The Gaming Den

Pokemon is simultaneous resolution, and an RPG (though the wrong kind). Its double battle and triple battle variants handle multiple characters, so you could use that as a model. Your Pokemon are implied to be standing in a line parallel to the opponent's, and each can only target the one directly i...

The thing some FATE branches do where becoming less human means lowering your refresh sort of works. (Refresh determines how easy it is to use a meta-currency that gives you bonuses for being in-character. When you have less of it, the things that define your character matter less.) Or, you could ha...

There are entire genres of board games dedicated to fiddly supply chain and resource management stuff, it's clearly possible. Hell, instead of making your RPG be a frame tale around a bunch of tactical wargaming, make it a frame tale around a bunch of Power Grid and you're done. The problem with sta...

With writing it down, you've got a decent concept for a one-off humor RPG. d20, roll equal or higher than the target difficulty to succeed. If it's never been tried before, d20 to determine the target difficulty. A couple of rolls later, you find out that in this world slaying a dragon is much easie...

I suggested a higher hit chance because it means stuff is actually happening on more turns. That's satisfied whether that's from core mechanics that center at a higher percent, core mechanics at 50% plus class bonuses that always somehow add up to that higher percent, a system of targeting weaknesse...

You can remix your defense-naming problems by naming the defenses after the problems they solve. Affliction (poison, disease, paralysis; things you resist by being healthy or a robot) Lies (illusions; things you resist with perceptiveness or a no-nonsense personality) Doubt (fear and mind control; t...

Simultaneous resolution is slow to adjudicate. Resolving a turn in Diplomacy takes a noticeable amount of time to puzzle out, and its rules are a lot simpler than your average tabletop RPG. But computerized Diplomacy goes plenty fast, so maybe for an online-only RPG this is actually the way to go. I...

I admit I’m not very familiar with fatal's core mechanic. I can't remember if this is from FATAL or some other awful system, but - first roll 1d100 to find out the probability to succeed, then roll 1d100 and see if it's below that to tell whether you did. That is, flip a coin in an overly complex w...

I'd just ignore it. Even when they're all together, it's not like the characters are stopping to discuss who's going to take the next stab. It's an abstraction of something that's happening almost simultaneously, with a splash of putting things in an order an author might use. "Alice stabbed Bo...

3) Target of action goes next, though needs to answer questions like when you target an ally, AoE, target yourself, etc. The character of that system depends on the specific set of answers you have to those questions. Let me propose a concrete one: Each round, everyone gets a turn, and someone from...

Start with just what it is that the players are supposed to do, on the first session, as their overall character arcs, and just as bread-and-butter filler session plots. Make sure any random collection of characters has a reason to work together on these things and the capability to. Then make mecha...

You can sort of make 3.5-like per-level multiclassing work if instead of starting your new class from 1, you always take your current level. So builds are described as fighter 1-4, sorcerer 5, fighter 6, sorcerer 7-8. This imposes the constraint that all level 7s are roughly equal, which is somethin...

I agree that every class should have its own fiddly resource system. What I think is useful is having those systems draw abilities from common pools, so every class gets things from every book. Doing that successfully means that the pool has to know how often its abilities are supposed to be used; y...

The Book Of Nine Swords has the start of a good system for dealing with classplosion support. Maneuvers are divided into schools, some strictly martial, some divine magic themed, some explicitly magical. The classes have different ways of recovering maneuvers, but more importantly, they have access ...