Protege: A Magitek Superhero RPG

[Orion]

Protege is an RPG inspired by the attractive aspects of Exalted. In particular, it will adopt from Exalted the following conventions:

--Clear in-setting distinction between Heroic Tier, Adventurer Tier, and Mook Tier.
--character classes defined by purpose or calling; plot hooks come with your powers
--stat+skill based dicepools
--charm trees with smooth progression from normal to superheroic prowess by area of expertise.

It will *not* adopt the following:

--large numbers of dice pool modifiers
--broken combo rules
--black and black morality
--anti-science propaganda
--jerking off to inherent superiorty

So! the PC-tier in this setting is occupied by people called Proteges or Prodigies when they're being snarky. These are exceptionally driven people who've been adopted by one of world's fundamental forces and given the means to succeed, in the form totally sweet training. Theoretically they have no bonuses that aren't learned, and they *can* share some of their stuff, but in practice second-hand training is no substitute.

The Library

The Library is the source of power for the most wealthy and populous power in the region, The Sun-circle Empire. Created by the crocodile goddess of knowledge, the Library is a space outside space, where the deeds and memories of great cultural icons are recorded in memory crystals. Those invited into the library can relive the battles which established the empire, observe the brushstrokes of the first great calligrapher, and discuss the finer points of jurisprudence with a panel of ancient judges.

The Solar culture has been driven out of a province by bad weather or military loss; on several occasions, the solar capitol itself has been sacked and occupied. But as long as the library exists, some promising youths among the conquerers will dream of the old, refined ways, and the solar culture will flourish again, unchanged save for the color of the people's skin.

The Library sponsors four type of proteges.

The Eye of the Library

The Eyes travel abroad proactively protecting the sun culture from external threats.

Examples: Faramir

An Eye's favored skills are Assassin and Explorer

The Hand of the Library

The Hands develop the sun culture's arts, technologies, and infrastructure

Examples: Archimedes

A Hand's favored skills are Sage and Seer


The Mouth of the Library

The mouth organizes the library into concerted action

Examples:

A Mouth's favored skills are General and Prophet

The Heart of the Library

The Heart keeps the Sun Culture in internal balance.

Examples: Xander, Socrates

A Heart's Favored Skills are Judge and Monk

Statistics: A Protege character is defined by the following attributes:

Strength, Quickness, Wits, Instincts, Will, and Grace

Strength helps you
--use heavy armor and weapons
--survive physical punishment
--channel large amounts of magical power

Quickness helps you
--avoid physical attacks
--run down escaping enemies
--use some fighting styles

Wits helps you
--build and use gadgets
--shop, administer, and research
--escape pursuit

Instinct helps you
--notice ambushers
--read intentions
--??? Profit!

Will helps you
--resist mind-magic
--bully others
--set an ambush

Grace helps you
--charm children and animals
--use some types of magic??

These stats could use work.

Skills:

Use Assassin to
--fire a crossbow
--creep past a guard
--pick a lock

Use Explorer to
--scale a cliff face
--track demons by riverboat
--buy expensive drugs without getting ripped off

Use General to
--rally peasant levies
--drive off bandits with a sword
--break a warhorse

Use Judge to
--get a prisoner to talk
--spot a concealed weapon
--??profit!

Use Monk to
--overcome pain, exhaustion, and poison
--jump small buildings
--totally flip out on someone

Use Prophet to
--double your army's recruitment
--make a dragon cry tears of sadness
--break a curse

Use Sage to
--bind a wound
--build an airplane
--set an explosive

Use Seer to
--spot a ghost
--predict the weather
--banish a demon


Magic of the Proteges

Every character has a Circle rating from 1 to 5, representing the most complex techniques they are presently capable of mastering. The knowledge of the library (and the other mentors) has become so widespread that encountering humans, ogres,and the like who've mastered first-circle talents is pretty much ordinary. Extras still have a Circle of one, they just don't have any Lessons. Concentrated effort on the part of a Protege can raise a human's Circle to 2, and each Protege can maintain about a half-dozen Disciples at that rating. Finally, the Proteges typically begin with a circle rating of 3, but can progress indefinitely.

Every character has a number of Focus points to power their most effort-intensive Lessons. Their Focus pool is equal to 10+3 per circle.

An individual power used by a protege is known as a Lesson. Similar Lessons are grouped into Disciplines, with mastery of the Advanced lessons in a discipline contingent on first acquiring the Basics. Each Discipline has a Source from which it is learned (like the library, or Ignus, or the White Lotus Guild), and a key skill or attribute which is required to advance.

[Orion]

Combat

At the beginning of combat, write down the number of focus points you had. At the end of combat, your Focus will be reduced to that total if it is higher. Each round, you regenerate focus points equal to your Circle. You cannot spend more Focus per round than Circle X 2, and no more than your Circle on any one roll or decision.

Phases of a Round:

Roll Initiative (Wits +Instinct)

Declare Movement from lowest initiative to highest. Movement Options:

--Activate Terrain: gain benefit from cover, pick up object on ground, gaurd door, etc.
--Escape attempt to change a close confrontation to a remote confrontation, or end the scene:
--Bodyguard: remove one hit from all attacks against another character with the same abstract position who is not making melee attacks; no guard rings allowed

Make Attacks

Roll your Stat+Skill against the target's Circle. Lose 1 hit if using a melee weapon against someone making ranged or no attacks. If you hit a target with a melee attack, you may declare an "engage" and move yourself to their position.

Then, decide how to spend your net hits. Most weapons grant wound penalties by default, but your Lessons may provide other ways to spend them, such as by draining Focus or disabling. In many cases, your target will then get to roll a resistance test to mitigate the suffering. For instance, wounding from weapons is resisted by Strength+Armor, if any.

[Rathe]

Orion,

Sounds like an awesome concept!

One question though, and please don't take this adversely, why don't you go the White Wolf route and use Frank & Company's A World of Darkness as the chassis?

If you go that route, it will free you up from having to invent a backbone for your game and you can focus on cool stuff like the setting itself and powers.

For instance, instead of using Circle and Focus, just go with Potency and Power. As for using the Winds of Fate System, a suggestion would be to have adapted the Universal Disciplines to supply a "focus and inherent awesome" for the character (note that these abilities would be always available). Meanwhile, you can change around the Sorceries and call them Maneuvers, so they fit your setting, and these would use the WOF mechanic.

Just thinking that while what you have down there is very cool; your time might be better spent not reinventing the wheel. Mainly because the aWOD system has already been designed and pretty well tested.

- Rathe

[Orion]

Oh, the idea was specifically to base it off aWoD. I just changed the names of things. I'm hoping that I can make the combat minigame interesting just using Focus points and spending caps, but I'm also tying to figure out how to implement WoF if need be.

[Username17]

The aWoD melee combat minigame isn't inherently that interesting. The default assumption is that someone shoots a person in the face and they fall down or a slasher cuts a person down and they go down. With guns and vampires out of the game, you're looking at relatively small piles of dice and near deterministic amounts of damage being handed back and forth.

It's not quite the "measure teams, award victory" system of the New World of Darkness - there is a pretty stark modifier for quality and one can actually conceive of being armored enough to matter - but it's certainly close.

Another thing to consider is that dice pool systems are a bit lengthy on the resolution time. That's acceptable with small units - say six police officers versus a werewolf and three zombies. But sword and sorcery tends to want a bit more models on the field than that. I genuinely don't want to roll soak tests for twelve goblins and 3 wolves.

Converting dice pool systems to sword and sorcery is no trivial task. In no small part because dice pool systems seriously go off the rails at the low end - there's no satisfactory method to rolling less than 1 die. POSIT damage can be scaled from ants brawling to titans throwing mountains at each other without strain - but dice pools can't.

-Username17

[Grek]

The <1 die issue seems simple to me: If you have a dice pool of zero, roll one die. If it's 1-4, you get 0 hits, if it's a 5 you get 1 hit and if it's a 6 you get -1 hit. If you have a negative number of dice, then you roll them and any 5s or 6s you get give you that many negative hits.

[Archmage]

But in every dicepool system I've seen, 0 hits is failure. What value is attained from tracking negative hits? If you've already failed to hit someone in SR, for example, it doesn't matter if you get negative hits that subtract from your raw damage--you missed, so damage is already zero.

[Username17]

The <1 die issue seems simple to me: If you have a dice pool of zero, roll one die. If it's 1-4, you get 0 hits, if it's a 5 you get 1 hit and if it's a 6 you get -1 hit. If you have a negative number of dice, then you roll them and any 5s or 6s you get give you that many negative hits.

That doesn't really address anything. Since success is based of number of hits, characters with less than 1 die can't succeed. That they might produce hits for the other side is of some interest in opposed tests, but of no interest whatsoever in a simple test.

-Username17

[Grek]

Both of those issues only come up if you do not have any tasks for which the threshhold is a negative number. This is mostly an academic point, as far as aWoD is concerned, since neither the setting nor the mechanics of that game ever require a threshold that low. But it does come up if you're making a new game in which you do want things to scale up and down arbitrarily far. If you're scaling things down to a level in which dicepools which can conceivably be less than one, then you should also be making tasks which can be done by people who are on that low end of the power scale.