Captain_Bleach at [unixtime wrote:1196557193[/unixtime]]
D&D claims to offer a place for people who want to play knights and samurai running around in a fantasy world stabbing things in the face and navigating through pre-Rennaisance societies.
Which RPG system would fit this best? FUDGE, d6 Fantasy, or something else?
That's the 5000 XP question, isn't it?
Certainly not D&D. D&D as a whole involves Spellweavers who can
individually lay siege to the MErchant Republic of Venice and probably win. And they are only slightly overpowered for their reported CR of 10. We all know that nothing stops a Shadow Uprising short of divine intervention or a gateway to the land of Efreet.
And while one can make a cogent argument that the magic & monster system of D&D is completely batshit and the game engine can survive without it - it is still true that a d20 character is inherently capable of destroying a huge number of characters who are of lower level, and therefore middle ages social systems simply cannot hold. There's no place for weak old men who happen to have the hereditary rulership of kingdoms and empire - that is simply outside the simulation.
D&D is
about champions fighting mightily and the tribe of the losing combatants running for the hills while the victors cut them down from behind. In short, it's about ancient civilizations: the Celts, the Greeks, the Aryans.
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To actually determine what you'd want as a game system, you'd have to determine what kinds of stories you actually wanted to tell. And honestly, I don't think most people can agree on that.
But imagine for the moment that you did have a solid idea for how you wanted it to play out. Then you'd run the:
Game Design Flow Sheet. And you'd see what you could come up with.
Do you want people to be seriously injured or kiled practically everytime they get hit with a big hammer? If so, are the players supposed to avoid confrontation most of the time? Ask yourself a bunch more questions along hose lines to narrow things down a bit.
Then you'll want some gme system in which ordinary people are capable of on some level competing against mighty champions because social organization is supposed to
mean something. At the same time, you'll want the mighty champions to have a substnatial bulge on individual people running around to drive home the futility of lone peasants standing up against the system when lords have armor and good food.
You'll probably want a dice and target number system because it's mch harder to push people off the RNG in those. You'll also want to have a static TN and a system by which players can get bonus dice because that's much more tractable than variable TN.
But you can't just grab Shadowrun or nWoD and rub the serial numbers off because those games have extremely skeletal and shitty melee combat systems. Shadowrun has the excuse that people are expected to fight with guns almost exclusively so having a complicated system of maneuvers and position would be a waste of time as only one person in any combat is likely to bother trying to use them. nWoD actually intends people to fight with swords, it's just very poorly designed in a lot of ways.
In short: unless you intend to run your samurai and ninja as characters from Samurai Deeper Kyo or Naruto (in which case you'd use Feng Shui and move on with your life), the system you're looking for does not to my knowledge actually exist.
-Username17