What are some good systems for running something that feels like a fighting game?
Ik the Street Fighter rpg exists and is obvious, but would any others exist?
Keep in mind, idr need it to have good storytelling mechanics(I think I can manage there), looking more for good beat'em up/fighting mechanics.
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Feng Shui 2. It’s a game made to emulate like, Hong Kong action movies and has some gonzo stuff in it. I’m sure it could emulate fighting games pretty well.
I’ve wanted to use it to run a campaign based on Yakuza/Like a Dragon for a while now.
I've been recommended Wuxia
*wulin
*wushu
Wdyn to have storytelling mechanics? Aren’t most fighting games kinda like an episode of DBZ?
Fighting game stories have more meat on their bones than people tend to give them credit for. It's just that characters have lots of excuses to engage in single-combat fisticuffs, even if there isn't a tournament set-up. Fighting game settings aren't so gonzo as to turn everyone into martial arts sociopaths.
Fighting Game-based RPG's tend to be very "one note", where all the mechanics and stats are purely intent on emulating combat and there's little in the way of OOC gameplay, so as soon as the fight ends, players are often left scratching their heads wondering what to do.
And this PDF is the icing on the cake as an example.
It would be much better for a Fighting Game RPG to completely ignore the mechanics and style of Fighting Video Games and to develop a system from the ground up based on immersive action and combat, so Feng Shui would probably be much better.
That PDF expands the combat for a generic system that places equal emphasis on combat, social encounters, and general skill encounters.
Thrash is what I would go with, or you could seek out the original Street Fighter RPG by White Wolf.
https://sfrpg.com/sf20-release-street-fighter-the-storytelling-game-20th-anniversary-edition/
Not OP but I'm genuinely impressed - Having played the original it seems they solved the savate cartwheel kick exploit from 1st ed. Thanks anon.
What I want to know is what kind of RPG would work for a Mortal Kombat Game? How would you even implement something like fatalities and X ray moves in an RPG?
I have the street fighter book, i lucked out and got it from a game store 1$ box of magazines and guides. It has the paper hex mat for stages and little cardboard standees for minis.
It honestly seems like the best official way to have a chop socky style campaign. this old grognard talks about it a bit here
just homebrew some 5e. its got monks and all their different subclasses. you could easily recreate a sorta street fighter type game with a bit of work
Chronic DnD brain (non judgmental)
I’ve been thinking about using Scion but it’s only good for MK1/2 type tournament stories due to communal resources in the rules. Champions is another possibility, it allows different types of powers so you can have cyborgs and ninjas.
If you don't have some sort of rollplay mechanics for jiggle physics, it's not really adapting the experience to the tabletop.
When I was a kid I homebrewed a fighting game/brawler system based on this thing I found online. Yes, it was 3e d20 based. I also homebrewed a whole classless point buy system and a point buy system for building special attacks that worked on a "ki point" system like psionics.
It was wondrously awful but my friends loved it, we played it on and off all the way to college.
Other than this and like one other PDF from the same dude none of it has survived to today, unfortunately.
Oriental Adventures may have been a lack-luster supplement, but one thing it definitely expanded was martial arts feats. I suggest you give it a look.
I'm well aware of OA. You better believe as king weeb of my friend group we probably played more OA games than we did standard D&D games.
And all those mechanics made their way into my shitpile homebrew system, of course.
Ewen Cluney wrote a street fighter game called Thrash or something
There's "Fight! The Fighting Game RPG" second edition.
Has anyone actually played this? Any clue what it's like to run? I bought the print books but for whatever reason I can't for the life of me wrap my head around the flow of the game and how it's -supposed- to be played
I have. Twice.
The first one we ran it like a usual RPG. We as pcs were the fighters and existed in this larger than life world where we ran around throwing energy blasts and dive kicking enemy fighters and their mooks. It didn't really work to be honest as everything just ended up being a bit of Mutants and Masterminds.
Then we reread the book and settled on it being pretty meta how the flow of the game is supposed to go.
So we treated it like we were playing characters who are playing characters in a fighting game. Kind of like that old "The world of world of warcraft" meme back in the day - your playing the player playing the character in arcade mode. Our "fighters" basically were built on the idea they had already been "designed for the game" our "players" were playing (if that makes sense - the roster was already filled with archetypes and everyone knew what cast was going to show up and their moves, except about the boss character).
It worked better than the first. We co-built the background lore to "the fighting game" and setup some mini stories with a few npc fighters as rival fights. The context was Basically King of Fighters and served to give a reason to us being a team of fighters and jointly moving together from fight to fight.
The end of "the fighting game" ie. campaign was sequel bait with a few of the npcs we beat seeking a rematch and "not Geese Howard" climbing his way out of the ruins of one of those giant coal chimneys found in powerplants - swearing revenge. We levelled up and the new moves were "what's going to be in the sequel to the game".
It's a weird approach to an RPG but I can understand why - it's trying to be this weird simulator/combat game/RPG hybrid and that's tough to pull off.
Weirdly enough, that puts everything I read in the rules into a perspective that makes sense. I think what I was really stuck on was what exactly PC's are supposed to do when resolving a non-combat, or even a non 1v1 situation. The action scene resolution reads like a paper-thin excuse to speed along the story to the next fight, and now descriptors of it being "hyperfocused on simulating a fighting game" add up.
Not sure if I'll run the game I was intending using it anymore, I'm really not sure how a traditional narrative campaign in Mortal Kombat would work out in Fight!!, but I might give it a shot just for fun.
Cheers for the help brother!
>The action scene resolution reads like a paper-thin excuse to speed along the story to the next fight...
This is the exact realisation we had going through it. It honestly made more sense that my "player" was just mashing "skip cutscene" and intros to get to the fighting. The only time we really did traditional RPG stuff was pre-fight intros and outros with rivals or making it believable transitioning to new stages: eg. one scene was fighting at night on a cargo carriage of a moving transcontinental train, we win and the rest of the journey is people recovering in the dining cart, healing up and scoping intel out on the next opponents. Fade to black and we arrive the next day at the station, are approached by the other team and are then fighting on the platform.
>I'm really not sure how a traditional narrative campaign...
Strangely I've been considering this a lot recently - I think that depending on the IP or setting your working in gives the action scene sequence different uses. Like our game 1 was trying to be a big epic story arc and really there was no time or reason to try to build up familiarity with the setting or npcs - the answer was always going to be "dive kick into Genei-Jin" to every problem. But by building the lore and character roster before hand everyone already "knew" the story context in advance and who the npcs were so could just get on with fighting to try get to the "final cutscene".
That being said - I am convinced a narrative could be built a bit like Soul Caliburs weapon master mode. Where basically a cutscene or exposition happens and that leads to a fight: but maybe the pcs have a choice to make to influence the conditions of that fight - like quickly blocking vents or some shit to prevent poison gas giving them a DOT debuff.
Unironically Fuzion RPG v 4.4.3
Thrash RPG
Where did you get that art? Best I can do is https://www.angelfire.com/va/virtualadepts/thrash.html
Panic at the Dojo is really fun with great mechanics for doing a street fighter or final fight type game, but it has a big issue where there are no advancement mechanics and the furthest I ever got a group was running one session and the players wanting to do something else since there was no sense of advancement outside of story progression. No becoming stronger or learning new moves. For a TRPG it's a pretty big misstep, even if otherwise the mechanics are super fun.
STREET FIGHTER THRASH SUPPLEMENT HERE: http://dsg.neko-machi.com/thrash.html