Looking for a system...

[Red Archon]

Hey there. My friend is starting to work on a single player CRPG, which he and a couple of his programming student buddies are going to put together. I'm largely responsible for the writing and rules engineering, and I'm now looking for a good pre-existing system to draw inspiration or straight-up rip off from.

Here are some of the baselines for what I'm looking for:
-No strong role protection (as the game is single player)
-Steady advancement (as in, no levels)
-May include difficult mathematics (as the computer does the calculations)
-Large pool of combat and off-combat options (because "I hit it with my stick" stinks)
-The best possible skill system (because combat will be on par with other challenges, as opposed to the focus)

I've scavenged through HERO 6th edition, MnM, Mutant Chronicles, a few d20 variants, some Dark Heresy, enough FATAL to be entertained by the sheer idiocy and D&D 2nd ed. Asides from bits and pieces, I haven't found a suitable core idea.

Requesting reading suggestions. Thanks in advance.

[malak]

Here are some of the baselines for what I'm looking for:
-No strong role protection (as the game is single player)
-Steady advancement (as in, no levels)
-May include difficult mathematics (as the computer does the calculations)
-Large pool of combat and off-combat options (because "I hit it with my stick" stinks)
-The best possible skill system (because combat will be on par with other challenges, as opposed to the focus)

Have a close look at Guild Wars 1. It has the best Combat-Ruleset of all CRPGs I know. It's simple to start with but very deep...

[erik]

MERPS (Middle Earth Role Playing System) has a percentile system which covered skills and attacks and while I think they gave out points each level that could be spread out between such things, there's no reason you could not just get points without levels.

I do recall an old somewhat popular AOL mud, Gemstone, used MERPS as at least part of its rule engine much to my surprise.

While in the MUD they had people pick out roles, in MERPS you merely are what you can do.

Here's a character sheet to give you an idea of the layout.

Hrm, after my google searching it keeps getting referred to as MERP rather than MERPS. Maybe they shortened the name a bit. Anywho, it is not a perfect system, but some of the notions may be adaptable to your needs.

Alternatively you could have a dicepool system like aWoD or Hollow Earth Expedition. They can work without levels and roles are fairly mutable.

"Best possible skill system" isn't a great guideline so I've mostly interpreted that as "pretty comprehensive skill system that doesn't break the game on my face", which rules out d20.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Will player skill be a factor, or will it be purely a matter of strategy and character building? This really matters.

Since you're going to make non-combat abilities important, it makes sense to somewhat partition combat abilities from other abilities. You don't have to do it completely (e.g. an 'athletics' skill will be useful in and out of combat), because it's a single player game, but you've got to rely on others to create the actual content. This means that the ideal balance might not be struck, and if that is the case then advancing both combat and non-combat abilities in parallel will allow for more balanced characters.

For a resolution method, something like the proposed 'A New Edition' mechanic would be awesome. You'll have an attack/dodge roll (doesn't matter with, the computer does the rolling) and a damage/soak roll with a damage/resistance type. As long as you keep things roughly mechanically balanced, you can have situational bonuses to attack, dodge, damage, and soak rolls (accurate vs. inaccurate attacks, long range, big weapons vs. small weapons, heavy armor vs. kung fu outfit, higher ground, reach, fire resistance, etc). Your rolls can use a fairly wide RNG (you can make a very nice approximation of a bell curve), so the only issue is keeping things on a scale that a person can easily understand.

The AWoD power system is pretty damn' good for 'continuous' advancement, but I worry it's too open ended for a computer game.

[Username17]

Freed completely from the boundaries of being able to plausibly resolve things, I would go with something akin to the Master of Magic engine. Were you roll really large numbers of dice with really low chances of success on each one. Then you manipulate the roll in all kinds of crazy ways. You have penalties that remove dice before you roll, you have penalties that remove dice after you rolled from the highest rolled on down, and you even have penalties that remove dice after the roll from the bottom on up (which you won't even usually notice unless it suddenly catches up and makes tasks impossible or makes you lose opposed tests against people of comparable skill - use this for "complexity" and the like).

But this can totally be back-end. The player just knows that they have a shooting skill of 54. They don't need to know that when they make a shooting test that they are rolling 54 d13s (TN 13), they just know that when their targeting reticule hovers over the target that it tells them they have a 98.7% chance of hitting. And that when enemies are behind cover or they attempt head shots, that number goes down.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

There's always GURPS... Or excuse me, as Fallout calls it... SPECIAL.

[Doom]

For character development that's classless and without levels, consider the Runequest system.

Combat's a bit brutal and dice-heavy, if I recall, but the advancement system is much more even than in level based systems. Asheron's Call (an old MMO) used a very similar version, with the ability to spend EP to improve skills, also.

[CCarter]

A thought on Frank's idea: as number of dice >>ridiculous, you'd I assume get increasingly deterministic results, even with target numbers per die that are quite high. Though the way it models different 'types' of difficulty is quite interesting.

To the OP: If you don't want any niche protection (single player) you probably don't want classes of course which means either points-based (GURPS, HERO). Another system of the same type I often recommend is JAGS (the designer of this has a blog where he's running through computer simulations of various rules to check his point costings). [edit: in interests of full disclosure - I don't know him directly at all but I do now know people who do]. You could instead go with a class system if the single player has several characters, of course. The other rarely-seen approach, other that just point spreading or classes, is to build characters in packages of skills using 'terms' (as seen in GDW games like Traveller or Twilight 2000; the Warhammer 1e/2e (+Dark Heresy?) Profession system is perhaps vaguely similar except that in these you generally start with only 1 "term" or part of one and add further terms, whereas in Traveller you might be old and start out as a Doctor/Scout/Soldier/Whatever).

As far as skill system - one that I kind of like would be LegendQuest by Board Enterprises (could be obtained from DriveThruRPG); an old game but has an interesting system for fatigue points and spell 'control levels', as well as skills of varying 'broadness' and a few other weird ideas e.g. it uses the idea of cross-matching untrained skill penalties, so if you're not trained in Riding, you could take the untrained Ride penalty on Archery checks to shoot people from horseback (even if you have Archery). Character options aside from magic and actual purchase costing for stuff isn't great in LQ, though, IMHO, and the skill list itself for LQ is mostly alot of fairly dull, very tightly specialized mundane skills.

As far as steady advancement goes you could use a Runequest type 'fail a skill roll and go up in skill' system or you can have handouts of xp/character points with costs increasing as skills approach maximum which may tend to promote characters spreading their points through lots of skills? Or both. I suppose whether you want to encourage that depends on if various skill challenges are all scaling up steadily through the game so that it requires 'jack of all trades' type characters, or whether the same challenge can be defeated by various skills used in different ways.

[cthulhu]

Start from outcomes and work backwards, not from mechanics forward. You said single player RPG, lots of questions remain underanswered like

A) Are you going to have a party?

B) What is the setting like?

C) Is it going to be grim or the battle between the gods

First person or third person? Third person seems logical, but it's a question that is not answered.

[Red Archon]

First off, thanks everyone for the replies.

Answers:
A) No. Technically you have talking items as the "group," but they do not have combat actions.

B) The setting is highish fantasy, power levels stretching from the D&D equivalents of level 1 rogue to level 11 druid.

C) Not entirely sure what you're asking. We're avoiding terms like "gritty" and "darker themes," and the world-shaking disaster is much more like the movie "Alien" than "Orcus and The Last Word." Gods are not in play, it's very anthropocentric.

D) Third person. We're going to struggle with the best way to implement the third dimension - flying monsters have always sucked in 3rd person crpgs and we'll, most likely, unfortunately have to continue the long line of wyverns hovering a meter off the ground.

[Username17]

In such a game, classes and skill trees are there to increase playability. Every class has to be able to complete the whole game, but ideally you give them a slightly different "feel" while doing so or change optimal tactics for various parts of the game. A good example is Gauntlet, where basically everyone can do everything, but the game feels somewhat different if you are playing as a Wizard or a Valkyrie.

You can also set different classes as difficulty levels, where for example in Nox, the Summoner class is made out of awesome while the evoker sucks donkey balls (being as his spells are pretty similar except they don't simultaneously defend you from enemies while dishing out damage).

Or you can do a little bit of both, like in Diablo II.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

What classes are the "easy difficulty" classes in Diablo II?

[CatharzGodfoot]

What classes are the "easy difficulty" classes in Diablo II?

It varied throughout the life of the game, and it varied between normal, nightmare, and hell, but in the version I most recently played amazons, paladins, and necromancers were pretty much easy mode for most levels.

[Kaelik]

Yeah, Paladins and especially Amazons are easy mode classes.

The thing about Point click bash games like Diablo is that you are faster than 90% of you enemies, so if you need to run away, you just can, unless you are surrounded.

So a fucking Amazon can kite all day with a bow even if they aren't unstoppable killing machines, which they normally are. (Also, you get stuff to escape the 10%, like clone or Valkeri to distract, or firing cold arrows to slow them and run.)

Also Amazons just get to destroy everything easy mode. You can actually beat Diablo no matter how many players and the difficulty level by just hiding in one specific spot and spamming Guided Arrow while quaffing mana potions.

You can get a crossbow that does more damage than any bow, and fires eleven billion bolts per second for 11 billion damage, and just machine gun everything to death.

[Sashi]

Back about 8 years ago when I played DII the rule was that if you're trying to play through Normal, Nightmare, and Hell as fast as possible in single player mode, then the spellcasters (sorceress and necromancer) are literally the only way to go because eventually weapon users literally can't function (miss % as a function of level vs. monster level).

If you were playing through in multiplayer then it flipped over to Barbarians because monster HP eventually got so huge that spells (which have static damage values based on skill rank) stop being able to deal, while Barbarians have an AoE weapon attack that keeps level with the monster HP, since you can keep piling Dakka onto it with items.