlucky you can lose control.
It's also not to the death. Most fights, baring some incredible rolls, will end in a surrender, sometimes in serious injury, but very rarely in actual death. Fights at that point are generally over anyways. If someone is injured it's more just finishing them off.
When i was 16 i tried to recreate rolemaster out of my vague memories of a couple of MERP games i partecipated to when i was 14.
fukken chad
It was an occult civil war game. It took place during the american civil war alt history where the change was that Europeans discovered a 3 mile tall stone wall enclosed most of North America. What was inside the wall were bodyhorror human-ish monstrous things, and you fought them using religion. People had gotten on top of the wall and had occasionally entered the interior, but never returned.
It was a D6 Dice Pool system.
>was
w-what happened to it
I stopped working on it. Didn't have the time.
>american civil war alt history
>nobody living in america due to the wall and monsters
So not alt civil war at all then.
The wall cut through the great lakes to the east coast was intact. So people settled, heard about a wall from the natives, thought they meant mountains and headed west until they saw it for themselves.
See pic related. Chicago was a border town built at the wall's base.
I dunno why but the idea of Minnesotan Cronenbergs absolutely slays me.
Poor Michigan though, has to put up with all these Coastgays.
Is it centered on Yellowstone?
Yes. The truth was it was Garden of Eden 2.0, that God made a second one in North America after the first one failed. The monsters were pre-original sin humans essentially.
Uhhhhh.... SPOILERS
The game is never going to exist, it's too late.
Concept is great, though. Definitely rework it into something. Maybe a board game?
What's the deal with sinlessness appearing to us monstrosity? Are we simply so used to our fallen state that innocence is repulsive? Assuming Trees of Power were left lying around finding Good/Evil and force-feeding to some latter-day Eve would be a good campaign goal, could be extended further if the newly exiled people are cast at the feet of still racialist and genocide-happy settlers.
it's just misanthrope cope about how sin is based on the knowledge of good and evil, so a sinless person is still evil, just ignorant and thus sinless
I like this one.
You made that?
With help from my friends.
Neat stuff, dude
Thanks, I'm kind of obsessed with this specific Disney property.
I understand perfectly. I, myself, am incredibly obsessed with another kids' cartoon, though I cannot post it. Something about a global rule 15 and a certain purple dinosaur
I love this.
Thanks, it's probably my favorite.
I can't. I have a bunch of ideas but none of them consist of much more than a few pages of notes and a load of vague ideas in my head.
It's a JRPG.
Classless dnd 3.5 (everyone gets Fighter feat progression, no level limit) with spells changed to dumb shit like Recursive Hyperdeath, Split Atom, Collapse Epidermis, and Duplicate Organ (hostile).
Setting is the future where we can simulate realities, which can themselves simulate realities, but the whole thing is collapsing in on itself and essentially the super-internet is leaking into reality (which probably isn't all that real to begin with).
I have an automated system to release the document in the year 2069 assuming I haven't achieved some kind of immortality.
>it's another Fantasy Heartbreaker
anon...it'll just consume your soul, stop doing this to yourself
>Classless dnd 3.5
THis does not compute but your overall setting idea sounds awesome. Post moar?
D100 based, war game phase based, High Fantasy over the top nonsense where by the end everyone has access to some silly shit. One example is an early bard ability 'failing upwards' where if during the conflict phase you missed a basic strike then during the reaction phase you turn that failure into an embarassing blunder provoking a mandatory threat attack, if the opponent misses then they cause the same blunder provoking a threat attack and at the final class level (classes and races both have ten levels of progression) bards get fail together which gives everyone an infinite number of reactions to cause threat attacks and allows failing upwards to essentially be an infinite loop so long as someone is missing their threat attack. Theres more the bard can do but that was just some fun nonsense for them. I wrote 120 of these things because i just likes writing classes. It also means it took me twice the time to write a bestiary than it did the core rules because i just wasnt as into it.
I read through your demo. I was interested in your core concept, considered buying it until I read a bit more. Your execution was bad. The classes and their abilities are poorly written with confusing language, and a lot of typos/grammar issues that I think even chatGPT would have caught and fixed. The real deal-breaker was when I got to the monsters and saw how shit they would be to make or run against a group. The idea of having a ton of actions per phase for a ton of phases needed refined too.
You could turn that into something good, but it's not now.
I disagree about the writing but hey, authors bias. I'd be interested in the typo's/grammar issues you saw. What makes you feel like the monsters are shit anon?
So, since this is kind of like an invitation to shill thread and someone from a previous thread actually wanted to provide feedback (even if it was a little to vague to be useful) i'm gonna post the preview version of my game.
Starting with the core rulebook preview, it has 12 of 120 paths, a few of the 24 races and is missing custom race building rules but otherwise is a complete preview of the game. It's a rather simple game, cutting all those races, paths and the race building rules brings it from 225k words to 38k.
I'd love if anyone has specific feedback, stuff like the previous anons impressions are cool to read even if they're negative but aren't actually helpful in making my game better. Of course, this is Ganker so vitriol about the game and name calling is expected and not a big deal, but I won't be responding to it.
Character Sheet
Narrative based expansion to the core rules, this is the entire expansion, its free because its meant to make up for a weakness in the core rules.
Bestiary Preview, has just the level 1 monsters, missing 2-20, custom monster building rules and encounter building guidelines, I think it goes from like 205k words to under 5k. Part of that is because monsters get more complicated as they level (they have 2 abilities plus their basic strike per level.
Eh guess it doesn't hurt to post a level 20 monster that I posted a few times while I was still working on the game just so there's a comparison from the level 1 preview.
It's D&D 3.5e with homebrew variant systems we have decided to use on our table.
One example: Familiars are animals possessed by outsiders who are summoned by wizards as part of their initiation to the class. They are their magical conduits, a wizard with no familiar is effectively worthless.
Im currently trying to build a system and setting based around the Dominions series of vidya games. In a design sense im basically cribbing systems I like from different games and trying to combine them together, while also figuring out the best way to translate rules from an incredibly autistic wargame into an RPG. For example, I am just yoinking the 3-action turn system from Pf2e because i think its a very elegant way of detailing what someone is allowed to do on their turn, as well as their concept of most "non-combat" skills giving some sort of in-combat action or utility.
The most unique piece, that ive worked on so far, is probably the magic system, but thats largely just cribbed from the video game with the addition of a manner of progression.
I downloaded Dominions 5 and bounced off it HARD, any tips? It's an intriguing setting, just wish it wasnt quite so impenetrable.
lmao, i have over 220 hours in Dominions 5 and over 100 in 4 before it, and I still think im hot stinky garbage at the game. I can win singleplayer games against normal AI with a couple specific factions, but thats about the peak of my skill level, never bothered with multiplayer. The only real tip I've would be to pick a specific faction that you like, and play them a bunch to learn them or look up guides.
I'm not making a TTRPG based off them because I'm a savant at the games, I'm just doing it because i think the snippets of worldbuilding it gives ( and it really is mostly snippets that make a FromSoftware game look story-based) are really interesting and I want to expand them into a cohesive setting and I like the magic system.
Start with a fairly straightforward nation until you come to terms with the dogshit UI and game progression - MA Ulm, MA Abysia, EA Mekone, are heavy infantry nations with simple supporting magic that'll basically expand on their own with low attrition without you needing to set up advanced formations or anything. Build heavy infantry for a couple turns, find the smallest looking province in your cap ring and smash all your troops into it. Then repeat that, pop out a new expansion party every other turn and keep taking provinces. When you can afford the gold for it, start recruiting mages to begin researching magic. When you have more gold, build forts and labs around your lands to recruit your national mages and such. As a beginner, just research something like Conjuration 5, Evocation 3-5, and Alteration 5. That'll let you cast most of the 'normal' spells like Fireball, Summon XPower, various elementals, and some buffs. Once you've got a bit of research under your belt, start mixing in mages into your armies, and play around with mage scripts to see how things work. Once you 'get' the basics, look through the different nations to find one you think is cool, try them out in single player, then find a multiplayer game recruiting. The AI just cheats a million shitty units so single player is generally a pretty mindnumbing experience, but the game becomes a lot more interesting once you add in diplomacy with other players and adapting to their strategies.
Similar to something like Dwarf Fortress, the game is actually really simple to read once you know what all the hotkeys are and what you can actually do, but it's made by two Swedish professors so it's not exactly polished.
>Want to make system for own sci-fi setting
>Work on for awhile because want to make gunfights more fun than previous system we used
>Take break, play in someone else's gurps game
>Get mad at gurps, homebrew some fixes
>Go back to work on homebrew
>Realize it's not really that great and the work we did on gurps made that more fun
In any case, it was a 2d20 roll under blackjack system. With the idea being inc ombat one die was damage, one was chance to bypass armor, you wanted both to be high but something had to be under your to-hit number to actually hit.
Automatic weapons or cover both added a third die. Rapid fire just got you a spare chance to hit (thus uncapping both the positive roll outcomes from to-hit chance.) and cover makes that third die also have to be over a certain number to not strike cover. (With very high penetration weapons like railguns lowering the cover number.)
It was elegant, and I won't say that it didn't work, but houseruling gurps into the ground just got us closer to where we wanted to be.
I'm currently making a tabletop war game based off the ATLA universe, centered around the 100 years war.
The only time in my life when I was homebrewing system, I was 12 and I was tasked by friends to "fix" pic related over stuff we simply didn't understand, solely because I was the best at math out of them. The end result was adding classes to it, extreme HP bloat (we were playing a lot of UO back then, too, so having HP counted in at least dozens was only natural). And using BG2 manual to add more spells to the game. Needlessly to say, I've created ten times more problems than I've solved.
It was a valuable lesson in the end. I've learned that effort put into something doesn't make it good, and that you first need to identify the real problem (like reading the rules and grasping them) rather than trying to fix a "problem" (our misconceptions about char-gen and char-progression).
I still have the notebook in which I've made all the notes, as a mementum, 21 years later.
No, wait, I made a simple percentile system for a Vallehru game. It was a simple race-class-profession system (since Vallheru already uses class-and-level system) with perk-like system to it, requiring specific level of related skills to get them and receive the bonus. Everyone kept praising it, which I find hilarious, because it was just a brain-dead d100 roll and either d3, d6 or d10 for damage rolls, while the implementation into the game was done by the admin of the server, so they were praising his coding and the fact you could make a roll in a middle of a post, get outcome and write rest of the post from there as my ability to design the most brain-dead shit.
Good times. Vallheru-like games are probably the reason why I've sticked with the hobby for so long, because 00s were absolute shitfest of endless edge and grimdark at actual tables.
A 'buy ranks in classes for XP' style system where there are three primary classes, each of which has their own various customizable abilities:
Adepts get 'Maneuvers', where they can trade negative qualities with a certain move/attack in exchange for positive qualities. Like an attack that has less accuracy but more damage. Or an acrobatic move that always succeeds but can only be done X times per day. They eventually get access to 'Styles', which give permenant buffs at the cost of permenant drawbacks. Such as a 'monk style' forcing you to be unarmed and unarmored. but improving your damage and defense rolls.
Evokers have mana pools, but mana comes in different flavors. Each type of mana works does something different if you use it internally, if you blast people with it, or if you blast areas with it. But you might not always have access to the healing mana, or the fire mana, or the like. You have to find wellsprings of energy in the area. They can also eventually design 'rituals' for more powerful magical undertakings that take multiple manatypes and have to be slowly built in order for the ritual to be actualized.
The last pseudo-class, the Scholar, prepares a metacurrency called Lore and devotes it to different categories. Then he can just spend Lore to get bonus dice on anything dealing with that subject. You know you're fighting a dragon, you can burn a bunch of Dragon Lore to hit it in the reverse scale. Then they also have a secondary ability to learn various monster traits and monster abilities, FF5 Blue Mage style. Learning Pack Tactics from wolves, etc.
Oh, I forgot to mention. Each of these classes can be mixed and matched. Adept/Evokers can make maneuvers that use mana or are based on spellcasting, while Scholar/adepts cross-classes can use the Secrets mechanic (the blue mage thing) to steal other people's manuevers.
Evoker/scholars get access to magical monster abilities, like a dragon's ability to breathe fire or a Hydra's ability to regenerate. They always have a mana cost, though.
Then there are a handful of other, much smaller classes. A normal path has 5 ranks, but some subclasses could have anywhere from 1-3 of them which cost different amounts of XP. One example is a Beastmaster Class, where you have a secondary creature you boost by spending XP, or a split from the Scholar that has the limited ability to teach other characters their Secrets.
it's a mix genesys/gurps/D&D/osr with lots of stuff stolen straight from final fantasy, mmos, and fighting games like street fighter.
It has limited resources like food and water, limited healing based on a maximum amount you can heal without resting in a safe place, special moves, desperation moves, cooldowns, 6 different magic skills, a system where you can build your own weapon from various templates stolen from fragged empire, active defenses stole from gurps, it has mmo roles like DPS, tank, and healer, and has magic items as something common that players get regularly.
In sum, it is the diametrical opposite of everything /tg/ stands for.
It is
>conceptually inspired by Mario, Wario, and Zelda, and even Sonic to a slight degree, but without the titular characters and set in its own world in which the concepts are worked to fit cohesively, instead of just thrown in the kitchen sink
>focused on exploring wilderness and fighting the local monsters, undead, and dragons; the game is more about what the characters do, than where they came from or who they are
>heavy on combat options, resource/status tracking, mathematics, and character setup; there is always a result to an action, and it is always codified rather than left up to some butthole to make it up randomly
>made strictly to my preferences and specifications, because that's what everyone tells you to do for every !game that's criticized anyway
therefore,
>not something /tg/ would enjoy
It is also
>not finished
>katana from edo mod has higher dps than w40k chainsword
40kbros...
What, brother?
lol wrong board
I've been working on it for a few years, running playtests and refining it significantly from the earliest drafts, and making tangible progress on the design and mechanics. My biggest problem is that I don't have a document of any kind worth sharing yet, and also I'm not going to post anything more specific about it on /tg/ because, honestly, frick this shit hole.
A rework of Essence (not the Renegade one) with some rules inspired by WFRP and Traveller.
The most significance different is the abandon of TN for a roll under SL+MOD and use of a Wounds-like attribute like WFRP with critical tables.
Working on it. Attempting to mash Exalted's combat system onto Anima. We'll see how it goes.
it sucks
>only players roll
>roll 1d6
>+1d6 if you're good at the thing
>+1d6 if the conditions are favorable
>pick the highest
>if equal or higher than target number, you win (2 is easy, 6 is hard)
rate my system
Sounds like Sputnik Lost.
It's a beer and pretzels ruleslight called Frat Wizards.
Frat Wizards is a dice-range system where you can fail in both directions (as in your default range of success on a 3d6 is rolling 8-13 with numbers above and below this being two different forms of failstate). The players are novice wizards attending wizard college who awaken each session in the aftermath of a hellacious bender and each randomly roll their prepared spells (3 is generally a good number) from a table, after which they are, as noodle-armed casters, charged with solving whatever problems they encounter/have caused with only use of those spells.
Each spell has three variants for success, low-failure, and high-failure. Frat Wizards only have two numerical stats which are bottom-range (power) and top-range (control) with each spell generally benefiting more from one or the other (power is important for fireballs, control is important for summons etc.)
Hoping to properly compose it into a pdf soon and post.
this sounds hilarious, I hope this project goes well for you anon!
>Frat Wizards only have two numerical stats which are bottom-range (power) and top-range (control) with each spell generally benefiting more from one or the other (power is important for fireballs, control is important for summons etc.)
You should check out ORE if you haven't looked at it already.
Fukken love ORE but the whole thing exists as a proof-of-concept for the dice range mechanic so I'm kinda married to it.
sounds like the only cohesive system so far ITT that isnt DnD with a little tweak
Please do make this, it sounds fun. Would blow Strixhaven out of the water.
Been hammering at the magic system since the start of the month. These things take a bloody long time.
It used to be slightly broken but then i reworked a major system which threw off a different minor system somewhere else, so now its slightly broken
Alternate player's handbook for D&D 5e. Just humans, 13 classes, no spellcasters. It was conceived to be sort of a design challenge, to make all the classes distinct without relying on magic or mysticism to explain my class features, but somehow it's closer to being finished than anything else I've worked on recently.
Overall I'm feeling pretty tired of 5e D&D, but I'm not tired of this, I need to finish this first.
>get sick of trying to do what I want in existingSystem
>work on my own system for a month or so
>start playtesting system with friends and find problems
>decide it's easier to just use otherSystem
>get sick of trying to do what I want in otherSystem
The impressive part is I never learn.
>5d4-1 dice pool system
Generic traveller with a pinch of fate and the spell system from mage ascension, although it's kinda of a supplement, most times I don't use magic
>2d8 + adds core mechanic vs 10 default target number
>classes including alchemist, runethane, etc
>subtle magic if any
>heavy armor focused class
>light armor battledancer class
>classes give you +3 to one skill and +2 to another. You then get to distribute +2, +1, +1, +1 among other skills
>no stats
>you pick a class, pick distribute your unpicked class bonuses, pick a few perks, and your equipment
>combat is a major and a minor action, which is a mix of "bonus action" and "reaction" in 5e D&D, effectively
>it can be used to do a few default things but mostly is powered by different feats that let you do stuff like react to move to intercept an enemy moving to attack you
>ranger class can help you avoid random encounters and gather ingredients for alchemists
>alchemists can make potions but also items and golems
>the idea is that characters will cooperate to stack debuffs on an enemy to finish it off, or take actions to complement each others' abilities
>each class has a starting perk and two perks it can take at odd numbered levels. Or you can take generic ones instead. You get a new perk at each level
>every other level, you increase four different skills by 1 point each
>damage mechanic is, you roll 1 to 3 d8s based on your weapon
>each creature has an armor rating. Unarmored is 4, and light/medium/heavy armor are 5-7
>each d8 that comes up >= the target's Armor reduces their health by 1
>most people have 1 health, characters start with 3 to 6 and gain +1 at each new level
Might switch to a d10s based system, with 2d10+adds for checks and to-hit, and d10 dice pool for damage, so I can shift the Armor values a bit higher and make 1 hit point minion creatures a bit less squishy. Which they're kinda supposed to be but I'd like to be able to have bookkeeping-free mass combat and meatier combat in the same system with this damage mechanic.
Latest is hacking tricube tales to have a real skill system where every skill has a paired skill it has to split 4 points with at character creation, so you can have 3 melee ranks and 1 ranged rank, or 2 of each.
My buddy and I were joking about making a system where the GM is a secret agent like Solid Snake and the players are all his combat team a la Colonel Campbell and Otacon and they have to successfully guide him through dangerous scenarios. But we’ll never make it. Would be best as a little pamphlet game like hell vice merciless maybe.
Hnnnghh metal gear
It's a little board game called Ganker. The rules are simple
>you roll an AI-generated thread from the slop machine
>you post it on /tg/ and try to get people to start a flamewar in it
>you're not allowed to reset IPs - if you're too obvious and the jannies ban you, you have to live with it
>bonus points if a threadschizo takes residence and starts having meltdowns
>whoever gets a thread to autosage first wins
fun thread
This is a system I've been messing around with recently. It's a Black Company inspired, low magic, high lethality skirmish game.
The interesting part at least to me comes from the equipment you equip your mercenaries with. Each piece of equipment has an ability you can use. The abilities are either an active, passive, or both. Actives you can only use once a turn and Passives can be used whenever they are triggered. The idea behind it was based off of Dark Souls weapon arts/ ER Ashes of War, where each weapon has a special attack that does more damage, casts a spell, moves the character, etc. The overall goal of the Equipment system was to add lots of little things that can happen during combat in the right circumstances, and also to allow players to still influence combat when its not their turn.
Comments, questions, and concerns welcome.
No, I haven't tested it yet. My group is busy playing bg3, but we are mercifully almost done with that.
Not exactly a system, but I've been spitballing an engine builder board game for a few days, about space witches brewing the ultimate witch's brew. Book of Hours came out recently so I wanted to make something that did a similar vibe of slowly collecting small pieces of power to slowly grow into something big, though it's pretty simple stuff at the moment.
When I was young I played on a forum where people made shitloads of homebrews. My own was some sort of d20 where most skills were governed by two stats instead of one. And that's kind of all I remember about it. We played immoral space pirates, near future cyborg warriors, and one time a buddy and me conspired to play Victorian Steampunk characters on a quest to find the queen in a semi-serious post-apocalyptic setting. The GM was cool with us, so there was no problem. All in random systems bodged together by who-ever was running it. Lots of adaptation of Vampire, too. Turns out the system translates really well to science fiction.
Currently, my homebrew only exists as a bunch of notes. I think it may be a little too ambitious.
cribbed the Disco Elysium system with different stat names. Bodged together a combat system to go with it.
Works well enough.
It’s shit, utter crap, basically unplayable, and for some reasons my playtesters just keep telling me that they’re ‘having fun’.
My d20 Arms Law for BX and 1e
Proof of more work
2d6 Xianxia/Wuxia game. Tick based combat with more powerful characters having more ticks.
Its an autistic mess.
Has rules for travel that take into account sailing upriver vs down river.
Has encumbrance rules that tie into overland travel and combat and fatigue.
Has rules for dying of thirst and starvation (and hunting and finding water as a way to not die)
Is designed so it could model you playing as a chinese rice farmer who doesn't go adventuring (boring as that game might be).
I'm still writing up all the taos (basically wushu powers) and it's slow going (85 written and another 30 or so to go) because the source material isn't exactly designed to be balanced for enjoyable combat gameplay...
It's basically a d&d-like with a different resolution mechanic at this point. i.e. it's very combat focused. I need to find systems with solid non-combat mechanics to borrow from.
Check out all of Ron Edwards' games, good starting point for getting away from DnD
Mine too except I can’t figure out if I should make mythology inspired spell casters or just go with dnd kitchen sink slop.
For example my summoner class only knows how to summon creatures; they can’t solve every problem with a spell like in dnd.
Summoners can only summon Demons (which are actual spirits in my setting) Fey, and elementals.
I plan on going the Avatar route and just giving players very basic "flavors" of magic. In this case, instead of the four elements, it'll be heat, cold, and force.
Don't heat and cold work on the same spectrum?
Stop posting this AI slop.
bad falseflag, but have a pity (You)
Proof of actual insanity
where'd you get this from
It’s my notes
>iphone filename
insanity indeed
this is like something you'd see scrawled in the recovered notebook of a missing scholar in a Lovecraft story, what the frick am I looking at Doc?
For the love of all that is holy dont say its a prototype character sheet
Lol, close. It’s some rapid prototyping for a... I guess it’s a spell selection list. But you build it from scratch, charting a literal path across procedurally generated magical “territory”.
At one point I was looking to include Penrose tiling in it. Not entirely sure why. But that’s probably partially why it looks batshit.
so spell selection operating sorta like an incredibly complex version of a video game skill tree, thats actually a really cool idea, although adding in some esoteric pattering on top of that is some advanced autism
Since this is supposed to be baby mode Rolemaster shitbrew, it will follow the philosophy of only 1 damage table (which I stole from a post from ICE forums). The critical table may be worked more but I still want to leave it vague enough for people to interpret their own gory kills and own death.
I started with Risus for a mecha game and now I have an unholy abomination of a system.
>Core mechanic is both dice pool and step die, using a standard set of polyhedral dice. So if a system had a d8, you would roll a d4, d6, and d8.
>Highest die of the set is compared to opposing roll, ties move on to the second-highest die, further ties keep going until a winner is found or someone runs out of dice.
>Tags on systems and mechs to modify effects of combat. Mech frames are mostly barebones and most of the customization is slapping systems and weapons on them.
>Random hit locations instead of standard Risus damage, can do called shots but you can only use your highest die instead of your full dice pool.
>Game is set in a vaguely Solatorobo style universe so gameplay would involve going on comfy airship adventures while fighting monsters and other mech pilots
>Abstract zone-based battlemap system
>Not really Risus anymore but still has concepts like Pumps and simultaneous combat turns (called 'Clashes') now
I have no idea what I'm doing but I have enough to start writing up mechs and playtesting them.
That sounds neat. I’m not really a mecha guy but I like the idea of using the skeleton of Risus and nudging the mechanics to produce different interactions. I’d totally give this a try.
>Random hit locations instead of standard Risus damage, can do called shots but you can only use your highest die instead of your full dice pool.
I’m curious how this would play out. Maybe I’ve misunderstood something fundamental or maybe I’m not getting your intent. How much of a disadvantage is this given that the highest potential result stays the same and the mean and median actually increase? You only take the best result from the dice pool, correct? I mean I get that you now have only one potential outcomes but that outcome skews higher now. Again, maybe I’m misunderstanding how potent a called shot is meant to be. I suppose if the benefit is choosing the system you target but you can only apply one ‘success’ of damage then that makes sense on its face.
I am too. I'm not a math guy but I know just enough about probability to be dangerous. To me, since you're only using your highest die type, you lose the clash if you tie or the opponent's roll is larger than yours. There's no backup dice in case you tie, or hope one of your lower dice roll better, so the outcome is swingier if you want to aim for a specific mech part. It's still 1 damage baseline, but tags can increase the damage. I'll have to workshop it more.
It may also be useful as some parts can take damage for other parts, or the weapon you're using can bypass another part's tag.
Ok, you’ve got more underlying interactions than just comparing dice faces. Ties automatically resolving against the attacker is significant and even without knowing how tag effects work I can imagine less dice being impactful in that regard.
This sounds very interesting. I’ve fiddled around with pool based dueling systems influenced and adjacent to Risus for years. I’ll keep an eye out for your progress report should you post one.
Last update before I go to bed.
This seems pretty clean.
Would there not be greater benefit if Pull Punch capped damage or reduced crit effects to only produce stun results? You can go all out with your OB but you won’t get bleed, extra CH damage, or crit effects. As it is now Pull Punch automatically generates a Parry, which may be by design, but doesn’t present the possibility of a single focused strike meant to disadvantage the target without being lethal. Given how overall damage is a combination of stun, bleed, and raw hits, as well as the effect of crits, just reducing the OB seems like a half measure as an option that isn’t just a bi-product of parrying.
Have you considered splitting OBs over +10 to gain extra attacks? I don’t remember if it was a house rule when we played RM or if it was in one of the Companions but, in RM terms, if your OB was 50 or more you could break it up and make multiple attacks with a -20 penalty to the attacks. OB couldn’t be reduced below 0 and still be effective.
I'll be very honest with you and say I just called it that because I wanted a cool name for the "saving OB" option. I was thinking of non-lethal combat just to be a normal roll, but the criticals are capped at A and there is no bleed. I was gonna keep the raw rules for number of attacks per turn since this is how I played it when using AL for AD&D. This isn't exactly a 1x1 of AL, it's mostly how I remember playing it with AD&D with some stuff I got from other games.
Well, it looks good. Like I said, very clean. I’ve been mashing some MERP and OSR stuff together and this could serve as a bridge for my combat ideas.
Glad to help. I myself doubt I will actually use it in an actual game, the people who used to play my AD&Dmaster are long gone.
Dropping this... not quite a homebrew but it's a boardgame/wargame some anons and I have been working on for almost 2 years now. Train based combat in a low-fantasy post post-apoc. Still a fair chunk of work to go but we're definitely making serious progress.
>Train based combat
Yeah, started as a shit post in response to a bait thread. The thread derailed perfectly, the way that tg has perfected to an art form.
https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/82832773/
kek, beautiful
I'll read up on this kino later
is it a working system?
It is, but it's ended up being fairly "component" heavy/dependant (cards, engine control, custom dice, etc). I'll try and tidy up our mega folder and upload components for printing if anyone is interested. If you have the pieces, it plays well. Played a demo round on tg about a month ago. Was pretty good.
>you need actual full-scale functional trains to play
based
Literally GURPS, but with FATE dice and FATE aspects (and a bunch of other homebrew rules) in order to deceive my players who say they hate GURPS into playing and loving GURPS.
But... It seems they deceived you into actually playing FATE.
https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-NfJXaho69SWHRQGKuDI
I made a 5e homebrew to convert the game to the Hero System, basically. The whole point is you can do it without touching or learning Hero directly, but it takes some GM legwork to rejigger his NPCs and monsters.
In practice it's been fun.
Sweet. You the guy that did Exalted20?
Nope! I haven't played Exalted, personally.
Ahh, yeah I remember now, that was M&M instead of Hero. But still with an eye towards converting the average 5e player.
I made games for a while, started simple with mutating ones i had then making new ones.
I was super poor so I made a lot of games.
Now I still do, often small, sometimes big.
Mostly wargames and board games.
Now I'm learning to make components to be the real deal.
I designed a wargame with simultaneous turns, and instant combat resolution using no dice or chance, inspired by Erfworld, including a magic system, in 2015, and told no one.
I kid.
I tried getting a few people on the erfworld forum to play but it fizzled out.
Then Erfworld died a few years ago.
Setting is the kitchen sink to end all kitchen sinks.
Mechanics are 1d20 vs 1d20, unmodified, with a sliding difficulty vs strength scale that determines whether you can fail upwards or succeed downwards, and it applies to all ambiguous challenges, from combat to crafting to luck to room generation, where the first roll is the player-character, and the second roll is whatever is opposing them (Enemy, Crafting Material, Lady Luck, ect ect)
So a Master Fire Wizard can fail a spell beyond his control without it exploding in his face, but just being weaker than normal, while a Novice Fire Wizard can succeed at a spell beyond his control, which just means it exploded in the bad guy's direction too.
Sounds great. What makes a character different from another, though?
I mean, what's the character generation like?
I used to have this amazing, unique homebrew system with unfolding rules based on a collection of the best D&D house rules and dice mechanics I could think of that ended up being fast, easy to play, deep enough for choices, and represented the fantasy world too.
Then I stopped playing TTRPGs for a while and forgot most of it. No, I didn't write it down either.
I have 3, all abandoned. 1 was a game about every character having a death clock that inevitably ticked down each session I came up with that one on a whim though, another was a glorified character creation lifepath solo rpg, and the last one was an RPG i was trying to make to replicate a post apocalyptic wandering in a weird post apocalyptic world with my inspirations being Gone with the Blastwave and Romantically Apocalyptic.
Now reworked the AT to be more similar to their Rolemaster counterpart, except Banded because Gygax love it.
Now with more eye gouging
Trying to do a total re-work of dnd 5e. Because I’ve never liked wotc’s system much. Basically I’m stealing rules from other, better, games like Cyberpunk, BECMI, Pathfinder, and DC20 RPG. And just sort of glorping them together on a much more flexible chassis of fundamental math. Also there’s a lot of things I’m fleshing out that 5e just shat the bed on.
> Formalized Dungeon exploration and dungeon turns. Currently lifted from OSE. But I’m gonna see if I can adapt then to function in any hostile environment. Not just dungeons.
> 4 action based action economy. Like Pathfinder but any action can be used as a reaction. Just with a much simpler Multi Action Penalty. So all you have to do is stack disadvantage instead of remembering a seemingly arbitrary string of numbers.
> 3 kinds of critical hits with different triggering requirements. To make weapon combat more dynamic while keeping the core gameplay loop as simple as possible.
> Mana system instead of spell slots. Spells are still powerful, but spellcasters operate with heftier restrictions.
Currently, it's a TCG that is exceptionally counters heavy, because when I did testing with the guys at the LGS people really fricking love moving counters around.
Currently it's just:
>6 colours, fashioned after the typical high fantasy low complexity element table of dark light fire water air earth
>mana system is most similar to lorcana, no dedicated resource cards, any card is playable as a resource instead of as a board piece
>initiative pass and reserve mana systems stolen from LoR, only with the capacity of loaning mana from the future, not just saving mana now for the future
>manually activated abilities go on the stack but triggered abilities are instant with automatically selected targets instead of spawning new decision points
>30 life, 30 cards, 3 cards per name
>decking out causes fatigue damage instead of instant loss
>resources are generic and decks are hard locked to 2 colours
>removal is intentionally mediocre to encourage playing the board
>no lock/prison pieces, but yes alternate cost or punishment pieces
>no legendary creature/unique cards everything is stackable
The only thing that I'm really concerned about is that during the alpha test fire was stupid overpowered, but it was also the most fun to play according to feedback
Oh, important additional wrinkle
>adding a card from hand to your resource section (which is hard once per turn) also causes you to draw a card
This is because I wanted what I think the bare minimum of what a turn should be, incrementing your resources by 1 and playing 1 card, should leave you card neutral. Merely playing on curve shouldn't cause you to consistently go card negative. On the flip side, no colour has unconditional "draw X cards" effects. Every single one has a means of gaining additional cards, and every one of them has to jump through different hoops.
>fire was stupid overpowered
Good, it's the protagonist element.
My current homebrew is Agartha Second Edition. Its an hexmap skirmish wargame where you recruit an Expedition of 5~20 men and lead them to fight other Expeditions and horrors in the underground layers of the world.
Feel free to come and check the work we are doing, we are always looking for more reviews and opinions and people to playtest.
We currently got the main rulebook mostly done for the main engine, 6 factions playable with a roster varying from 8-25 units, a "world" book in the works for the lore, and we are looking into building a campaign mode eventually.
For the moment its a wargame but we have been talking into having a RPG variant with it.
>I've stopped talking about the game I was working on because the system is homebrew that I put together but I'm too worried everyone will think it's stupid and terrible so I can't show it to them by actually running the game.
The harsh truth is that you haven’t been working on a game, you’ve been jerking off to tables and maths. Development is a cycle of writing->testing->writing->testing. If you haven’t playtested, you haven’t even properly begun.
Test early. Test often.
I've made a few attempts at a hack of the Song of Ice and Fire RPG (the d6 dice pool one), built for a more pulpy sword and sorcery setting, and tried to tack the psionics rules from Stars Without Numbers onto it as a magic system, but never got very far into it. But I mostly run OSR games, and I'm fairly content with them, so I'll probably never get around to it.
It was a strategic historical campaign using modified ADLG rules for simple large scale combat with the players representing various leaders (mercenary captains, nobles, kings). Out of combat resolution used 2d10 roll under with player stats covering three broad categories, social, intellectual, and martial. Social was negotiation and shit intellectual was everything from problem solving to organizing troops during marches, and martial is actual combat duels, or avoiding dying or getting maimed in battle.
I'm too indecisive to ever finish my system so I'll just dump my concepts:
Overall inspiration was Cypher/GURPS
Design philosophy is universal system with rules focused around the three gameplay pillars combat/social/exploration but with player sided rolls only to allow ease of GM.
A level based classless system with perk trees tied to skills. The skills had hardset overall categories but freeform specializations.
Played with the idea of having classlike special abilities tied to items. Then if you found a class artifact you could mix/match or switch out classes.
Wanted a system that mixed temporary and lasting damage.
Originally this was a Vitality pool segmented into three separate chunks which fueled actions/abilities as well as take damage. Depleting a chunk was a level of exhaustion. 5 minute rest would refill current chunk. Nights sleep would heal an exhaustion allowing to refill up to the higher segment.
Currently I'm more on the idea of having three separate pools for Sanity/Health/Energy which each have their own semi-permenant damage that is harder to heal and each can be spent to fuel different types of actions.
Could never decide on a dice mechanic.
Originally was going to do a unique system of a 2d12 roll over but the TN was based on your skill and any environmental difficulties. Mods only changed TN. This allowed a blackjack style gambling system of trading your resource pool to roll closer to 24. Every 4 over your TN gave a bonus to the effect roll but rolling over 24 was a critical failure.
The effect roll was d6s keep three and had it's own TN such as a monsters armor or a lock difficulty.
Thought this system was too finnicky for most players so I've been toying with a aSoFaI style tiered Dice system (1d12+skilld6 v TN), a Cortex Prime style mixed dice pool with die size based on skill, and a d6 pool keep system with tricks based on unused dice vaguely reminiscent of the AGE system.
In the vein of Cypher it would have tons of single use items
roll above DC d20 system, players roll against Attack and Defence DC of enemies. Roll modifiers are Attribute + Skill, but Skills are each a category (Martial, Cunning Survival...) and are not attribute locked. Their "class" is a set of dice they put on Damage, Energy, Speed and Vigor.
You never made text adventures on a Vic-20 in basic while drawing maps anon RND*6(6) you fluffer
I made a dungeon crawl on the TI-99
Room 1 you got the sword, the gold, or the key
Room 2 there was a monster, a locked door, or empty
Room 3 GAME OVER
A famous game company published a system, but it was incomplete so I homebrewed a bunch of stuff to make it playable. It's called Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition.
>tell us about your homebrew system, anon
no
Its a classless D20 fantasy adventure game built out of the skeleton of AD&D2e trying to evoke the atmosphere and style of the King's Field games.
Players build their own ability kits and spells are MP based, with an emphasis on exploration and finding magic items to mix and match. I have about 160 pages and have done some playtesting for it, but it still has a ways to go before I try publishing it for real. Probably going to release a playtest document in a few weeks though.
We don't have a proper game design general because this dogshit thread exists. I hope you choke on a chicken bone and die, OP.
there was a proper game design general before this thread was made?
Edit: huh funny he never replied
wtf you can edit posts?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
Only Ganker Gold members can do that
But we did though and it was some /ic/ tier shit full of anons throwing sand at each other out of jealousy
There's one every month, you colossal moron.
>We don't have a proper game design general because this dogshit thread exists.
Can you walk me through your logic here? I understand that it's impossible for you to make a /GDG/ thread while OP's thread exists, but can you elaborate on why this is so?
I just wanted a system where basically every class is a martial style (knight, thief, hunter, monk) OR a magic type (arcanist, priest, druid, psion), with an emphasis on multiclassing. the goal being you could play solo classes or you could multiclass to do stuff like holy knights, nature rangers, elemental monks, psychic assassins, etc.
I had a rough concept for a system like that where at chargen you make a 3 stack from any combo of martial, finesse, and magic. Each one would have a bevy of ability options and you either tier them so you can only choose options for the rank of your character or you choose a number of the options equal to rank for each level up. So a rank 3 martial can only choose martial abilities while a 2M1F will have mostly martial abilities with a smattering of finesse abilities.
Honesly I'm a big fan of level based soft classless systems. Really inspired by pic related and Morrowind, where you are setting intentions at the start but are not limited to set abilities. I like the idea of creating a unique concept for your "class" from the start and giving it it's own name.
p>that pic
So wait, the most "Mageness" class is Battlemage?
Who's the dumbass who put the categories at the sides instead of the vertices?
you seen to get something wrong
the scale on the side shows how much something is.
100 mageness is the wizard (lower right corner)
while 0 mageness is the warrior
Battlemage is 50 mageness.
I think there is another one labeled as you say, which would be easier to read, but they are both correct if you read the axis
no you will steal it
I just wanted to make a freeform magic system for my all-wizard game and ended up creating a hex system that required undergrad math units to make sense of. It worked for the 30 or so sessions and then I never wanted to touch it ever again because it was fricking riddled with fixes and changes that I made no changelog for and could not remember for the life of me what I was thinking when I made them.
Post it. Do it
ok
>players sit in a circle
>each take a turn rolling a d6
>number that comes up determines how many times the roller has to punch himself in the testicles
last person to faint wins.
Gladiator game. Turns out there's not that many out there. There's GURPS, but it's GURPS. Mythras actually sucks at combat. It's detailed, it's dangerous and deadly, it works for what it wants to do, but at the same time, if you think a turn in D&D is slow, Mythras is slower. Blood Red Sand doesn't actually work that well. Tried it. Doesn't work. Same with Eternal Contenders and it's card system. And then the rest are just settings or splats for RPGs that do other stuff. And even then there aren't many. DarkSun, but D&D doesn't do gladiatorial combat well. It's too spongy. Savage Worlds, but I'm not a fan of their system. And a bunch of narrative only systems. I want combat.
So, seeing that I made my own. It's a d12 sorts dice pool. But not really. You roll a number of d12s equal to your stat, then you add your stat and other bonuses to each roll. Then you compare them highest to lowest. It's quick, it's snappy, it's very much flow dependant. If you're lucky enough (and your build is good enough against the type of gladiator your opponent is), then you get to take control of the flow. But if you get a bit unlucky you can lose control.
It's also not to the death. Most fights, baring some incredible rolls, will end in a surrender, sometimes in serious injury, but very rarely in actual death. Fights at that point are generally over anyways. If someone is injured it's more just finishing them off.