Grapps

[Vladius]

Hi, I'm new here.

While I find the GNS system and the whole concept of "indie roleplaying" somewhat pretentious, I'm working on a fairly complex game and I don't want to be a hypocrite.

It's called Grapps. The setting is an alternate universe where magic caused a small, third power during the Civil War to secede (or "double secede") from the Confederates, and eventually annex their territory. This small place, originally called Lorrinthine County, grew into its own country that the Union could no longer keep under control, and so left alone to grow and expand. Magic spilled out into the world, along with elves and other nasty beasties from fantasy stories. The most basal magic, or "Soul Magic," developed as a result of people telling various stories, rumors, and superstitions to each other until they became true. With the advent of a large amount of science fiction stories, time travel was thrown into the mix with Space Marines and a hostile insectoid alien race called the Walkers.
It's basically what would happen if you threw Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Georgia, and Florida into a blender with the sum of all science fiction, fantasy, westerns, and folklore. Lots of weird interactions resulted. Sasquatches are the descendants of the Biblical Cain and have a mix of ecclesiastical Christian fervor, solemn regret, and a "redneck" mentality. Dark Elves have been adopted into many remaining Native American tribes, and roving bands of down-to-earth mutant villagers have risen up from the bayous and dubbed themselves "Tar People."

The name of the game comes from the specialized grapes, or "Grapps" that developed as a result of magic entering Earth at a vineyard. These grapes have been bred or evolved into every possible function, including but not limited to healing wounds, altering space-time, emitting pheremones, producing chemical explosions, and growing fur. These are the somewhat collectible items of the game, and they function much the same as you would think that potions might in another more generic fantasy game.

The combination of grapes, time travel, radiation, magic, fried food, etc. resulted in essentially everybody becoming either a mutant, a folk hero, or both. The player characters all have a "Folk Power," which is an original ability somewhat like a superhero power, or like a superstitious infinitive. For example, a basic one might be heat vision. A more complex one with a drawback would be immortality at the expense of having to "recharge" by sleeping for excessive amounts of time. Abraham Lincoln's "could not tell a lie," in this universe, is taken a bit further, and he has the loose ability to change something to the truth simply by stating it (though he didn't know it at the time.) As the players interact with each other, these powers will lead to a greater sense of individuality, and a handy tool for solving puzzles.

All of the player characters are some kind of folk hero, with their own legends and stories to tell. The GM is labeled the "Storyteller," and he or she is recanting the details of the party's adventures together in retrospective, which provides justification for changing some of the rules or rolls on the fly, as nobody has a perfect memory.

While Grapps is nothing groundbreaking, and relies on some of the standard D&D, fantasy, and sci fi tropes, I hope it's at least somewhat original.

What I need right now is advice on the rules, suggestions for monsters to fight, and lots of artwork. As of right now, I'm almost finished.

If you need more details on the actual mechanics of the game, I'll fill you in. For right now, I think this will suffice:

Everything is done with a d20, and many "modifiers" are based on doubling and halving both full rolls and bonuses. The abilities, or "Traits," follow the somewhat satirical acronym of ACQSHIOkNS (blatant misspelling of actions), or Awesome, Character, Quickness, Skills, Haughtiness, Ingenuity, Organization, kNowledge (needed a word that started with N,) and Strength. When rolling for anything you will add your relevant Trait to the roll. The bonus is lessened with circumstances. For example, if you are making a roll for something involving a place you have never been before, you halve your kNowledge bonus if the item you are studying there is similar to something you know about, and you halve the roll if you have never seen anything like it.

If you fail a roll, you can "appeal" it to another Trait if there is solid justification for it. For example, if you would automatically hit with a weapon, you can appeal a Skills roll to Strength. Awesome is a Trait that is only used as an appeal with no bonus, with a few exceptions, and when you succeed, you do something really cool, basically.
You can only appeal a roll if the failed roll is not a multiple of the Trait you are appealing to. One of the incentives for increasing your Traits is that multiples of it will appear less often in the numbers 1-20 as it is increased, allowing you to appeal it more often.

There is strictly no "leveling up," and Traits are increased somewhat like in the computer game Morrowind, after repeated or extraordinary use.

Experience points are called DP, or Development Points, and are not racked up in the thousands, but used to purchase different Quirks (think like Fallout's perks), your job status and income, and basically anything else that you want to give your character provided you can pay for it.

There are also systems for resolving precise tasks, large scale battles with lots of units, and loads of other stuff I have, but I won't go into it here.

So, again, what I need right now is advice on the rules, suggestions for monsters to fight, and artwork.
Thanks!

[7VII7]

This seems to be a really awesome concept, is the setting just limited to to the south (that's how I read it but I might be wrong) if so it seems sort of limited. Still it's refreshing to see something that covers American Mythology without falling into sterortypical Native American Mythology.

As for monsters, you've already got Bigfeet covered but there's plenty of more cryptids that could be covered such as the Mothman, Jersey Devil, and maybe having the Skunk Ape be a subrace of Bigfeet, here's a list of cryptid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptids you could also have characters from american literature like wizard of oz, or mark twain and stuff like that. Also not all monsters have to be monstrous, you could have things like MIB & Area 51 play a big part in things. You could also have a race of crab-people out for revenge for their fallen comrades! Oh, and you definitely need a giant cat fish monster in every lake, river, and pond. And ghosts, lots and lots of ghosts.

[Vladius]

That's what I like to hear.

The setting is just limited to the South at this point. The borders between Lorrinthine and the U.S. are really strictly enforced, because of orbital shields, magic, the fear of people smuggling grapes out of the country, etc. The U.S. at this point isn't even called the United States anymore, because states were abolished after all the stigma of the word "secession." It's now called United America, and it runs similar to how European nations do today, for good and for bad. (Mostly bad, in my opinion.) Maybe there will be an expansion or something. The stuff from the North will still make appearances, though, because there was a lot of immigration to Lorrinthine once it became a complete state.

What I'm working on as of this second is the various playable races.

There are Humans, obviously, who start out with more DP and earn it faster. Most people will hopefully choose human out of practicality, because there is no penalty for starting out that way and there's very little complexity.

There's sasquatches, and their colder, more calculating brethren, the Yeti, who are a subrace. I guess I'll add "Skunk Ape" as a second subrace. (The only things I know about the Skunk Ape come from the first Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator game.)

There's elves, which have the subraces (for simplicity) of Tree Elves (like Santa's and the Keebler elves) and Dwarves, Dark Elves, Wood Elves (regular ones, or ones with antlers and hooves the way they were meant to be originally), and Orcs. Each of these start out with a particular School of magic, which I won't explain now, but I think I did magic pretty good.

There's robots... yeah... robots... (I haven't worked out all the mechanics for them yet)

There's aliens, which come in two main varieties: Roswell Grays, who are really smart, and Walkers, who are insect-like, really stealthy, and really cool. (Lots of rayguns and stuff.)

There's the People of Tar who come from the swamps and have tons of random mutations, who I haven't developed in full just yet.

Then there's going to be some kind of Lizard-man race with a somewhat Oriental culture with ninjas and stuff.

[MacLeod]

Its been a while since a game's setting blew my mind... I think, yeah, it was World of Synnibar the made my brain go kersplooey last.
That said, it sounds like an amazing amount of fun.

You mentioned that the game is fairly complex... Are you actually referring to the game mechanics, or the setting? If its the mechanics, try not to circle the drain like Synnibar, okay? =)

The ACQSHIOkNS thing looks sort of massive. How many other things do you intend on filling each character sheet with? Obviously the folk power, which I assume is sort of open to suggestion as opposed to heavily structured in its creation? Perks, too, right? And perhaps even a magic skill.
I'm wondering how complex each one of these things will be.

[Vladius]

I'm referring to the game mechanics.

It's not too bad once you get into it. Character creation takes about 1/5 of the time it does for 3.5 D&D, and about 1/20 of the time it does for 4th edition...

There's one page for your character, and then another page for magic if you have it.

The character sheet has your name, your species, your class, how many times you've "Transcended" (I won't go into it now), your "Limiter" (something difficult to get around to make the game interesting, Crippled, addicted to drugs, boring, radioactive and gives people cancer, etc.), your Folk Power and the game mechanics for how it works, your Traits, your Total Average (of Traits, used for planting grapes and Transcending), your Damage Potential Average (of Strength and Character, how much damage you can take before becoming incapacitated), your Movement Average (of Quickness and Strength, how many squares you can move), your Massive Combat Average (of a bunch of things, used for battles with armies in them or when it would become cumbersome to fight a bajillion people with the regular rules), your Inventory, which has the subsection of "Tools" (things that you always receive the full Skills bonus for, or weapons of choice), Quirks (which are divided into ones you can get at character creation, like being a werewolf, your job status, like "Middle Income," Basic ones that are constant effects, Action/Battle ones that you can use as powers to expend, Weapon/Combat ones that enhance your abilities in combat, and Axis ones that you can get if you're a certain way on the Good/Evil Legendary/Practical axis), your position on the Good/Evil Legendary/Practical axis (Legendary and Practical are better in this setting than Chaotic and Lawful; Legendary people perform larger feats and epic stuff, but are more likely to be clumsy and to fumble easier things, while Practical people make the world work through repetitive and labored actions and shy away from doing things that would make circumstances harder in the future.), and lastly, your position on the Range system (you roll inside a certain "range" of numbers, say 8-14, depending on your Skills, Quickness, the armor of the target, etc. if you want to snipe someone from a distance or lockpick something or do something else really precise.)

I suppose it's somewhat complex, but I've gotten this far, I'm almost done, and I don't feel like simplifying it.

Yes, the Folk Power is completely open ended as long as the GM agrees. You can do anything you want, but it will usually have some kind of interesting restriction on it. (You can turn into a gun but not bullets, you can use heat vision but it requires prolonged concentration, you can talk to animals but you don't know what you're saying, etc.)

If you give me your email address, I can send you the sheets, the logo, the rules, or anything you like. (I am no spammer, sorry if I sound suspicious.)

[MacLeod]

It sounds like to me that with the exception of the perks that most of the complexity is in making choices... but Perks will end up like 3.5's feats in muddling up the gameplay. That said, I have playing 3.5 for a very long time and I don't think it is nearly as complex as most people tend to think.

I think the real challenge is to make sure that each Perk can be applied quickly and easily without having to do some complex/long math mid-play just to figure out what your guy can do as a werewolf.

Also, your 20% versus 5% ratios up there indicates that you think 4e takes longer to generate characters...? Are you sure about that?

[Vladius]

Yes, I am sure. It took me and two buddies upwards of three hours just to flip through the book enough times to see all of the stuff we could get as a Dragonborn Warlock (me,) a Dwarf Fighter, and a Human Cleric. I suppose it could've gone faster if we had done it before, but as it was it took forever just figuring out all the stuff.

The Quirks are somewhat easy to apply, and you won't have very many of them. (Being a Werewolf is really expensive on your DP. Vampires too.)

As you get more familiar with your character, you'll just remember the various effects that apply. Most of them are simple math, like adding +2 or subtracting -1, or doubling or halving something. Other ones are something like "such-and-such rule doesn't apply to you" or "you get Critical Hits on 20s."

If you don't think 3.5 is very complex, then Grapps shouldn't be a problem. At least I think so. (I can't tell because I'm the one who wrote all of it, so I naturally have it stored in my noggin.)