A Fantasy RPG: What's Required?

[pemerton]

I'd go one of two ways.

If you want "traditional" - stats, skills, weapon lists, spell lists - than I'd be looking at Runequest or some other iteration of Basic Roleplaying, at Tunnels and Trolls, and at HARP, MERP or RM express, and seeing how to distill a game like that down to the bare basics. Probably 4 stats (Physique, Agility, Smarts, Spirit/Percpetion/Empathy), a choice between warrior/scout or spelluser, a basic skill list, and a simple action resolution system.

If you want "modern", I'd be looking at fewer-than-10,000 word games that are also quite flavoursome (eg Nicotine Girls or The World, the Flesh and the Devil) and thinking about how you might use that sort of approach for a fantasy game. Looking at HeroQuest or The Burning Wheel would probably help here (HeroQuest, and the core mechanics for Burning Wheel, might even fit your 10,000 word constraint).

 

[fanboy2000]

Great Question

The bare essentials of a Fantasy RPG are, to me: 1) a task resolution system. And 2) a way to improve over time during the course of a campaign.

The Task Resolution System should allow players to specialize in something useful to the goal of the game in a way that makes their probability of success higher than someone who doesn’t specialize. More specifically, the specialist should have a greater than 50% chance of success and the non-specialist should have a less than 50% chance. This is so that the specialist feels that the game resources spent on specialization haven’t gone to waste.

The Character Advancement System should allow players to defeat previously difficult challenges faster and more efficiently than as they progress.

The simplest FRPG that would be playable would for me would be a percentile system with every PC having a set of skills with a value between 1 and 100. To succeed at a task (any task, even shooting someone in combat), the player would have to roll under the value of the skill. Every PC would have a damage value and and would die when that value reached 0. Player could advance their characters by raising their skills and the GM could influence the outcome by granting bonuses and penalties.

So, to sum-up, I think an FRPG needs:

• skills
• a way to keep track of damage
• a way to deal damage
• a way to measure success in a task
• and way for the GM to increase or decrease the difficulty of a task based on the situation.

 

[fanboy2000]

I fell like I haven’t addressed everything

Looking at my post, I don’t think I addressed all the components of what you asked for, or at least I didn’t explain how what I wrote applied to what you wanted. Let me elaborate:

Fantasy
To me, the fantasy element means pseudo-medieval fantasy. The components of this are: feudalism, agrarian society, low technology level, and fey. Given that all the elements by fey are historical reality, why are they part of the fantasy element? As an American, I have no experience with feudalism. I know it’s basics, but that is it. This makes it easy for me to accept (and imagine) a wide variety of interpretations of feudalism in a non-historical context. Anything else, and I fall victim to the “Unassailable Wall of Realism” that Monte Cook talked about on his blog recently.

As a modern American who has lived in large cities all his life, agrarian societies seem fairly exotic to me, despite them being the norm until very recently in human history.

Magic and technology don’t mix well to me because, in my mind, technology has replaced magic. Doors open automatically for me not because of magic, but because of technology. Because technology has replaced magic, I prefer low tech fantasy.

Fey = magic in my book. I’m using a broader definition of fey that encompasses fantastic races and creatures, not just pixies and sprites. They represent a concrete connection to the supernatural that humans don’t have. They are seasoning to a setting that, without them, is simply a pseudo-historical Earth.

Adventure
Would be represented by the choice of skill selection and the choice of challenges provided by the GM. Skills should be related to things like combat, arcane lore, and feats of strength and agility. Their challenges should be overcoming danger and traveling to exotic locations.

Game
Success and failure should be measured objectively, with the players being able to spend game resources to define their character and how it interacts with the world. A good balance of luck and skill should be made. If there is no luck and only skill, the game boils down to meta-gaming all the time. If there is only luck, there player choice doesn’t matter very much and many players will become board.

Of course, IRL, there are games of only skill (Go), and games of mostly chance (Fluxx). But those are at the extremes. By combining the two, an FRPG appeals to a wider variety of people and can hopefully accommodate a wider variety of play styles.

 

[steenan]

1. You need a setting. As you want to fit the game in 24 pages, it's impossible to describe a world in detail. Focus on a few important ideas that you can fit in several paragraphs. Leave the rest to players' imagination. List movies and books that may be used as inspiration.
Without a detailed world the game cannot be played in a "sandboxy" way. Decide what is the focus and make it known to players. In 24 pages you may have a dungeon crawl, a wilderness exploration adventure, a story of cultural clash. You won't fit all three. Focus.

2. You need a resolution system. Make it simple. Build around your thematical focus and ignore the rest (or make it extremely simple). If your focus is combat, make a fun tactical system without any noncombat skills. If your focus is exploration, track rations, torches and tools, not HP - combat may be a single roll.

3. You need character creation. Five to eight numbers or abilities to choose, no more. Don't create a list of powers, feats or spells. If you create any list at all, make it no longer than 10 items, with one-line description each. Definitely no detailed weapons stats etc.

4. You need a way to create opposition. It may be monster stats, terrain traits, trap descriptions. It may be abstract, if your resolution system is abstract. Maybe a troll ambush and a falling boulder traps are both "rating: 4, traits: suprising, tough" challenges mechanically.

All other parts of a game are, IMO, optional.

 

[Reynard]

Without a detailed world the game cannot be played in a "sandboxy" way.

I am not sure I agree with this statement, or #1 in general. I don't think each of the activities of dungeon crawl, urban adventure and wilderness adventure are mutually exclusive in a short form system. In either case, setting can be "supplementary" and all the I think would be required is flavor and some setting assumptions.

4. You need a way to create opposition. It may be monster stats, terrain traits, trap descriptions. It may be abstract, if your resolution system is abstract. Maybe a troll ambush and a falling boulder traps are both "rating: 4, traits: suprising, tough" challenges mechanically.

I like this -- rate obstacles on complexity and difficulty and then use a "type" descriptor. So, fightinga bunch of orcs might be Complexity: Moderate, Difficulty: Low and Type: Combat, while climbing a cliff might have the same stats except Type: Movement or something. Maybe add a "threat" rating as well, which will determine the effect of failure?

 

[Hand of Evil]

RPG Fantasy needs the following:

• Setting - this is to grab the players and make them want to play the game. This is not just the world but the classes, the presentation, the packaging.
• System - how I wish there was a simple universal system but there is not, what you want is one that best covers action, skills, damage and magic, that a lot more. Yep, something may work with combat but for magic, not there, then you have all the stuff that comes up, like skill checks, creating magical items. You have to have a system that is not too complex and flexable to handle it.
• Stats - What makes up the mind, body and spirit and how do you build it around your system. This is a step process, if man is zero in strenght, a dwarf is 1 but a house cat is a -2. Again, this has to be the best to cover the setting of your game and work with in the system.

 

[Votan]

Having taken a quick look at Microlite d20, I don't think so. It isn't so much a complete game as it is the condensed rules of d20 like you'd expect to find inside a board game box. there's no flavor or information there. And I'm not sure you could hand it to someone who had never seen d20 or 3E before and they would be able to actually make use of it in real play.

The answer to my initial query *must* be more than "bullet point rules".

How much flavor is required?

What is hard to include in such a requirement is that world/background is an endless amount of material, if done well. Just look at how much material there is on major fictional worlds (think Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Conan or Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

If you have a light set of generic setting rules (Savage Worlds or Cortex) based in an established setting then the main rulebook can be pretty small. But if setting and flavor information needs to be included then the minimum size goes up.

[in this sense, it is amazing how useful it can be to make a world similar to what has been done before. If you tell the players "this world is very similar to and modeled after Lord of the Rings" then they can do 12 hours of background research by watching the movies and will know what an Orc is, that Elves do impossible things, that Ringwraiths are bad and that cutting down forests is a dicey proposition.]

 

[Wolf1066]

@Morrus; I was not talking in terms of cutting an existing system down, rather in terms of what I've encountered in other systems that seems to be "normal" - such as some form of alignment/virtues system - and whether or not you could get away with not bothering to include such in your own system.

Task resolution is mentioned a lot - and not surprisingly, really - and it got me thinking about how that could be pared down.

Perhaps a "skill building" system wherein your book outlines how to resolve tasks - opposed ones such as combat, haggle, persuasion, intimidate and so on as well as unopposed ones such as repair/make something, shoot a target etc - but you just give guidelines as to how to come up with skill difficulties etc and let the GM/players come up with the actual list of skills relevant to their in-game needs.

That instead of a "laundry list" of skills and their descriptions.

Should take less space to tell them how skills are used and generated from an idea than to enumerate and describe all the possibly useful skills they may need. With such a "tool kit" the GM could set the fantasy in any time (s)he wants from Bronze Age up to Interstellar Civilisation.

 

[Ariosto]

With such arbitrary constraints, Reynard, you are not talking about what is 'required'. You are talking about what fits, and what makes that interesting is that it is not enough.

If space were not an issue, then you could pursue the question of what is enough.

Metamorphosis Alpha was 32 pages of notably small type, and not a commercial success. Bunnies & Burrows was 36 pages. The "Holmes Basic" D&D book and second-edition Villains & Vigilantes were each about 48 pages. You might consider what 1/3 to 1/2 you would cut from those.

You could look at David Cook's Crimefighters, which took up 22 pages in Dragon magazine back in March 1981. That includes a "cover" page, a 4-page scenario and a page of background on the pulp magazines of the 1930s. Layout is typical of TSR product of the time such as Gamma World and Top Secret.

Now, that game is inspired by such heroes as Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Avenger and the Green Hornet -- not the mishmash of sword-and-sorcery that informed D&D. There remains the question of whether, for that genre, it is quite a complete game.

In a D&D-type game, magic is very prominent, its practitioners being more common (especially as 'heroes') than in the old genre fiction.

About half the 128 pages of the AD&D 1st ed. Players Handbook are devoted to spells. Magic as a whole takes up only slightly less space (50 pp.) in the similarly long 1st ed. RuneQuest (which had a whole supplement devoted to the magic-granting Cults of Prax). In The Fantasy Trip, magic first got its own game; with overlapping combat rules stripped out, and details on magic items added, the Advanced Wizard book came to 40 pp (out of about 144 in the TFT trilogy). I think you would probably find at least a dozen or so pages of spells in any edition of Tunnels & Trolls.

What I think is really of the essence is to convey a "world" and the driving elements of adventure in it. The world of the "dungeon game" was key in both D&D and T&T. The latter offered much less in the way of cataloged monsters and magic items, and really paled next to its "big brother" in treatment of the world beyond the mazes, yet it managed to fire many imaginations to similar effect.

Nowadays, the old dungeon game is "overly familiar" to the point that it has actually become quite alien to many who have never really played it. Whatever it may mean in contemporary Dungeons & Dragons, it is nonetheless with the current edition (and possibly others) that a game essentially imitating D&D inevitably ends up competing.

'Supplementary' material can be arbitrarily not counted, but that can be very misleading. Supplement I went a long way toward defining what D&D would mean in all subsequent editions. The thief class, for instance, appeared therein, along with variable damage by weapon and the "additive" treatment of magic shields and armor, and much else.

Still, if one is going to convey the 'world' and the 'game' primarily through additional works such as scenarios, then the basic 'rule book' can be very brief. It takes but a little, for instance, to play through most T&T solos -- and less for gamebooks such as the "Lone Wolf" series.

 

[Ariosto]

The old Heritage USA "Paint and Play" model sets came with something like 8 pages. That included rules, tables, "stats" for monsters, scenario, and painting guide.

Those included Caverns of Doom, Crypt of the Sorcerer, Knights of King Arthur and Merlin the Wizard. (The last two, at least, went under the "Knights and Magick" name.)

I reckon one could find a number of similar efforts online, perhaps at freewargamerules.co.uk. The question, I think, is whether such a work sufficiently bridges the gap between "skirmish wargame" and "roleplaying game".

Especially in a context in which representatives of the 1970s scene are still available, it may be a question of how this latest thing justifies itself. It is not, for instance, as if one actually uses much of the 48 pages of Holmes Basic in any given session, or that the game is made too much more complicated by adding in more character levels, monsters, spells and treasures. (Some magics in particular change the strategic situation quite remarkably in high-level D&D, but that is a matter of emergent interactions in the game-world rather than of sheer 'mechanical' complication.)

There are some thousands of free RPGs listed at John H. Kim's site, and I imagine that at least a dozen could be found at the intersection of "rules light" or "short" and "traditional fantasy".

If nothing else, there is Risus by S. John Ross, which I think comes in at about 6 pages. That leaves you 18 pages to detail whatever is especially fantastic about your fantasy game.

Of course, one could attain even greater brevity by snipping the combat and saving-throw matrixes from OD&D and using them for everything. Instead of actually describing spells, monsters and magic items, one could just list names as inspirational examples.