What Lost, Abandoned or Short Lived TTRPG would you like to see get a re-issue and new support?

[Bagpuss]

• Leverage
• Street Fighter
• Weapons of the Gods

 

[Reynard]

• Street Fighter

I am surprised no one else ever tried again -- even with one of the other pillars like Mortal Combat.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Others have already mentioned using 2d10 instead of 1d20 in Masterbook. Some other changes are, off the top of my head:

• Dexterity split into Dexterity (hand-eye coordination) and Agility (full-body coordination). I think Spirit might have been renamed as well but I could be misremembering.

Reduced a bit of the tendency for Dexterity to be the god-stat.

• Instead of adding your bonus number to damage, you add your result points (margin of success). On one hand, this solves the glass ninja problem (TORG was kind of infamous for hard-to-hit characters getting absolutely splattered if actually hit, because the lucky roll needed translated to huge damage), but on the other hand it makes Agility a much stronger stat than Toughness (since more agility = less damage taken because both Unarmed/Melee combat and Dodge are based on that).

Not a perfect solution for the reasons you say (though I vaguely remember Toughness was more useful against area attacks), but still better than the TORG problem.

• Introduction of an advantage/disadvantage system. Both advantages and disadvantages are rated on a 1-4 scale, and they have to match one-for-one (so if you have a level 3 advantage you need to have a level 3 disadvantage, you can't use a 2 and a 1). Different races have different numbers of ads/disads they can take, so one race might have 3 1s and 2 2s and another might have one each of 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Never quite understood why the perfect symmetry thing was necessary.

• All sorts of FX abilities (magic, psionics, miracles, weird science) use the same system, with it being up to the GM to specify any limitations. There's also a system in the core book for creating FX, and as I recall it was entirely deterministic rather than subject to rolls the way the Aysle spell creation rules are.

Which was all to the good. Making it so a good roll on spell creation gave you superior punch with that spell forever (especially since that good roll could be pushed by Possibilities) was a really not thought-through design.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I am surprised no one else ever tried again -- even with one of the other pillars like Mortal Combat.

Probably prohibitive licensing conditions/costs. Licensed games are really far more fraught than most people realize.

 

[Staffan]

Not a perfect solution for the reasons you say (though I vaguely remember Toughness was more useful against area attacks), but still better than the TORG problem.

I do like the solution in TORG Eternity better, though you couldn't really transplant it as is without taking the whole system. In TORG Eternity, for one, Toughness isn't a stand-alone stat. It's Strength plus armor (there may be perks that affect it separately, but it's not a separate stat). And the way damage works is that a regular hit deals its base damage, a Good hit (margin 5+) deals +1d6 (exploding), and an Outstanding hit (margin 10+) deals +2d6 (exploding). So there isn't a 1:1 correspondence between defense and damage resistance like in Masterbook. The damage values are also calibrated so that for most foes, a normal hit will only do some Shock damage but a Good or Outstanding hit has a good chance of inflicting Wounds, which take out most minion-type opposition.

Which was all to the good. Making it so a good roll on spell creation gave you superior punch with that spell forever (especially since that good roll could be pushed by Possibilities) was a really not thought-through design.

It was definitely a step in the right direction, though I vaguely recall it had some issues. And of course, they didn't use it themselves – the spells in various Bloodshadows books had absolutely nothing to do with the FX creation system.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

• Street Fighter

I am surprised no one else ever tried again -- even with one of the other pillars like Mortal Combat.

I like a good martial arts campaign. You can really have a blast with them.

I briefly ran one in HERO that was centered around a martial arts combat competition in which weapons were allowed; killing was permitted but not required. I had a DMPC who was based on the blind master archetype (complete with staff), while one of the players ran an “inhumanly strong cheating brute” type (with glass & scrap metal embedded in his hand wraps). Some of the other players’ PCs were clearly modeled on particular martial arts movie heroes & villains as well as characters from Mortal Kombat, Tekken and similar games.

My character & the cheat opened the competition, and their combat was pretty cinematic. The DMPC bobbed, weaved and did all kinds of opportunistic strikes while the brute struggled to connect. Slowly but surely, the blind master whittled his gigantic foe down to size, avoiding every blow launched at him.

Until he didn’t.

It was just the one strike that landed, but it damn near killed the DMPC as it knocked him clean out of the combat ring.

 

[chuckdee]

I like a good martial arts campaign. You can really have a blast with them.

I briefly ran one in HERO that was centered around a martial arts combat competition in which weapons were allowed; killing was permitted but not required. I had a DMPC who was based on the blind master archetype (complete with staff), while one of the players ran an “inhumanly strong cheating brute” type (with glass & scrap metal embedded in his hand wraps). Some of the other players’ PCs were clearly modeled on particular martial arts movie heroes & villains as well as characters from Mortal Kombat, Tekken and similar games.

I ran one in GURPS based on Jademan comics. It was a blast!

 

[Thomas Shey]

I like a good martial arts campaign. You can really have a blast with them.

I briefly ran one in HERO that was centered around a martial arts combat competition in which weapons were allowed; killing was permitted but not required. I had a DMPC who was based on the blind master archetype (complete with staff), while one of the players ran an “inhumanly strong cheating brute” type (with glass & scrap metal embedded in his hand wraps). Some of the other players’ PCs were clearly modeled on particular martial arts movie heroes & villains as well as characters from Mortal Kombat, Tekken and similar games.

My character & the cheat opened the competition, and their combat was pretty cinematic. The DMPC bobbed, weaved and did all kinds of opportunistic strikes while the brute struggled to connect. Slowly but surely, the blind master whittled his gigantic foe down to size, avoiding every blow launched at him.

Until he didn’t.

It was just the one strike that landed, but it damn near killed the DMPC as it knocked him clean out of the combat ring.

Back in the day the late Scott Bennie ran a competition between supers (both hero and villain) in one of his Gestalts campaigns that was pretty much a Bloodsport situation in that pretty much anyone who had the capacity (and was a melee combatant at least in part) was invited. This included my character Athena. I was very fond of playing martial artists and fencers and the like in Hero because I always liked the degree of interactivity in it, so I knew both how to put together a character for martial combat and how to play them. I'd based a lot of Athena's melee capability around Find Weakness because she wasn't super-punchy.

Well, for the first part of the competition, I was not-casually, but regularly rolling up opponents one by one; she could take an occasional hit, I know how to minimize the ones I was taking, and the 4e era Find Weakness was one of those things that, given time, could get people's defenses down to the point she'd slowly beat them like a drum.

Then I hit the opponent with Lack of Weakness 10.

That was about that. She held up for a little while, but she was doing minimal damage, and a couple good solid hits did it.

 

[Birmy]

Shatterzone doesn't actually use MasterBook. It's a precursor to MasterBook, between TORG and MasterBook.

Consider me corrected!

 

[jdrakeh]

I’d love a cleaned up OSE style treatment for original D&D to have a revival.

Ask and ye shall receive!