Best game for God of War-esque action?

[Celebrim]

Ok, why?

Why emulate a video game? It's not like you are going to manage to capture a reflex based visual medium in a cerebral pen and paper game. You certainly aren't going to capture the sense of scale, frantic action, and the visual effects. This is dice, not 'twitch'. The very basis of the contest that makes it work isn't available to you, unless you want to resolve actions by playing tiddly winks. You are never going to make a better combat game out of pen and paper than you can have with a game controller.

So what are you going for?

Numbers are all relative anyway. If you want to be Karatos in a D&D game, scale everything down. Divide everything by 5 or something. Karatos is a 12th level fighter. The biggest baddest things out there have like 20HD. A huge dragon has 4HD. An Ogre has 1HD and a 12 str. Anything smaller than that can be automatically be squashed as a free action at the rate of your HD/round. You'll lose fine resolution, but who cares about fine resolution at the scale where you bashing Gods.

 

[Nightfall]

Celebrim,

I'm guessing it's for the same reason there are days I want to be Naruto. Cause honestly I tried being a half fiend human ninja...and it's just not working out.

 

[IceFractal]

Actually, since you bring up Naruto, that's a good example of how well you can mimic abilities in different systems:

In D&D, you can somewhat mimic the shadow clone move with the Astral Zealot PrC (3rd party), if you change the descriptions a bit. Incidentally, the psionics crew make a pretty good case that psionics better approximate those kind of powers than the actual Ninja class.

In BESM, you can mimic it pretty closely, with existing powers.

In HERO, you can mimic it exactly, right down to the puff of smoke. The tradeoff to this is that HERO battles take approximately a decade, IME.



This would probably also be the case with God of War - for accurately portraying Kratos, you want a flexible system, and the more detailed/tweakable it is the closer a match you'll get.

However, for getting the God of War feel, I don't think the character creation is the most important part of the system - the combat mechanics are. What you need is a system with fast moving combat mechanics, that retain enough detail to make things like tossing your enemies around meaningful.

Unfortunately, that's hard to find - a lot of the systems that encourage fast moving combat and crazy stunts do so by significantly abstracting combat - to the extent that picking someone up with a flaming whip and impaling them on a spike just gives them -2 to their combat roll.

What's a good tradeoff between detail and momentum is an individual decision, so I think your best bet would be to find which combat system you like the best, and try to create Kratos in that system.

 

[Donovan Morningfire]

I'm gonna echo other's votes for Mutants & Masterminds 2e.

Character creation system is flexible enough to create pretty much anything and everything, as the Roll Call forum on the Atomic Think Tank has demonstrated time and again (and I believe at least one person actually did a PL 10/150pp build of Kratos). The combat system is quick and fluid (just treat the non-boss opponents as minions, so they drop easily), and between the various combat feats and power stunts, you can pull off the sorts of over-the-top antics that you often see in video games.

 

[RangerWickett]

Ok, why?

Why emulate a video game?

I don't care about the fact that it's a video game. I care about the fact that saying,

"I grab the minotaur by its throat, hoist it over my head, rip off its horn, stab it in the heart with it, hurl the horn into the face of the Medusa across the room, and then swing the minotaur by his feet in an arc around me to knock back the oncoming hordes of undead Athenians"

is a hell of a lot cooler than,

"I make a touch attack. Okay, I hit. I make a grapple check. Alright now I sunder his horn. Oh, you can't sunder natural weapons? I guess I'll release the grapple and just make a normal attack against him."

 

[thedungeondelver]

In HERO, you can mimic it exactly, right down to the puff of smoke. The tradeoff to this is that HERO battles take approximately a decade, IME.

Pfft. Oh stop. They take nine years and everybody knows it!

 

[Celebrim]

I don't care about the fact that it's a video game. I care about the fact that saying,

"I grab the minotaur by its throat, hoist it over my head, rip off its horn, stab it in the heart with it, hurl the horn into the face of the Medusa across the room, and then swing the minotaur by his feet in an arc around me to knock back the oncoming hordes of undead Athenians"

The problem with this is that it isn't a proposition. It's a goal. Not only is it a goal, but its a whole series of goals each of which would have to have a separate proposition and resolution. You aren't describing from a player perspective what you want to do; you are describing what you want to achieve as a result. And because what you want is so specific, any detailed combat system which would distinguish mechanically between those goals and any other goals would require 50 dice rolls with a tone of modifiers.

You could achieve that in Amber quite nicely, though. Your combat skill is much higher than the minotaurs, so script whatever story you feel is appropriate. But, I don't think that's really what you are looking for.

"I make a touch attack. Okay, I hit. I make a grapple check. Alright now I sunder his horn. Oh, you can't sunder natural weapons? I guess I'll release the grapple and just make a normal attack against him."

The problem with this description is that it is a proposition in game space, not in the imaginary space in which the game is supposed to be taking place. It would be considered very poor form at my table to present your proposition entirely in such metagame language. The reason that it is boring is primarily the language you are using. In a detailed system should be making a series of in game propositions:

1) "Kratos grabs the minotaur" (resolve action and get ref feedback) "...The minotaur howls in rage as you pull it up to your chest."
2) "I heave the creature up over my head." (resolve action and get ref feedback) "...The beast howls in terror and confusion as you lift over your massive shoulders"
3) "I try to snap the creature in two." (resolve action and get ref feedback) "...the minotaurs spine breaks with a satisfying snap."
4) "I use they minotaurs body as a weapon against the advancing undead horde." (resolve action and get ref feedback) "...undead warriors are smashed back by the whirling bulk"
5) "I throw the minotaur at the gorgon"...

And so forth. You should immediately see the problem. Since the conflict resolution is dice based, even if we can emmulate the action to a close degree, it won't have the snappy, adrenalyn charging, ego boosting effect of doing it in near real time.

I got to tell you, if you are looking for ego boosting games that let you feed on rage and the illusion of accomplishment, pen and paper games just aren't even going to come close to computer games.

As for not being able to sunder natural weapons, if you want to sunder natural weapons it should be no problem to introduce that as a house rule into whatever system you want. But since you want to sunder natural weapons AND you also don't want gritty, realistic, dangerous combat - you want to have your ego boosted by the wicked damage you are doing - you should simple state that the PC is not an NPC. He should get a special 'I'm practically a god. Did I say practically, I meant I am a god... no BETTER than a god." package that means the PC can do things that can't be done to him in return.

All the rest is just a matter of relative scale.

 

[RangerWickett]

I find the term 'ego-boosting' mildly insulting. It makes fun seem so . . . psychiatric.

I play D&D to do big cool things, and if I had the skill I would like to do similarly cool things in the rest of my life, because cool is better than normal. Sure, lay-up shots are fine in basketball, but slam dunks and blind passes are cooler.

The thing is, in D&D there is a barrier to coolness. It's not that I want snappy, trigger-finger gameplay. I just want a game where the rules easily support doing things that are more fun to imagine. D&D wants you to hack away at hit points. I'm looking for a game that wants you to chew the scenery.

I don't mind rolling four or five dice a round to accomplish a bad-ass maneuver.

Grab - roll.
Kill - roll.
Impale medusa - roll.
Whirlwind attack - roll.

But in D&D it's:

Grab - touch attack, opposed grapple check.
Kill - opposed grapple check, probably several times because you've got to go through a lot of HP. And you have to roll damage each time.
Impale medusa - roll, with a penalty because there is a horde of undead between you and the medusa, and because you're not proficient with 'horn.' Roll damage.
Whirlwind attack - roll, with a penalty because you're not proficient with 'corpse.' Roll damage.

I need to get a copy of MnM 2nd edition. 1st edition ain't bad, so I figure 2nd edition will be better. Anyone have that link to the PL 10 Kratos?

 

[Celebrim]

I find the term 'ego-boosting' mildly insulting. It makes fun seem so . . . psychiatric.

It's not meant to be insulting. It's meant to be descriptive. The creator of GoW openly admits that this was a design goal and that the game is intended to achieve emotional immersiveness to the point of causing the player to experience beserk rage and accompanying ectasy as Kratos experiences these things.

I play D&D to do big cool things, and if I had the skill I would like to do similarly cool things in the rest of my life, because cool is better than normal. Sure, lay-up shots are fine in basketball, but slam dunks and blind passes are cooler.

And people wonder why the US national team is losing to teams like Greece lately...

But anyway, I digress. I don't play D&D to do big cool things, but I do recognize that a large percentage of players do.

The thing is, in D&D there is a barrier to coolness. It's not that I want snappy, trigger-finger gameplay. I just want a game where the rules easily support doing things that are more fun to imagine. D&D wants you to hack away at hit points. I'm looking for a game that wants you to chew the scenery.

My experience is that players that want to 'chew the scenery' tend to get upset when the scenery chews back.

Grab - touch attack, opposed grapple check.

In most cases, the touch attack can be dispensed with. It's only an issue worth considering at relatively low levels versus dodgy sorts of monsters.

Kill - opposed grapple check, probably several times because you've got to go through a lot of HP. And you have to roll damage each time.

Again, this is just a scale issue. If you want to chew the scenary, face alot of things that are more than 4 below your CR. Divide the hit dice/hit points of everything in the monster manual by 5. Give the PC's a 'I have a license to chew the scenary' package. Go to town. My guess is that to a certain extent, you'd be unhappy with that because it interferes with the illusion of 'badassness' to 'see' how explicitly things have been weighted in your favor. To avoid that, use a system you aren't as familiar with - like say Mutants and Masterminds - and do basically the same thing - face hordes of mooks with 5 power levels or so below your characters. Have even the big Collosal foe have a PL at most a couple below yours. Chew the scenary accordingly. This works particularly well if you don't know the details of the system you are playing at all (as you don't usually in the case of a computer game).

Impale medusa - roll, with a penalty because there is a horde of undead between you and the medusa, and because you're not proficient with 'horn.' Roll damage.

So, give PC's a 'badness' package that among other things lets them ignore all circumstance penalties. Cover? Heroes don't worry about cover! They fire arrow through coin sized holes without penalty! Improvised weapons! Real heroes don't worry about whether a stick, a table, or the jawbone of a donkey is less effective of a weapon as something made of hardened honed steel purpose design to be a weapon! Real heroes are weapons, and they are perfectly capable of kill a cyclops with a paperclip!

The system you are going to be happy with is going to do something like that anyway.

What I'm trying to say is that D&D is putting these 'barriers to coolness' in the way for a reason. Perhaps that reason could be best explained as 'Batman is much cooler than Superman.'

 

[Doctor DM]

I put my vote in for BESM. You can do ANYTHING in that game.