The Elder Scrolls RPG

[GMMichael]

Just started playing Oblivion again, but this time I have the two expansions to look forward to. I really wouldn't want to recreate the persuasion game for a TRPG - it's pretty cheesy. I'm not sure if they did this in Skyrim, but gaining favor with someone should be based on which of your multiple choice responses you choose, not how big of a slice you pick on a dial.

Degrading weapons, after watching the Albion Online video, is a really good idea. It's a pain in Oblivion though; after one or two fights with BBEG daedra, all of your equipment is at 10% and you wonder why you can't do damage or absorb damage. I think it makes great sense though for weapons and armor to occasionally break, because this adds value to a sidearm, sometimes makes dropped or old weapons attractive, and makes arms merchant a career with potential.

I'd take out the scaling enemies with level bit - that's a video game feature more than a specific Skyrim feature and RPGs are better off without it. I'd also include
- crafting your own gear
- high-power criticals (I once killed a dragon in Skyrim with a single arrow shot from stealth, with appropriate skills maxed of course)
- skill improvement after specific number of successes with the skill
- wards as active magic protection
- active defense options in combat

Criticals - yup. I was just eyeballing a backstabbing perk that could be amplified when using daggers or knives only, like the assassin's blade perk from Skyrim.

Skill improvement - both Oblivion and Skyrim seem to progress skill separately from levels. Oblivion focuses on class skills, while Skyrim treats all skills the same. I think this is easier to model than tracking successes, because I wouldn't want to have a Skill Sheet with room for a tally behind each skill for each time I succeed with that skill. I've thought that awarding skill after a game session, if the character showed progress, would be easier, although I really like the idea of a Skill Progress die that you get to roll in certain situations when there's a chance that your skill might improve.

Wards are like shields...

Oblivion and Skyrim also give you a choice: block or attack. I'm not sure why this isn't a common feature in TRPGs. It's a very economical choice, and pretty realistic. Is it not fun enough? Anyway, I would definitely put active defense in an Elder Scrolls campaign.

I disagree with people saying that this is a hard thing to do in actual play - it's not. You just need to have a few general dungeons kicking around within a few levels of your PCs, and adjust as you see fit. To play this sort of game, you need to be able to wing it... which happens to be my favourite part of RPGs.

Having characters be able to enchant their own gear, smith their own weapons, build their own houses, and progress in their preferred guilds are all good, "elder scrolls" ideas. And all of these are pretty easy to do in both 5th and Pathfinder, so that's a plus.

I've noticed that players in any Elder Scrolls game tend to be generalists with a focus on one area. So, everyone can cast healing magic, but some might be conjurers and others might just use a huge axe. Whether you want to do that, or just use the D&D class system is up to you. Personally, I'd just go with classes.

I love using alchemy in Skyrim. Stealing that system, and having players try to figure out what to combine with what to make potions would be pretty cool. It's like a campaign-length puzzle you can throw at them. And doing similar things with other parts of the game - enchanting and disenchanting items, finding metals to smith your own gear, and the like - could help your game feel "skyrimmy".

Also, I'd keep your individual quests short and sweet. In an Elder Scrolls game, the over-arching plot is something you visit occasionally, but you'll spend most of the time accomplishing short quests that are easy-in, easy-out.

Give each place a theme to it. For example, in Skyrim, all of the holds have a different vibe to them. Riften is a wooden Venice that's home to con artists and thieves. Winterhold is built on an icy cliff and has a bunch of decaying buildings and a frozen castle full of mages. There's the city of Solitude, a city of "civilization" in the north (it reminds me of Baldur's Gate). And then there's Morthal and Markarth, which I always get confused - one's a horror-vibe swamptown plagued by ghosts and vampires (with a young heir who seems to have epilepsy!), while the other is busily involved in an uprising from the local natives. If you can provide one "hook" to each settlement, you're well on your way to an Elder Scrolls game.

It would be easy enough to create a Mad-Libs, or OGRE generator, for random side quests. They're not that complex. And winging it would be a pretty important part of that. Hard to do if you're playing a crunchy game, but I bet lighter games could make that sort of thing pretty easy.

House-building: I clearly remember moving into the Haunted House in Oblivion. And the place cleaned up pretty nicely. As a player, I would appreciate my own RPG house more if I had an actual map of it for reference. This would be a very visual thing for me. But...is it an essential Elder Scrolls feature?

I wouldn't necessarily call Elder Scrolls characters generalists, but they definitely have the ability to do ANYTHING. How well they do anything, that's up to the player. If you spend time doing everything, then sure, you're a generalist. The point is, what, all characters are allowed to cast spells if they want?

I like the themes idea for locations, but I think that applies to RPGs in general.

As with most single-player video games, Elder Scrolls has a plot that revolves heavily around the character. In my experience, trying to push that into a larger group can be disruptive, since really only one of them can be "the chosen one" or whatever. I've seen campaigns like that fall apart as the party gets divided.

However, there are often sidequests that have pretty epic plotlines. What I would do is have several equally important plotlines that each revolve around a different character. So one might be the chosen of the Dark Brotherhood, the next might be the Dragonborn, a third might be destined to become the new Sheogorath (I know I'm mixing games here, but it's just an example).

Also important would be making sure that no single plotline gets resolved all at once. So the party might do a quest for the dragonborn, then a quest in the Shivering Isles, then head over to the Knights of the Nine, then go back to the dragonborn plotline, etc. That gives each character time in the spotlight, while also maintaining the general style of Elder Scrolls quests.

Star Wars revolved heavily around Luke. Did that make Chewy, Han, or Leia less important? Or R2...

Plotlines for characters: that's downright genius. +1.

Do the plotlines need to persist, and exist independently? That IS an Elder Scrolls feature, but only to the extent that your GM must be a CPU. Playing an Elder Scrolls RPG should be able to improve on this, no?

 

[MarkB]

Augh, I have bad memories of that affection wheel from Oblivion. I had a flat-mate at the time, and the cacophony of appreciative, admiring, frightened and annoyed responses the NPCs would spout during the minigame combined into what he described as sounding like "someone having violent sex in the next room".

One thing I liked in Skyrim is what I'd call 'drop-in' quests. There were plenty of normal-style quests where you'd be sent somewhere specific - but in many cases, if you just happened across a tomb or cave and went in to explore, you'd quickly find a fellow adventurer, or a corpse with a journal, or something else that would start to weave a story about the place. That might be something worth capturing in a tabletop game.

 

[bone_naga]

Star Wars revolved heavily around Luke. Did that make Chewy, Han, or Leia less important? Or R2...

You can't really compare movie or book plotlines to RPGs. You can draw inspiration from them but the characters behave however the script says they behave. It's far less entertaining for most players if a single character is the star of the campaign and the rest of the characters are just supporting cast. Just like one character in a story can have gain ridiculously powerful abilities and outshine everyone else, whereas the same technique might not work so well in a game.

But Star Wars is an interesting example. While it does heavily revolve around Luke, the most important thing he did in the movies was destroy the Death Star. After that, he could have died and the rest would likely have gone the same way. His actions after that were important to his personal plotline but not to the galaxy as a whole. He destroyed a walker on Hoth and helped direct the downing of others, yet the Imperial assault continued on and the shield generators were still destroyed. We really don't know if they even slowed it down since the AT-ATs appeared to steadily advance despite Rogue Squadron's best efforts. He went to Dagobah, which didn't really help anyone else. He fought Vader at Cloud City but that didn't really change anything one way or another. He fought Vader and resisted the Emperor on the Second Death Star but since Han brought down the shield generator and Lando destroyed the power core which in turn destroyed the station, they would have died anyway. So Star Wars is actually a great example of giving each character their own important pieces to play and letting each of them shine without one person clearly overshadowing everyone else.

 

[bone_naga]

Augh, I have bad memories of that affection wheel from Oblivion. I had a flat-mate at the time, and the cacophony of appreciative, admiring, frightened and annoyed responses the NPCs would spout during the minigame combined into what he described as sounding like "someone having violent sex in the next room".

I think that wheel was just an interactive way (not saying it was the best way) to illustrate something that can easily be done in a tabletop game, which is making all social skills possible but with different chances of success. In a tabletop game, this would just be handled by having different difficulties for the various social skills.

 

[JDulle]

Improving skills to gain new levels is something I identify with the newer Elder Scroll games, but you'd need a system that allowed for that to occur on the pen & paper side - perhaps something like the system Call of Cthulhu uses where improving the skill is much easier at lower levels but the better you get the more difficult it is to use the skill to level up.

 

[sunshadow21]

• Open world - probably requires more random tables than oodles of planning,
• Scaling enemies - easy, if you're playing the right game. Otherwise, you have some prep to do,
• Design own spells - still not striking me as a general feature,
• Persuasion Pie - unique to Oblivion? But see factions point...
• Degrading weapons - did these appear outside Oblivion?
• Rich Lore - see www.uesp.net
• Skills, magic, weapon and armor prof improvement - isn't this a common RPG thing?
• Classes - Elder Scrolls, except for Skyrim, has classes. Primarily fighter, wizard, rogue,
• Zodiac Sign/Standing Stone - any of these outside IV and V?
• Racial reputation/faction - recurring theme. There's a good amount of prejudice in Elder Scrolls,
• Guilds - these take different names, and are pretty streamlined in IV and V. But not so in III?

Morrowind had most of these features. A lot of the base features are repeated even if their precise implementation is not. For instance, Morrowind had enchanting, alchemy, and custom spell making while Skyrim has different implementations of alchemy and enchantment and the ability to craft armor and weapons instead of custom spells. Guilds remain more or less the same as far as implementation, just sometimes with different names. The only thing that I can think of that is overtly different and unique to just one game is the persuasion pie, but even there, aspects of it can be found in guild rank and numerous other smaller ways. The one thing that would be very difficult to translate over would be the skill progression and how it ties into level. In the games, you get a new level after you raise x number of skills y times; tracking all the individual skills in a pen and paper game would be extremely difficult and probably not worth the effort. Everything else about the games could probably be ported over with little to no difficulty.

 

[CapnZapp]

Improving skills to gain new levels is something I identify with the newer Elder Scroll games, but you'd need a system that allowed for that to occur on the pen & paper side - perhaps something like the system Call of Cthulhu uses where improving the skill is much easier at lower levels but the better you get the more difficult it is to use the skill to level up.

BRP.

The term you are looking for is Basic Role-Playing, or BRP for short.

Cheers

 

[GMMichael]

Just updated the main list (first post). Some things I'm looking at:
[MENTION=8835]Janx[/MENTION] still gets a +1 for supporting the fluff. Use Septims, put location-appropriate monster tables in (no Goblins in Skyrim!), and (@Wik) give your locations a theme.

Health regeneration: I think only Skyrim was a bad offender in this. But I just read that ESO heals a certain amount every 2 seconds.
[MENTION=26651]amerigoV[/MENTION]: NPC abuse is a spreading tragedy. But you've indirectly raised a good point: TES characters can only carry so much. From what I've seen, it's usually WAY too much...but encumbrance should be some sort of factor, no?

Poisons and diseases are pretty common TES features. Although I didn't notice them on my last Skyrim playthrough, I think it was because I had some sort of poison immunity...

CLASSES: everywhere but Skyrim. Should an Elder Scrolls RPG have classes? What should they be?

 

[amerigoV]

CLASSES: everywhere but Skyrim. Should an Elder Scrolls RPG have classes? What should they be?

I would pick your favorite class-less system and run it (me - I would use Savage Worlds, but I am a SW fanboy). There has always been flexibility even in the class systems used in TES and Skyrim just let you built as you want. Of course, you could easily have a non-viable build in Skyrim (I had about 25 hours into a PC when I had to give up - he could kill mooks in 900 different ways, but if the opponent was Named he was a goner or it would be a looooooong fight).

While there was some talk of it upthread, I would in no way try to replicate the level system in TES. Skyrim's is pretty good, but I could never get past the annoyance of it for Oblivion (I go back, play it a bit, give up). I should not have have an App or a spreadsheet to track skills just to level up efficiently. TES skill/leveling system leds to stupid behavior like standing there flogging your demon horse for an hour.

https://youtu.be/Q44ituA0TZk

To me TES level system, especially Oblivion's, is just an anachronism of a time long past.

(ie, we used to take a dump in an outhouse - but even today we do not do that even if we are at a historical house)

 

[MarkB]

I would pick your favorite class-less system and run it (me - I would use Savage Worlds, but I am a SW fanboy). There has always been flexibility even in the class systems used in TES and Skyrim just let you built as you want. Of course, you could easily have a non-viable build in Skyrim (I had about 25 hours into a PC when I had to give up - he could kill mooks in 900 different ways, but if the opponent was Named he was a goner or it would be a looooooong fight).

Yeah, there's nothing equivalent to specific class features in TES - even in Morrowind and Oblivion, classes were simply a way to codify which skills and stats you wanted to specialise in, and about 8 times out of 10 you were better off building a custom class than picking one of the defaults.

While there was some talk of it upthread, I would in no way try to replicate the level system in TES. Skyrim's is pretty good, but I could never get past the annoyance of it for Oblivion (I go back, play it a bit, give up). I should not have have an App or a spreadsheet to track skills just to level up efficiently. TES skill/leveling system leds to stupid behavior like standing there flogging your demon horse for an hour.

My abiding memory of Morrowind was the constant bouncing of the view during long travel. This wasn't due to excessive head-bob settings - it was due to the fact that I was hitting the Jump key every second step, because jumping trained Athletics and Athletics made you run faster.

The other issue with the system is that every skill point you earned contributed to your level, and monster toughness was tied to your level - so you could level up as the perfect social butterfly, skyrocketing your Speech and Bartering, maybe doing some Armoursmithing so you could make that nice badass-looking armour set, and some Lock-Picking so you can steal the materials you'll need to craft it, but because you were gaining levels without advancing your combat skills, you'd die to the first random bunch of critters you encountered outside town. It encourages combat specialisation over versatility. That can be compensated for somewhat in a tabletop game, but it could still be an issue.