Cartoon Role Playing

[STARP_Social_Officer]

Maybe this belongs in the "House Rules" segment, but I had an idea last night I'd like to share. It's silly, but a little silliness is needed in our work-a-day world. Anyway, my idea is this: cartoon role-playing. By this, I mean adding elements to a campaign to make it like animation. I'm not referring to anime here -I mean cartoons, like Looney Tunes. Have abilities so characters can do stuff that only happens in cartoons. Let me demonstrate:

Feat:Meep! Meep!
A character with this feat can cheat fate, even death, and escape totally uninjured from any catastrophe, even averting the disaster completely. Once per day, the character can invoke the Meep! Meep! feat, and completely avoid the effects of any situation that would injure or disadvantage him. He can totally avoid any damage from any spell, survive an anvil falling on top of him, or avoid being trampled by a herd of elephants.

Feat:Is it Real?
A character with this feet can treat any illusion or other deception as a real depiction of the object. Thus, a character with this feet can walk through an illusory door, interact with, and hit, an illusory creature, or pull a picture off a wall and have it turn into a real item. The ability functions exclusively for the creature with the feat. If any other character attempts to do the same thing, nothing happens. Thus, a character with this feat can run through a picture of a tunnel painted onto a cliff face; another character attempting to do so will hit the wall.

Feat: It IS Real!
Prerequisite: Is it Real?
This feat is similar to Is it Real, but images or illusions used by the character become real and solid, permanently and for every character. Thus, the character could run through a fake tunnel and have his pursuers do likewise. However, any other character attempting to use the device or object is 50% likely to suffer negative consequences - if chasing someone through the above tunnel, for example, there is a 50% chance a train comes out.

Feat: Defy Gravity
This feat allows a character to walk on thin air as long as he or she is not concentrating. The ability activates automatically when a character walks over a cliff or other high location. The ability duplicates air walk and functions for 1 round. After 1 round, the character must fail a Concentration check to continue using the ability for another round. If he passes the check, he falls instantly and takes full falling damage (unless he has the THUD! feat; see below).

Feat: THUD!
A character with this feet takes half-damage from all falls, from any distance. In addition, upon landing the character is automatically able to get up and walk away, though he takes a -2 penalty to all checks for one minute due to the birds flying around his head.

Feat:Bump on the Noggin
This feat allows a character, once per day, to convert any damage into an equivilant amount of nonlethal damage. He can apply it to any damage he chooses, even damage that would otherwise result in death. The side-effect is that this causes little birds to fly around the character's head, and that he grows a large bump on his head which is one inch tall for every point of damage taken. The bump shrinks as the damage is healed.

Has anybody got any more ideas? I think I might be on to something here...

 

[Crothian]

There is a RPG called Toon that is playing cartoons.

 

[Glyfair]

There is a RPG called Toon that is playing cartoons.

There was also the Rocky & Bullwinkle RPG. That was a very different style of roleplaying. Still, who can hate an RPG that comes with hand puppets! (For those of you that hate minis)

 

[Aurora]

Interesting. I like the THUD feat

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Yes TOON is a great game if you're looking for that sort of thing. I think they have it in PDF form at Warehouse 23 now if anyone is interested.

I managed to get my hands on a hardcopy of the Deluxe Edition. Now if I could just get some time to play a one shot or two of it. Damn real life!

Olaf the Stout

 

[Deuce Traveler]

Heh. I just let someone borrow my copy of Toon. Fun game.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Toon is an awesome game and surprisingly adaptable.

 

[paradox42]

Chalk up another vote for TOON here. It's my favorite RPG next to D&D. And Whizbang is right- it can be adapted to do just about anything, especially if you have the supplements that detail rules for "alternate settings" like "The Crawl of Catchooloo," "SuperToon," or even "Dungeons and Toons."

I actually used TOON in my D&D game once. The party (through an Amulet of the Planes mishap) once got accidentally transported to a continent on my game world that's known to be saturated with Wild Magic and is thus considered uninhabitable; well, the party discovered that this was not so. They met some inhabitants... starting with the giant yellow bird which looked inexplicably more like a walking and talking drawing of a bird than a real one. I secretly used TOON rules to run the other side that day, instead of D&D, and boy oh boy did the players get scared when they realized the party tank couldn't hurt this bird no matter what he did (bird's Fight score was high and it kept rolling low on defense- woo hoo!).

Lucky for them the party's resident jokester kept drawing tools in her pack for no previously explored reason. She drew a door with a sign on it reading "Stairway to Heaven," and one Led Zeppelin song and trip up an Infinite Staircase-like demiplane later, the party arrived safe and sound in Mount Celestia.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

Tales From the Floating Vagabond had abilities called "shticks" that were much like the concepts you propose. Among them were things like the Schwarzenegger Effect (the character wouldn't suffer the effects of pain, blood loss, etc. until he literally dropped dead), the Rambo Effect (projectile weapons fired at close range would never hit the character), the Flynn Effect (there is always some sort of low hanging rope/chandelier/vine/whatever near at hand for the character to swing to the rescue on; the side effect of this was that they could never just enter or leave places normally, they'd have to take the most dramatic way out- say, though a plate glass window).

My favorite was the Rodgers and Hammerstein Effect, where the character had theme music playing constantly in the background that would rise and lower according to dramatic effect.