Re: FATUM- a roleplay in epic scenarios

[Jarx]

It seems like it's unreadable so I try again.
Fatum is inspired by books like, the illiad, paradise lost and book of revelations.
It takes place in Sirathaír fifty years after a "Rain of fire" where big comets from the sky falled down to the earth. That year, only days after, an alliance between all the kingdoms in Sirethaír was made called the black star alliance.
I have thought up a big plot to where everything will go in the end of the first edition(If I ever finish it) but I would like some inspirations and advice to the rules, I have a pretty fast system that helps in quick combats and doesn't require you to know 1000s of skills to suck anyway. I call the system Demon 4, so those of you who have at least half a brain can see that I use D4s.
The main rules to do things are like follows: every charachter have 5 basic skills from 1-4. If you have 4 on one that means when you want do do something, like push away a big stone, you roll 4 d4s and try to come over a certain dificulty from 2-16, whereas 16 is nearly impossible.
The 5 basic skills are:

Physique how strong and fast you are, more or less how muscular you are.

Agility/Movement literary how agile you are, is good when you want to dodge attacks and something like that.

Instinct you're 6th sense, allowes you to feel when somethings wrong and dodge an arrow if you're lucky.

Discipline could by many RPG be called will, though discipline is says more than will. If you are fataly wounded you might want to roll discipline to see if can still move.

Prescense Much like Instinct but with the other senses such as sight, hearing, semlling and touch.

Thats the basic skills, then theres the charachter skills, these cive you bonuses or minuses on rolls to one of the basic skills. It could be such as Blind (ChS), that gives your presence skill 0 when trying to see something but gives bonus on Instinct, hearing, smelling and touch.

Tell me what you think of it or give some advice of improvements.

[TonyLB]

I have thought up a big plot to where everything will go in the end of the first edition

That seems a strange thing to do.  Won't the heroes (i.e. the player-characters) create the plot as they play?

Tell me what you think of it or give some advice of improvements.

Well, with 4d4 you're not going to have very much randomness in results:  Not a lot of whiffs, but not a lot of wild successes either.  Is that in keeping with your goals of a heroic epic?  I honestly don't know, because I don't have a good handle on your goals yet.  Can you express your goals a bit more specifically than "Like the Illiad"?

Also ... no offense, but ... d4s?  Non-roleplayers can scrounge up 4d6 from old board games, but if you require d4s then the only people who can play your game "off-the-shelf" will be pre-existing roleplayers.  Why limit your market that way?  Wouldn't rolling 4d6 be roughly the same in terms of rules?

[Jarx]

OK, the thing of why I'm using d4s is that it's easy to get low results, I mean a 3 can be good but 4 is 0.25 more higher. And if you think it sucks with d4s then all you got to do is remodel the mechanics to d6s. And the way to reach heroic stuff is that it should be hard to do hard stuff and easy to do easy stuff! So even if you have a one in Physique, you can still do(with a little luck!) a fourth of it! 25% is quite good and those with a 4 in physique can get his ass kicked by a guy who has 1 in Phy. though its highly unlikly. Thats where the charachter skills come in as I mentioned it, if the the one with a 4 in Phy. has the ChS. for example: strong as Hercules, he gets a +4 in physique every time he uses strength.
So if he rolls and gets 1,1,1,1, he still has bonus by 4 which makes it 8. And that also allows him to what is nearly impossible that with difficulty 16, though he must have som pretty good luck with that roll.

And the big plot is just something that changes the world, like the alliance might fall into pieaces and a war starts between the whole world. Did I mention theres magic as powerfull as nukes?

[Jarx]

I dont really have an answer to what I mean with the Illiad, I was inspired much of how they talk and the interaction between the gods. Actually i've been inspired by many things so the whole thing might end up as a hodgepodge between books, movies and games if i fail. The heroes as you called them, I call them champions, a better ring to it.
And I don't mean to limit my market, but can't people buy d4s where they buy the game? Americans...

[Jarx]

I'm also meaning to have very high technology in the game, though it's just called alchemy and thechnology is basicly powerfull spirits locked into things like armours and weaponry. What I mean with epic is a massive story and actions in it. The battle scenes should be huge, in what would be like a boss fight, therefore I use the d4s, cause you should never really be able to own the shit out of your opponents, sure it might be fun with normal opponents but it should be easy to lose a round and then have to fight harder to get on top of the battle. So with demon4 the whole thing gets a little more dramatic and exciting. I mentioned magic in my answer to your post, Tony and as Fatum is latin for doom and also gloom, it has a high cost, your very own lifeforce. The lifeforce decreases when you're using magic(if the charachter can, it's not like saying a couple of words) but also when you're damaged, so when you're out of lifeforce, you're dead. The lifeforce decreased by combat comes back in time, but to retrieve lifeforce you used for magic you must take it from somewhere else. So most mages ends up being like something like a vampire, killing others for their own cause.

[joepub]

The battle scenes should be huge, in what would be like a boss fight, therefore I use the d4s, cause you should never really be able to own the shit out of your opponents, sure it might be fun with normal opponents but it should be easy to lose a round and then have to fight harder to get on top of the battle. So with demon4 the whole thing gets a little more dramatic and exciting.

I don't actually see the correllation.

I mentioned magic in my answer to your post, Tony and as Fatum is latin for doom and also gloom, it has a high cost, your very own lifeforce. The lifeforce decreases when you're using magic(if the charachter can, it's not like saying a couple of words) but also when you're damaged, so when you're out of lifeforce, you're dead. The lifeforce decreased by combat comes back in time, but to retrieve lifeforce you used for magic you must take it from somewhere else. So most mages ends up being like something like a vampire, killing others for their own cause.

Have you ever played the card game Final Twilight, by Neo Productions?

You might want to, to see a mechanic very similar to this. Characters get 2 resources, Money and Mana. The game is a CCG somewhat similar to Magic:tG, except that it has locations-based combat and player-character avatars.

The p-c gets a certain amount of starting money (and various cards and locations generate more during play), and a certain amount of mana (and various cards and locations generate more during play). Some things (police, equipment, etc) cost a lot of money. Some things (vampires, spells, etc) cost a lot of mana.

The thing is, money is typically easier to generate, and mana is your HP for your avatar as well.

Fatum is inspired by books like, the illiad, paradise lost and book of revelations.
It takes place in Sirathaír fifty years after a "Rain of fire" where big comets from the sky falled down to the earth. That year, only days after, an alliance between all the kingdoms in Sirethaír was made called the black star alliance.
I have thought up a big plot to where everything will go in the end of the first edition(If I ever finish it)

I want to know how this works. If you have heroic characters doing huge and epic things in the world, and making huge decisions and changing things... then how will a static, canned plot stay in tact through the many ways they shake the world? Also, how will the plot MEAN SOMETHING to the actual characters?

[Jarx]

The so called big plan is, how to say it, decided by a higher plane, or actually lower. It has the effect over the world in that it for example starts a sorta worldwar 3000:the evil is back!(A cheesy movie title, made up by me, feel free to use it) So that plot only decides what the world is like after the book, after the book the alliance shatters and a big war starts, on purpose by thirteen men on high places in every kingdom and empire, twelve of these will become after the war, the 12 judges having an allmighty rule over the whole Sirethaír. The champions can't change what has already been decided by the stars, or their actions might lead to that. The big plot only tells how the world looks like after the book, in the next edition, as the world should evolve, not remain in the same state every time, as that would be boring.
But if the GM thinks the big plot stinks he/she don't need to care of it, it's just tips to adventures.

[Jarx]

I havent played final twilight, but while the mana in that CCG can come back to the PC, In Fatum, the lifeforce you sacrifice for magic is lost for ever, I said the player could take from others, that means like sucking out peoples souls. And there also is a corruption meter, when you use powers, without really taking the costs You go down a step in coruption and gets more powerhungry, awaking an addiction for lifeforce.

[Noclue]

So is the game about achieving your goals but risking corruption? What do the non-mages do in your game? How does the society view the mages. If I knew that someone with magical power was likely to turn into a vampire and suck my soul I'd be out burning witches at the stake. Is there a mad witch hunt going on? I see alot about the story, but I'm not sure how the players and their characters fit in yet.

James

[slavemind]

A point you have to think of is character improvement- if there are only four levels you can improve only three times - thats it.

Furthermore some math:
On a scale from 1 to 16 a bonus (or malus) has a huge impact... for example a roll of 10 with 4d4 is average - a bonus of 4 makes it 14 - close to impossible... to get an 12 with 3d4 is hard, but 1/4*1/4+1/4=1/64=~ 1,5% - too easy to do the nearly impossible for me (especially to nuke a city with my mind)

[Jarx]

OK, I shall first answer Noclue(Or James if you prefer that), there is not much of a witch hunt, since the ability to use magic in that way is really rare, it has existed but much after the rain of fire it's been forgotten and those who can are widely accepted by the kings and dukes as they are powerfull as weapons and therefore give them poor people to feed on, and you don't have to take souls from humans, it can be from rats, snakes, well every other animal though it's not as tasty.
OK now to Slaveminds queston or critique, you can't raise your basic skills, only raise or get more charachter skills, the basic skills are unimprovable. On to how easy it is to nuke a city, you can't do that with your basic skills, you have a wisdom thingy that's originally 3d4s unless you have ChS like "stupid as a donkey" you hit 3d4s and get a bonus of your knowledge in magic and a minus in corruption, so if your far from corrupted it'll be harder to do evil magic.
Corruption is also how well you can stand against proposals of work where it involves doing really unethical things like slaughter an entire village, behead babies and throw women to the crocodiles.
And what I mean with nearly impossible is liftin a stone the size of a truck with 4 times your weight.
So if your doing something much harder, the dificulty can be like 20. that means you gotta have 4d4s on 4 with a bonus +4, sounds more impossible to me, and you should be able to do impossible stuff, that makes your champion more heroic.

[Jarx]

Before you ask what i mean with tasty souls, I mean that you get more lifeforce with mure pure souls, so the higher corruption, the more lifeforce you get from eating it. So in corruption, 0 is really corrupt, you're a power addict that needs a steady diet of souls and needs more and more, on the plus side you have it easier to use powerfull magics.
There are, however, ways to go round the whole souleater thing, by using an external powerforce such as spiritgems or guardian spirits that is also used in alchemy, the whole alchemy thing is something like the demonbinding in Sorcerer, I know I stole some ideas, but not the entire concept!
Furthermore i can adress a new book of inspiration, Beowulf, the language and the setting where much like I thought for Fatum.

[Jarx]

I forgot to answer the question of James where he asked what non-mages do, well, since it really doesn't exist classes, a very good warrior could also be a good mage, depending on how high his knowlegde is on that type of magic. So mostly you just need to find magic grimoires that helps you do that magic. The just part is mostly visit longdead cultures inhabited by vicious beasts, strengthend by the magic in the earth. This is where alchemists come in, if you hav a sword or armour where a guardian spirit is binded by alchemy, you have a better chance since you don't get corruption. There is also summoning of high spirits that can loan you power for a cost of something, mostly lifeforce since they don't need treasures.

[Jarx]

I think I've changed my mind about using d4s, Tony, you're right, I'll use d6s instead, but now you have the basicskills from one to six and the difficult level is from 3-36, does that sound harder?

[Jarx]

Inspired by several of the articles here on the Forge I've decided to make a more deep construction of Fatum with some of the guidelines.
So the concept is: "The players are champions chosen by the stars in a world on the edge of apocalypse"
the synopsis then goes as follows: "It has been 500 years after the catastrophe, the world is still reagaining the power and knowledge that has been lost. The kingdoms have been striving for more power from the others, evidently leading to a war but has been stopped by the sword alliance, an alliance where warriors are wares between the nations to protect others from the beasts that has awakened in the deserted lands."
That is pretty much it.
I'm still keeping the fortune-based system i've mentioned in earlier posts, so tell what you think.