What would be the ideal system with which to run a table top game based on God of War?
My friend has suggested Runequest, but that's just because he's fetishized the game, I think it's combat takes too long.
D20 seems like it could work well, though, again, combat takes a hell of a long time.
I'm thinking Scion could work well, it has a lot of work done already, but I'd want to tighten up the combat system, at least...
Long combat is fine for "boss fights" and shit, but the majority of combat in GoW is hordes of mooks, really.
Tabletop God of War
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NineInchNall
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Does Feng Shui have a distinctive mechanic for dealing with hordes of mooks or something?
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CatharzGodfoot
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Yes.NineInchNall wrote:Does Feng Shui have a distinctive mechanic for dealing with hordes of mooks or something?
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Username17
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spasheridan
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hmm... lets do up a list of desirable traits so people have more to go on and can explain why the system they suggest is good...
So Feng Shui has rules for hordes of mooks and finishing moves. And from looking at the table of contents, it can probably handle mythological creatures pretty well. What else?
Scion hits the "Characters start [awesome]", "Magic Exists" and "Godhood is planned into character advancement" buttons, has mythological creatures statted out, and, I think, allows some amount of mega manning, but I don't remember what it's combat system is like. It is a WW product, though, so...
D20 allows characters to start awesome, definitely has magic, I can find more mythological creatures than I'll ever need, even some outside the major mythologies, allows some mega manning, I've found a rule for finishing moves, and it's combat system isn't TOO bad, and with a quick house rule, I could probably get environment attacks to work off of the improvised weapons table, but godhood needs a rework, and mooks could be a bit tricky to work.
Runequest allows characters to start [awesome], has magic and legendary abilities, has as much megamanning allowance as D20, probably has stats for most mythological creatures I'd care about, especially if I stuck to greek myth, and has a combat system only slightly more complex than d20. I'm a bit uncertain as to how well it'd handle characters becoming gods.
- Characters start [awesome]. They need to be able to wade into a squad of mundane soldiers and start kicking ass and taking names. Whether this is the "level 1" of the game, or the game allows for starting at level 10 or so, doesn't matter, but the starting characters need to be legendary.
- Magic exists. The source material has a demigod killing monsters and gods with artifact weapons and spells. Magic is a must, and pretty much everyone needs to have some, but segregated themes would be acceptable.
- Megamanning, to some extent, needs to be possible. Part of this requires a loot system, where you pull your dead enemies' gear off of their swiftly cooling corpses (or near corpses...) and part will likely require some manner of house rule that says cutting off the gorgon's head does in fact give you a magic attack that petrifies enemies...
- Environment attacks. One of the major things in the game, the boss fights particularly, is Kratos using the scenery to kill shit just as much as his actual weapons, so the system would need to handle this fairly well, probably by at least having fairly generalized and well thought out improvised weapon rules.
- Finishing moves. This is one of the most well known aspects of the trilogy, Kratos' gory dismemberment of enemies to finish them off. The system needs to not only handle this, but also encourage it.
- Godhood is planned into character advancement. It doesn't need to be inevitable, but it needs to be taken into account that characters may become gods, and have that level of influence. More importantly, god level characters need to be capable of still adventuring.
- Mooks exist. Some enemies show up en masse and serve as little more than an obstacle.
- Mooks aren't cannon fodder. Even mooks can be dangerous in large enough numbers. And sometimes they just keep coming.
- Has rules for mythological creatures. Especially if it's a system I haven't played before. I could probably run Runequest, I could even create new backgrounds and professions, but new monsters is... something I'm not up to, just yet.
- A robust, yet simple and fast combat system. The combat system needs to handle grand melees, but go fast and be simple to implement.
So Feng Shui has rules for hordes of mooks and finishing moves. And from looking at the table of contents, it can probably handle mythological creatures pretty well. What else?
Scion hits the "Characters start [awesome]", "Magic Exists" and "Godhood is planned into character advancement" buttons, has mythological creatures statted out, and, I think, allows some amount of mega manning, but I don't remember what it's combat system is like. It is a WW product, though, so...
D20 allows characters to start awesome, definitely has magic, I can find more mythological creatures than I'll ever need, even some outside the major mythologies, allows some mega manning, I've found a rule for finishing moves, and it's combat system isn't TOO bad, and with a quick house rule, I could probably get environment attacks to work off of the improvised weapons table, but godhood needs a rework, and mooks could be a bit tricky to work.
Runequest allows characters to start [awesome], has magic and legendary abilities, has as much megamanning allowance as D20, probably has stats for most mythological creatures I'd care about, especially if I stuck to greek myth, and has a combat system only slightly more complex than d20. I'm a bit uncertain as to how well it'd handle characters becoming gods.
This has my interest. Carry on. I'll help playtest if it gets that far. I've got friends who'd like to do something like this.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
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NineInchNall
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Let's see. Since it's the system I'm currently fapping over: Weapons Of The Gods.
- Characters start [awesome]. Check. Starting characters exemplify wu xia heroes' mobility, running on walls, balancing on the tops of trees, etc. They wreath their weapons in flame and destroy buildings accidentally. They chew through weak mooks like nobody's business. They know multiple fighting styles and use them even more interchangeably than Lei from Tekken.
- Magic exists. Magic definitely exists. You've got your artifact weapons (eponymously so). You've got curses and blessings and divinations. Fighty magic and fighty punching run off the same system of kung fu.
- Megamanning Um ... This means acquiring equipment or special techniques? The formless technique system can be used for this, as can the system of powers used for the weapons of the gods themselves. Give Medusa's severed head the 3 Jade Chi power to turn a target to stone or something.
- Environment attacks. This is definitely in. For destructible environments, Breaking Things is a specific roll in WotG, often made as part of specific kung fu techniques. The combat section of the main book has a little chart listing ranges and damage for improvised weapons, which of course includes that wall over there.
- Finishing moves. Give extra Joss or even a temporary chi condition when the character finishes off an enemy with an attack that inflicts the Missing Limb disadvantage. Pretty simple.
- Godhood is planned into character advancement. Transcendent Destiny allows for becoming immortal and for ascending directly to the Jade Emperor's Court in Heaven without passing Go.
- Mooks exist. Oh, yeah. They definitely do. Right from the start.
- Mooks aren't cannon fodder. This applies. Get some Gang or Faction mooks thrown at you and you'll probably have to pay a little attention, especially if they come in large numbers.
- Has rules for mythological creatures. And here's where it falls down, I guess, since no monsters are statted up in the book. That's rather unfortunate, since it's so bloody easy to use the existing rules to make monsters. I mean, if you wanted to make a monster, you could just start with a generic character and add formless techniques for the specific abilities you care to model.
- A robust, yet simple and fast combat system. The combat in WotG is simple to explain, interesting mechanically, super fast against mooks, and robust against more significant opponents.
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Feng Shui checklist
- Characters start [awesome]. Check. Sample starting character powers: Kill any mook you hit, attack completely silently, hit people hard enough to set them on fire, jump up a 10 story building, throw lightning, summon demons, rise again if killed. Every starting character can be expected to handle a couple of mooks without breaking a sweat. Anyone actually training in killing mooks can swat them like flies.
- Magic exists. Check. Sorcery exists. Special weapons exist. Most powers can be explained as being magic, many even already come with special effects built in.
- Megamanning Nope. You can of course chop people up with a sword you just looted, or grab their armor, but that is it. On the bright side, the shtick system makes it pretty easy to design something like that.
- Environment attacks. Check. Built into the stunt rules.
- Finishing moves. Sort of. Definitely check for mooks. To get something like finishing moves that are usable against named opponents you need to pick appropriate powers.
- Godhood is planned into character advancement. Nope. The description is kind of vague though. What exactly should gods be able to do?
- Mooks exist. Check. This is a main part of the game.
- Mooks aren't cannon fodder. Check. Mooks can scale up to be dangerous (they will always be fragile though).
- Has rules for mythological creatures. Check. Has sample monsters and a power pick system to build (and play) your own monsters.
- A robust, yet simple and fast combat system. Check.
Murtak
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RiotGearEpsilon
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angelfromanotherpin
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WotG combat is neither simple nor fast. There's a lot of decision-making and resource management each turn, many dice-rolls per action (initiative, attack, defense, damage, and possibly soak), and the die mechanic is kind of unintuitive.RiotGearEpsilon wrote:I'll actually heartily recommend Weapons of the Gods for this.
I still like the game, but it fails on those criteria pretty hard.
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NineInchNall
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Weapons of the Gods Rundown:
Attributes: You have five colors of chi. (Think L5R, but not sucky.) These go on a scale of 1-5 for starting characters.
Skills: You have five groups of skills, one for each chi color. You generally roll a number of dice equal to your skill rating. If your attribute (chi) is >= your rating in a skill, you get to roll an extra die.
Dice System: It's, as far as I know, unique. You roll a dice pool (d10s) and look for matching numbers. So if you rolled 5d10 and got 1,3,4,4,5 you'd see that you have two fours. the number on the die (4) becomes the ones digit and the number of dice in the set becomes the tens digit (2), so the result is 24. If you had rolled 1,3,5,5,5 you'd have a 35.
Bonuses & penalties: Modifiers come in +5/-5 increments. Also, nothing stacks. So if one thing is giving you a +15 and another is giving you +20, you get a +20, not a +35. Take the largest bonus and the most significant penalty, so out of +10, +20, -5, -15, you'd take the +20 and the -15 and have a net of +5.
Abilities: Pretty much all abilities are represented by kung fu styles. For example, you have Holy Fire, which lets you hit burn people with magical burning, or Walking in Shadows, which lets you do a bunch of supernatural sneaky things.
Each kung fu style is broken up into techniques which cost a certain number of chi to use. This cost can be anywhere from 1 chi to 8 chi of one color and 12 of any others. You generally replenish one point of chi of each color each round, so there's incentive to use kung fu all the time, but you have to be tactical about it if you want to use the big guns.
Attack & Damage Rolls: These are pretty simple. You make an attack roll and the opponent makes a block or dodge roll. If the attack roll exceeds the defense roll, then you do one die of damage plus one for every five points by which the attack roll exceeds the defense roll. The difference in weapon damage is handled by having each weapon have a bonus or penalty to damage.
Advancement: Experience points are called "Destiny", and this isn't just an affectation; while you can spend them to power up your character, you can also spend them to incorporate specific fates into your character's destiny. These can range from being fated to learn a particular fighting technique or to acquire a particular weapon, to having a predestined rivalry with another character*, to really esoteric effects like turning out to be a descendant of a particular legendary hero, with attendant mechanical bonuses, or some really meta-game things like giving an item plot immunity.
*Disadvantages: Disads in this game don't give you extra points to spend during character creation. Instead, each disad is a story hook, whether it be kleptomania or a rivalry. Whenever a disadvantage gets in your character's way in a significant way, you earn an extra point of Destiny.
Here's an intro doc: What is WotG?
All in all, the system mechanics are highly weighted toward giving players more direct control over the collaborative storytelling aspect of RPGs. It's sort of like how the Knacks in TFOS describe your character in story-making ways. If your character has the Drive Anything Like A Maniac knack, for instance, you are going to try to find situations in which it comes into play. Thus providing more story opportunities that are relevant to the character.
Attributes: You have five colors of chi. (Think L5R, but not sucky.) These go on a scale of 1-5 for starting characters.
Skills: You have five groups of skills, one for each chi color. You generally roll a number of dice equal to your skill rating. If your attribute (chi) is >= your rating in a skill, you get to roll an extra die.
Dice System: It's, as far as I know, unique. You roll a dice pool (d10s) and look for matching numbers. So if you rolled 5d10 and got 1,3,4,4,5 you'd see that you have two fours. the number on the die (4) becomes the ones digit and the number of dice in the set becomes the tens digit (2), so the result is 24. If you had rolled 1,3,5,5,5 you'd have a 35.
Bonuses & penalties: Modifiers come in +5/-5 increments. Also, nothing stacks. So if one thing is giving you a +15 and another is giving you +20, you get a +20, not a +35. Take the largest bonus and the most significant penalty, so out of +10, +20, -5, -15, you'd take the +20 and the -15 and have a net of +5.
Abilities: Pretty much all abilities are represented by kung fu styles. For example, you have Holy Fire, which lets you hit burn people with magical burning, or Walking in Shadows, which lets you do a bunch of supernatural sneaky things.
Each kung fu style is broken up into techniques which cost a certain number of chi to use. This cost can be anywhere from 1 chi to 8 chi of one color and 12 of any others. You generally replenish one point of chi of each color each round, so there's incentive to use kung fu all the time, but you have to be tactical about it if you want to use the big guns.
Attack & Damage Rolls: These are pretty simple. You make an attack roll and the opponent makes a block or dodge roll. If the attack roll exceeds the defense roll, then you do one die of damage plus one for every five points by which the attack roll exceeds the defense roll. The difference in weapon damage is handled by having each weapon have a bonus or penalty to damage.
Advancement: Experience points are called "Destiny", and this isn't just an affectation; while you can spend them to power up your character, you can also spend them to incorporate specific fates into your character's destiny. These can range from being fated to learn a particular fighting technique or to acquire a particular weapon, to having a predestined rivalry with another character*, to really esoteric effects like turning out to be a descendant of a particular legendary hero, with attendant mechanical bonuses, or some really meta-game things like giving an item plot immunity.
*Disadvantages: Disads in this game don't give you extra points to spend during character creation. Instead, each disad is a story hook, whether it be kleptomania or a rivalry. Whenever a disadvantage gets in your character's way in a significant way, you earn an extra point of Destiny.
Here's an intro doc: What is WotG?
All in all, the system mechanics are highly weighted toward giving players more direct control over the collaborative storytelling aspect of RPGs. It's sort of like how the Knacks in TFOS describe your character in story-making ways. If your character has the Drive Anything Like A Maniac knack, for instance, you are going to try to find situations in which it comes into play. Thus providing more story opportunities that are relevant to the character.
Last edited by NineInchNall on Fri Apr 02, 2010 6:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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NineInchNall
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Oh, yeah. You usually only get one Full Action per round, which might be an attack, or it might not. None of that 12 attack hydra bull shit.
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Well, in God of War, at the end of the first game, Kratos doesn't get the reward he thought he would (he wants to be rid of nightmares brought on by a misdeed, the gods merely forgave the deed) so he's given the consolation prize of ascension to the throne of God of War left vacant after he killed Ares.Murtak wrote:Godhood is planned into character advancement. Nope. The description is kind of vague though. What exactly should gods be able to do?
So a tabletop version of God of War needs to handle characters fighting gods (greek style gods, preferably) and handle the characters then ascending to that level of power: Overseeing a domain (for lack of a better term), having god like influence on the world. When a god dies in the games their domain is no longer controlled. It's not shown what happens for that brief period of time that there is no god of war, but when you kill Poseidon in God of War III the seas go out of control and flood the world. Not only that but the gods have great power over their domain, with Hades summoning chains that almost completely encompass the area in which you fight him, Poseidon calling up large creatures at least partially composed of water, so on.
At the very least, the gods can change size at will (their default size isn't stated, they could have the ability to grow colossal at will and be human sized, or they could be colossal and be able to shrink down.), have powerful attacks that cow mortals, and should be tied to their domain, with it going out of control or completely away when they die, and being able to completely control it while alive. Really there's no reason why Zeus would have had to fight Kratos directly, he could very well have just zapped his ass with lightning from the sky until he died...
That sounds awfully like GM fiat to me. Is there any need for an actual system to handle godhood? Because if godhood does not help you in the main game and the godhood minigame is incredibly open-ended I don't see much point in writing mechanics for it. Just write up some guidelines and examples of what gods should and can do and call it a day.
Murtak
My concern is that the game could well collapse when people get to the godhood stage if that's the only rules consideration, where as in the source material the game not only doesn't collapse, but goes on for another game (granted, he loses his divinity, but he has it for a good while at the start of game 2). In a video game it's fairly accepted that the sequel will have your bag of swag spill and you have to collect power all over again, some games actually have decent explanations for this spillage (like GoW). But in a Table top, if you start every new campaign with the same characters, but lose your powers, people are going to start punching the DM, so there needs to be some way of giving people the feel of playing a god, and providing acceptable challenges at that state.Murtak wrote:That sounds awfully like GM fiat to me. Is there any need for an actual system to handle godhood? Because if godhood does not help you in the main game and the godhood minigame is incredibly open-ended I don't see much point in writing mechanics for it. Just write up some guidelines and examples of what gods should and can do and call it a day.
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CatharzGodfoot
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But if you want non-gods to be fighting and killing deities, the two systems had better interact pretty damn' well.Thymos wrote:If you want players to attain godhood then your probably better off using two systems. One for the players and one for the gods. When players gain godhood then just have them remake their characters for the god system.
I think that the idea of a 'god template' and some 'god' powers (which might be attainable by mortals if you're allowing high magic) that interface with the normal rules, and a 'god minigame' which deals with worship and management (and does not interface with the normal rules) is a good one.
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging and sleeping under bridges.
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
oh... fuck.
lets see, the rationale for Kratos being able to kill gods in the games is 1. He's a demigod himself (albeit he doesn't know this originally), 2. He absorbed the "Ultimate Weapon", Hope, from Pandora's Box, which is apparently able to defeat gods, 3. He wields the "Blade of Olympus" which is also capable of defeating gods.
So a table top system made to represent this would basically require characters to possess a few things to defeat gods: A certain tier of Power (possibly an explanation for the [awesome] tag), a quality they can acquire, possibly by hunting down the right artifact, and a weapon that overcomes divine resistance/immunity against mortal weapons. Presumably any two of these is enough (Kratos kills Ares with only 1 and 2, but needs all three to defeat Zeus).
I'm digging around for WotC's "The Primal Order", a non-denominational supplement they released a couple decades back, or so, which had system-independent rules for a god minigame.
lets see, the rationale for Kratos being able to kill gods in the games is 1. He's a demigod himself (albeit he doesn't know this originally), 2. He absorbed the "Ultimate Weapon", Hope, from Pandora's Box, which is apparently able to defeat gods, 3. He wields the "Blade of Olympus" which is also capable of defeating gods.
So a table top system made to represent this would basically require characters to possess a few things to defeat gods: A certain tier of Power (possibly an explanation for the [awesome] tag), a quality they can acquire, possibly by hunting down the right artifact, and a weapon that overcomes divine resistance/immunity against mortal weapons. Presumably any two of these is enough (Kratos kills Ares with only 1 and 2, but needs all three to defeat Zeus).
I'm digging around for WotC's "The Primal Order", a non-denominational supplement they released a couple decades back, or so, which had system-independent rules for a god minigame.