Serious Zelda RPG designed influenced from Savage worlds and L5R

[Evenglare]

Greetings all ! I just stumbled upon this site and it looks fantastic !

So anyway down to business. I love Zelda, its just a huge part of my life , first game I ever played and it bonded me to my parents and introduced me to fantasy. Ive always toyed around with playing in Hyrule but no systems really "Felt Zelda" enough to me. Anyway I have been playing RPG's for around 12 years now , and for the past 4 or so years I have branched out and become a dabbler of many systems. The systems that I have really enjoyed so far were savage worlds and L5R . They were simple and fast to play.

So then I started about a month ago trying to develop my OWN zelda system which of course led me here. Ive been set on a roll and keep system akin to L5R as well as a sort of tiered success and failure system with raises or something similar. There was another Zelda RPG that was developed on 4chan and it looked okay but began to become complicated. I want to avoid complication.This is what I have come up with so far. I have Attributes and Virtues. The attributes are based on the 6 sages / symbols of ocarina of time, Light, Shadow, Spirit, Fire, Water , Forest which are governed by D6's. Virtues are based on the Triforce , Power, Wisdom, Courage which are governed by D4s.

So now I developed the basic mechanic of my system. I tried to avoid smaller submechanics and this is pretty much what I have come up with . First of all I wanted to differentiate my self with a system that does not require a static "To Hit" number. I know this adds a level of complexity of statistics of die rolls but in doing this I believe I have added more character involvement to the system. The easiest way to explain this is through basic melee combat. In this system mentioned before each of my attributes are linked with a triforce virtue. 2 attributes per virtue and each attribute loosely represents a physical or mental attribute.  Light and Fire are associated with Power, Shadow and Forest are associated with Courage, water and spirit associated with Wisdom (I may switch shadow and spirit) . So far for character generation each attribute starts at 2 and each virtue begins at 1.

So anyway a simple combat round would follow as such . A person would make a Fire attribute roll (fire being associated with physical power) add in a particular bonus for a sword (lets say you are attacking with a wooden sword which would add +1. In this case the roll and keep method becomes roll 2d6 keep 1 + 1, a sample roll may be 4 and 6  keeping the 6 , then adding 1 to give you a total of 7. Now lets say the defender is a dodongo. A physical attack would be against his courage virtue. The dodongo in this case has a 1 courage virtue + 1 (the +1 comes in from his thick scaly hide). The dodongo would then roll a d4 +1 , as a sample roll would be a 2+1 for a total of 3. So now my tiered success comes in. Every multiple of the defenders virtue roll will deal a half heart of damage, since the defender's roll was a 3, (success occurs on 3 , 6 , 9 etc) compare with the attackers roll of 7 , the attacker would deal a full heart of damage (half a heart for both 3 and 6, but not 9 since 7 is less than 9). Oh yes, I forgot to mention your Hearts (health) are calculated by simply adding up your virtues . Coincidentally a normal person would begin with 3 hearts like the games.

Assuming I described that clearly enough , you can see how this will involve characters much more making an active defense roll rather than rolling to hit a static number. Now other things that remain are things such as races, items, and actions you can perform as well as progression...

Races - There are many many races . Of course like in most if not all RPGs races will benefit in things such as attributes and perhaps a virtue and some sort of skill or action (which I will get to in a bit).

Items - As stated before Items will usually do something akin to adding to a virtue roll or an attribute roll for instance a Kokiri shield may be a +1 towards a courage roll. Of course specialized items will be there like the hookshot I just havnt decided how I want to use them.

Now I'm still toying with how I want to handle the actions taken. I have come up with 2 solutions. First is to have skills that would function similar to Dungeons and Dragons , grant some skill points at character generation then add them to the attribute roll as in legend of the 5 rings. Problem here is that skills add to the dicepool of the roll. My second option seems to be a simpler approach, Attributes would simply have actions associated with them. Such as Melee, Archery > Fire, Endurance > Forest, Magic attack > Light etc. I am leaning towards this approach . With the action attribute link I can give races specific action advantages instead of limiting the races to an additional attribute point or whatever. The hierarchy is obtained.

Hierarchy Of Solution 1 would follow as such

Level 1
-Virtue rolls (These rolls are most important since it governs keeping dice as well as virtue rolls for defending or whatever)

Level 2
-Attribute rolls (This adds to your dice pool)
-Skills (this adds to your dice pool)

As you can see this essentialy makes skills attributes which would yeild much higher results and become unbalanced in the long run (I believe)

Hierarchy Of Solution 2 would follow as such

Level 1
-Virtue rolls (These rolls are most important since it governs keeping dice as well as virtue rolls for defending or whatever)

Level 2
-Attribute rolls (This adds to your dice pool)

Level 3
-Actions (this adds to your attribute total instead of your dice pool)

Im almost set on number 2 because it needs no modifier and gives more creation flexibility . For instance a Gerudo may get a bonus as a race towards a particular skill AND a particular attribute , instead of number 2 granting extra dice in the dicepool which seems redundant if skills are treated as attributes although it occurs to me this is almost the same as type 2 instead of giving just a +1 to attribute rolls, you would get an extra die but as mentioned above this would skew the action results  to be much higher.

I have decided I would like to make character advancement in the form of skill trees using actions. I would have 2 skill trees for each virtue (mental and physical)  as well as a skill tree for each race (only 1) , and MAYBE a skill tree for each attribute. Doing this would bring enhanced character development by choosing different paths to take. Doing this would let you choose and specialize your style of character . (Much like Skyrim's perk system , or World of Warcrafts specilization system.

So far that's just about all I have come up with. Im sure it sounds complicated , I just wanted to vocalize my direction of thinking. Anyway , any thoughts or ideas?

[Josh Porter]

Well I'll be damned.  A Zelda game that sounds like Zelda and has HEARTS!  I like it.

However, you may want to double-check the sticky at the top of this section of the forums.  To make sure this topic doesn't get shut down, you're supposed to have a link to an external document (probably the manuscript you've got for your game so far, or even just your notes or whatever) so that we can read it and give you feedback.

I have to say that I'm very excited to read what you've got so far.  I also am a huge Zelda fan and I'd love to see a Zelda RPG that effectively captures the feel of the games.  Pip pip, sir!

[Evenglare]

Thanks for the tip. I did read the sticky but not very thoroughly anyway, I have begun working on a document... I guess you could call it a Beta document . Anyway, ill try and keep everyone updated. Thanks for the support !