Modern Military RPG

[PaulieRomanov]

I had an idea for a modern military RPG similar to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, I have an idea of how things would work setting-wise, but have no idea how to do mechanics. Any idea on a good system for a modern combat game would be appreciated.

I had in mind something like this....

There would be classes and factions.

The factions are as follows...

United States
Great Britain
Russian Federation
People's Republic of China
Terrorist Forces

The classes are as follows....

Rifleman
Gunner
Sniper
Demolitions
Medic
Guerilla
Grenadier
Assault

[Excalibur]

Ok, the questions I ask are:

Is this going to be a tabletop rpg like D&D, a video game, or a web-based click-to-advance game like Mafia Wars?
How fast do you want the game to feel?
Do you want your players rolling dice for every shot?
Do you want your players to narrate what they're doing then roll?
Is there luck involved at all?
Do you want a straight comparison mechanic? (IE: Combat skill vs Defense skill: the highest wins)
Do you want resource allocation? (A player puts a certain number of points from a pool into an action to succeed)
Do you plan on altering the setting to include magic or high technology or do you want to keep it to modern times entirely? (G.I. Joe: The Rise of C.O.B.R.A. would be on the cusp of modern and sci-fi I think and the boundary for modern warfare)
Do you have any statistics or skills envisioned?

[Ar Kayon]

Sounds like a game characters will die in very quickly.  Your game may benefit from removing:

1. Attributes
2. Non-combat skills
3. Deep character information

Despite the lethality, if you keep the system lean (yet still complex enough for tactical skirmishes), players shouldn't have a problem making new characters, you don't have to juice up health values, and you can keep the action frequency high. 

[Ar Kayon]

Whether you accept it or not is up to you, but over the next few days I'll try to devise a mechanics template to help you get the ball rolling.

[PaulieRomanov]

It will be tabletop like D&D or World of Darkness, I would love any help.

[Excalibur]

Is this going to be a tabletop rpg like D&D, a video game, or a web-based click-to-advance game like Mafia Wars?

It will be tabletop like D&D or World of Darkness, I would love any help.

How fast do you want the game to feel?
Quick, hit-or-miss action? Or a more laid-back narrative feel where the action takes a bit longer?

Do you want your players rolling dice for every shot? or Do you want your players to narrate what they're doing then roll? Do you want resource allocation? (A player puts a certain number of points from a pool into an action to succeed)
Staple for D&D, roll a d20 for every single shot, roll damage, move minis, etc. or does narration take a larger role? It could be there there is a pool of dice or points that a character puts towards an action if there are enough successes or the sum of the dice beats a target number, he succeeds.

Is there luck involved at all? Do you want a straight comparison mechanic? (IE: Combat skill vs Defense skill: the highest wins)
Luck can be represented by the dice, by a luck stat, by a card draw, or GM whimsy. This could also be skill-based: If the character has the skill, he succeeds if it meets or exceeds the opponents skill at ducking (this might be very dull)

Do you plan on altering the setting to include magic or high technology or do you want to keep it to modern times entirely?
This has a lot to do with setting, but the mechanics might be slightly different.

Do you have any statistics or skills envisioned?
You mentioned D&D and WoD. Have you thought of manipulating their systems for your game? At least to see if it's a genre that you and your gaming crew would be interested in pursuing?

Do you have a game guide for Call of Duty?
Sometimes looking at the original material in print form gives inspiration.

Have you looked at other modern RPGs
How about Twilight 13 or Advanced Recon (just to name a few)? There's also The Compendium of Modern Weapons which is designed by Palladium Books to work with many RPGs?

Do you plan on using miniatures for tactical display and movement?
This might help with the CoD:MW feel. This, however, opens another can of worms depending on how detailed you want this aspect to be. If you'd like this, try looking at the rules for D&D Miniatures, or Warhammer 40K.

OK, I've done some research on CoD and it's a pretty cool game. I did not know there was class creation or levels in it! This makes class creation pretty darned easy for a tabletop version if you want that CoD feel, use what's there.

So, basically, each character has these stats: Primary Weapon, Secondary Weapon, 4 Perks and Death Streak. There is also equipment, but these alone are your character's class.
Primary & Secondary Weapon are actually weapon proficiencies which tell you what weapons the character can use.
The Perks and Death Streak define the character.

You can find a LOT (and I mean A LOOOOT of info here: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 @ GameFAQs.com). You can also get a list of the achievements (the rewards for playing the game besides experience for your level) with a nice list here.

Converting the stuff to a fast game will be pretty straightforward. If you go to this video you can find more stats on the weapons such as accuracy, what they look like, etc. The FAQs available at gamefaqs.com will give you a pretty good idea about the numbers you'll need.

Now, based on everything I've seen so far, I think you could go a few ways with combat.

• Do it d20 style. Roll a d20 plus modifiers to beat another d20 plus modifiers roll.
  
• Do it d% (2d10 as percentile) basically the same as above.
  
• Do it as a success/fail using weapon rate of fire to see if a bullet connects (I like this one the best) and accuracy to determine the success/fail range (I will choose this as my mechanic below).
  

I am going to use d10s (since you mentioned WoD you should know what a d10 is and may have access to several).

I like dice pools. I like simple "success/fail" results. I like these two things because they can be fast and they can be fun though sometimes counting the successes and failures can be tedious with lots of dice. This one, however, should be fine since the number of dice thrown will be between 1 and 11. What I've done is looked over this FAQ and divided all the Rates of Fire by 100 to get the number of dice you throw in order to see if you hit.

Using the video as a guide, I've broken the Accuracy stat of a weapon into 4 categories: 100%, 75%, 50%, and 25%. Each of the weapons fall under these categories (at least the guns do). The success rates are as follows:

• 76% - 100%: 1 Success on a roll of 7, 8, or 9. 2 Successes on a roll of 0.
  
• 51% - 75%: 1 Success on a roll of 8 or 9. 2 Successes on a roll of 0.
  
• 26% - 50%: 1 Success on a roll of 9. 2 Successes on a roll of 0.
  
• Less than 26%: 2 Successes on a roll of 0.
  
• A roll of 2-6 is a miss.
  
• A roll of 1 is a Failure and will cancel 2 Successes. Thus a roll of 1 will cancel a 0 or any combination of 7-9 that adds up to 2 Successes.
  
• If, after removing Successes due to Failures, you still have Failures to account for, the character has critically failed and something bad happens such as the gun jamming or a flash-bang drops at the character's feet.
  

With this chart in mind, a character will throw a number of dice equal to the Rate of Fire for a weapon (divided by 100 if you use the ones from the FAQ, or if you pre-calculate the division just that number). Remove any success/fail combos.

Perks may increase or decrease this number.

Throwing grenades is a 1-die deal (unless there's a perk that may improve the accuracy of grenade throwing) and I would call it as a 8-9 = near the target (within the blast radius of the grenade though the full damage isn't done), 0 = dead on (full damage done), 1 = critical failure and it ends up at the character's feet (the one who threw it takes full damage), 2 = failure and the character (or an ally) is within the blast radius (partial damage). 3-7 is a miss entirely.

Each of the weapons has a damage (use the gamefaqs.com stats for the weapons) that can be applied directly to the hit points of the character getting hit. There are multipliers which indicate how many pellets or slugs get to the character (x6 and x8...only with shotguns though) and the damage is multiplied by this number depending upon the range of the target. Weapon ranges aren't really stated (that I could see) outside of close, short, medium, long, and extreme. I would have to say that you could use these abstract measures and since most of the weapons have a damage degradation (say, 40-20) you could cut the damage into 5 increments (40-35-30-25-20 for instance for C-S-M-L-E). With shotgun multipliers, I would say that each increment should eventually drop the multiplier from it's max at close range to x1 at extreme range. In the video, you can see the Range of a weapon. That indicates it's extreme range where you can do at least some damage. If you want to tie that into real-world meters, the math would be pretty simple. Find a 100% ranged weapon (the range bar is full) and find it's real-world range. Then, based on the % of the bar filled, calculate all other weapons based on that %.

Now, about the character himself. How do we create him?
Here's a shot:

• Select a Primary Weapon group. (encourage diversity)
  
• Select a Secondary Weapon group. (encourage diversity)
  
• Select 1 Perk for each of the 5 Perk categories from the list of Perks available for that category.
  
• Each character starts with 100 hitpoints.
  
• Each character starts with a mobility (speed) equal to the Mobility of their primary weapon.
  
• Each character starts at level 1 with 0 experience.
  

Mobility will mostly be helpful if miniatures are involved, but you can use it in an abstract way. It may hinder the number of successes since you can't move fast enough to hit the enemy, that sort of deal. If you go the abstract route, I would go ahead and introduce 1-2 automatic failures depending on the slowness of the character. There are Perks that can increase Mobility.

As a player gains levels, they unlock weapons and perks. You could set this up as well, forcing players to create new characters as they unlock those elements, or you could just provide all of the perks and weapons at the beginning then allow the players to upgrade once they reach the unlock level.

For advancement, it looks like there's a +5 experience gain per kill. You might want a different XP scale than that. I might suggest getting a cribbage board and keep track of kills/XP. Once the character reaches the end of a cribbage track, they gain a level and start the track over again (just a quick & easy thought there).

How's this so far?

[PaulieRomanov]

I was thinking somewhere in between fast action and narrativism. I want to use a system similar to WOD, which I am researching more about. As for other stuff, I am still thinking about it.

I don't want any magic or sci-fi. Keep it like COD.

Sorry if I haven't replied in so long. What do you think would work best in terms of a mechanics system?

I also have an idea for an RPG similar to Little Fears, but somewhat different, it can range from dark horror(the default setting) or action-adventure like the early Army Men games.

This game is about children who are transported into an alternate dimension via their dreams. Trapped in this dark dimension, the children have been transformed into the heroes, characters, and archetypes they admire(For example, a kid who loves G.I. Joe and Call of Duty may become a soldier in this dimension). However, they still retain the minds and personality of children, since they are children when you get to the core of it.

[Callan S.]

Will it/do you intend to have an endgame? Or if it's the traditional endless campaign, will there be an 'end session' so to speak, where a big conclusion for the night session is reached by mechanics (rather than punting it to a GM to arrange entirely by themselves)?

[Locke]

i made one and ill post the pdf... it played okay with no hp's.  Pretty simple and the firing and pinning i thought were very realistic.  You can take a look and compare notes.

[Locke]

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-7APna9ZhHEMjU4Njc1OWItNmYwMS00OWVlLTliZTMtZWFlNzQ2YTY4YTg1&hl=en

here it is.  during play testing the firing was quite "realistic"...  I've since come up with better mechanics for automatic weapons, which is hard to do because everyone knows it actually harder to hit something at long range with a longer burst.  Also the wounding system was okay, but not perfect.  Check it out.

[mjbauer]

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-7APna9ZhHEMjU4Njc1OWItNmYwMS00OWVlLTliZTMtZWFlNzQ2YTY4YTg1&hl=en

here it is.  during play testing the firing was quite "realistic"...  I've since come up with better mechanics for automatic weapons, which is hard to do because everyone knows it actually harder to hit something at long range with a longer burst.  Also the wounding system was okay, but not perfect.  Check it out.

Sorry, the page (or document) you have requested is not available.

Please check the address and try again.

Anyone Else Getting this?

[Locke]

...working on fixing it.  it works for me, but then i posted it. 

[Locke]

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-7APna9ZhHEMjU4Njc1OWItNmYwMS00OWVlLTliZTMtZWFlNzQ2YTY4YTg1&hl=en

try it now... it wasn't shared now anyone who has the link should be able to view it.

[PaulieRomanov]

I flipped through the PDF and I kind of like it. It's pretty good. Maybe we can work with factions and settings as well.

[Locke]

the goal was to achieve this

1. to make auto fire weapons make sense (no other system does)
2. provide sensible and balanced gear load outs that allow everyone to have a niche w/o having to keep track of weight (cause no one does anyway)
3. make a different wound system that fits better with super-present technology (HP's just don;t seem to work well here)
4. provide all modern weapon types w/o having 1000 weapons stats in the game. (the players choose what their weapons are)

I was going to finish this but the group I was making this for I stopped playing with.  It's now on the back burner for my age past game and the steam punk supplement.  What kinda of something did you have in mind?

I actually have a supplement to this that is based in a stargate like place that has entrances to a inter dimensional fantasy world.