Just a note.

The Omnificent Role-playing System ™(ORS™) rule set is now available for download.  Currently only the ORS Standard Rules™ is up on the site, but as my web designer gets around to it all the 4 core books was be available for free to download.

So join the ORS™ community and help create the next generation role-playing game.  ORS™ will only happen if the community at large make it happen.

Kent Krumvieda
www.dreamborn.com

I'd had something of a look, and wondered if you had a particular topic of discussion in mind.

What I'm seeing in my brief scan is a fairy old-school set of rules for playing fantasy RPGs, with the nice addition of the ability to run on PC and phone. The rulebook reminded me an awful lot of AD&D 1st ed, with its equipment lists and race descriptions.

I quite liked the idea of the event-based progression of time, although I think there may be flaws with it. Also, the predefined action templates appealed, but mainly because I'm a programmer and I find myself wanting this if I play computer games.

You seem pretty geeared up to earning from this -- that's cool. Have you thought much about your competition? (eg Battlegrounds) Do you have a USP that'll differentiate you from these direct competitor, and from related competition like classic tabletop FRPGs, and from computer RPGs?

the underlying philosophy of ORS™ is a role-playing system that is unlimited in creative power. To accomplish this ORS™ was designed with realism and playability as the two main guiding principles. ORS™ breaks the mold in most role-playing systems in eliminating predefined classes/professions, and artificial level definitions. It introduces a level-less system that is skill based with character advancement based on skill usage.

Hello SteveCooper

My goal is to turn this into a community project. I can't do it all on my own.  If this ever gets done it must be a community project.  I personally don't care if I earn a dime.  I would love to play ORS in it's full glory.

If you are a computer programmer, consider all the rules (4 books) as a requirments specification.  Hopefully the rest will be up soon. 

In my opinion it is not old-school.  Read some more.  The standard rules were written to be familar looking.  The key strength are under the hood, but you will only see that after you read all the other books.

Kent Krumvieda
www.dreamborn.com

SteveCooper wrote:
What I'm seeing in my brief scan is a fairy old-school set of rules for playing fantasy RPGs, with the nice addition of the ability to run on PC and phone. The rulebook reminded me an awful lot of AD&D 1st ed, with its equipment lists and race descriptions. 

dreamborn wrote: In my opinion it is not old-school.  Read some more.

The party consists of archetypal Thief, Woodsman, Priest, Mage and Cavalier. The GM acting in his role as a storyteller describes what the characters are experiencing. [...] the party is exploring an old dungeon below a haunted castle. The party most recently traveled down a long 10-foot wide corridor and is now standing in and around a door. The Thief hands his lantern to the Priest and then selects Standard Door Procedure from his personalized action list. The Woodsman moves 20 feet back down the corridor and selects has guard template. The rest of the party selects their guard template and adjust their character‘s facing using their game map, while the thief does his thing.

It's been a while, but I can't think of any salient differences between this and the example of play from the AD&D1e GM's handbook. I've highlighted some of the phrases that for me trigger that sense of being old-school gaming. The kind of game you are asking people to have is the very first kind of role-playing there was..

Where you have tried to break away from D&D in the sense of rules -- for example, by removing fixed character classes -- you've fallen straight back in by talking about characters as thief, mage, priest, ranger, and cavalier. The big change from D&D - replacing levels with skills that advance by use -- is basically RuneQuest circa 1978...

What's not clear to me is who the target audience of this game is, or your larger design goals, or the problem you are trying to solve. Are you trying to convert D&D players to a slightly better form of dungeonbash? Do you want to make your fortune on the iTunes App Store? Are you trying to give computer RPG players a taste of tabletop? A clearer sense of what you're aiming for and what kind of feedback you are looking for would help greatly.

I am trying to design a game that models life, learning and behavior, but hides all the mechanics and allows the GM and players to create a consistent story/adventure.  The type of adventure the ORS can handle is up to the GM.  ORS is a flexible as the GM needs.  As I mentioned before I don't care if I make a dime.  I am trying to create a system that allows players and GM to create ANY type of game that allows them virtually unlimited freedom to create and act within the GM's world.  This, in my opinion, is only possible if you have a complex rules engine BUT those rules have to be handled quickly and consistently by the computer.  How it handles the rules can be changed/modified by the GM, after all he is in control.

I've thought that way myself, too. I found myself wanting to design systems as an engineering problem: where the idea is to start with a set of scenarios and then use those scenarios as 'acceptance tests.' for instance;

  * Scenario 1: Open field. Two men with assault rifles. 500 yards away, two guys with spears. Desired outcome: assault rifles win 98% of the time.
 
  * Scenario 2: Open field. Achilles, armed, vs an unarmed leperous child. Achilles wins 100%
 
  * Scenario 3: Open field. Twins. Twin 1 wins 50% of the time.

Enough scenarios and we have a 'fitness function' which gives us the right kinds of expectations.
Then (and this is the tricky bit) get the computer to generate the system itself - say, by using a genetic algorithm. The end result is a computer program which is your system.

Thanks for the feedback.  Where possible I have incorporated your comments into the four rulesets.  The updated rules will be uploaded on or a bit after April 1st.

Kent Krumvieda
www.dreamborn.com

2 problems I've experienced in games where use and are the main ways of gaining skills and improving stats...
(1) we were playing a game with no levels or classes where no player knew any rules or his characters stats. all he had was a description and knew when he wanted to do something he'd roll 3D6. the gm would secretly increase our abilities as time went on based on what we did. and then one day we finally had some rest without absolutely nothing to do. the GM goes. what do you want to do with your time? some players ask what are our options. Anything you want! this is the 'between adventures' time where you can train to improve whatever area you wish. one power gaming player immediately set to teaching himself powerful martial arts techniques in his striving to beat up everything in combat. I was umming and ahhing about what to do. I didn't know who my character was, his strengths and weaknesses, the nature of the world was still a puzzle to everyone. all I had was my personality for the character, and he didn't come across as seasoned warrior. so i decided to do what I thought was good for an average human with no labels on him. I went out jogging. stating that I will start off slow and slowly build up my jogging pace and keep going until I can't continue. this had an entirely unexpected result. i became the super runner. I eventually exceeded all physical running ability. my speed at running hadn't increased much but my endurance was greater than any gods and the story moved on to a point where I had to keep jogging non stop to hold reality together. it was like I became the embodiment of jogging and infinite stamina.
(2) The other I think was Runequest. my memory is a permanent haze. while the Gm tried hard to run a scenario and get the players to follow the adventure. the players usually only had their characters do something in a skill they wanted to get better at. and so instead of playing a RPG we were 100% focussed on trying to do only those things that increased the skills we wanted. to me that aspect of the game crippled the whole point of gaming.

hopefully these situations wont come up for other gaming groups, and while I really like and agree with the idea of practising to gain skills and stats, I could never implemented it in any of my games. I think Rolemaster and its 500 companions had rules for neglecting stats and skills. or perhaps some other game I saw. where if during the entire adventure you didn't utilise a particular stat or skill it would lose a point or you had to do a roll such as a self discipline based resistance roll to avoid losing the point.

reminiscent Jan

Jan writes 2 problems I've experienced in games where use and are the main ways of gaining skills and improving stats...
(1) we were playing a game with no levels or classes where no player knew any rules or his characters stats. all he had was a description and knew when he wanted to do something he'd roll 3D6.

Jan also writes, “The nature of the world was a puzzle… Jan’s character took up jogging and became the embodiment of jogging and endurance.”

Jan also writes, “The other I think was Runequest. my memory is a permanent haze. while the Gm tried hard to run a scenario and get the players to follow the adventure. the players usually only had their characters do something in a skill they wanted to get better at. and so instead of playing a RPG we were 100% focussed on trying to do only those things that increased the skills we wanted. to me that aspect of the game crippled the whole point of gaming.”

ssem wrote:
the players usually only had their characters do something in a skill they wanted to get better at. and so instead of playing a RPG we were 100% focussed on trying to do only those things that increased the skills we wanted.

Steve Cooper writes, Call of Cthulhu gave you a tick in a box when you passed a skill check, and you rolled up at the end of the adventure. Consequently, you got maximum benefit by maximising the number of different skills you use in an adventure. There was always a temptation to try to fast-talk strangers or randomly read an ancient Hebrew scroll as the game continued...

Some computer RPGs work the same. I remember playing Oblivion, in which you gained athletics skill for jumping; so the natural way to move around the landscape is to pogo back and forth for miles. If you weren't leaping, you were losing.

--- Part the First

dreamborn wrote: Yes it could be abused BUT I ask you, do you want the Roleplaying System try to control this or is this a GM responsibility?   Remember ORS doesn't eliminate the GM, it just makes his job easier.

Personally, as a GM, I would never design such an adventure, I would be bored to tears.  You might as well play a computer game, BUT that is a personal choice and ORS does not force my tastes in game play on others.

Steve Cooper writes,[player] I'll try to pick up whatever I can from the experienced sailors on the journey.

  [gm] that sounds reasonable. You make friends with the first mate, Stubb. He explains how the rigging works and lets you know how to avoid being hurt.You get used to the constantly-rolling decks and overcome your initial seasickness.

  [player] Do I get anything on my character sheet?

  [gm] write down 'apprentice sailor'

Steve Cooper writes, “I'm starting to realise what it is that's been bugging me about the system. What you seem to be doing is building a very fine-grained mathematical model ; the z-scores, action templates, and event modelling are a way to build a simulation. However, a simulation is not a game”

Steve Cooper writes, “Now, the way I understand ORS, it's not going to be easy for a GM to use it to run a game of his own design. If I decide to write a magic system, I think I'm going to have to also write it as a computer program. And that limits the imagination of my players to algorithmic, systematic, formal thinking, which isn't something I want to see in my magic system.”

Ari Black writes, “I'm working on an RPG system with a similar goal to yours; essentially, one system to rule them all. I'm also using a skill based system with improvement through use. My approach was different from yours, as I wanted to make the system as basic as possible, with as few rules as possible, so that it was more flexible for different types of games. After completing most of the ground work, I started thinking about how I would play the current game I'm running with the new system that I'd created. “

Ari Black writes, “I saw that I would have to rework the mechanic of magic to use the system I had created. This was fine with me, because I expected that GMs would have to add personalizations here and there to make their specific game work. But I realized that, as long as I was creating a set of formal rules, no matter how abstract, I was forcing my tastes in game play and mechanics on the people who would be using the system.”

Ari Black write, "This is not a bad thing, every RPG system does it. Even if a group was doing pure free-form RPG, they would likely develop a set of house rules to adjudicate even if it was just a basic social contract among the players. A game design friend of mine put it a different way, a way I didn't like at first but now think is probably true for the most part, "People need rules so they know what to break. "

Air Black writes, “You can't make a system that will work for all of the people all of the time. To do so, it would have to be all of the systems and none of them all at once. The best you can hope for is to make a system that's approachable; complex enough to allow for variability and challenge but simple enough for the learning curve and in-game use to not be restrictive. But, at best, it will only appeal to some of the people some of the time.”

dreamborn wrote:
Dreamborn responds, ORS would do this automatically, remember ORS requires computer assistance, time required 0.  With that said depending on how much time the player devotes to learning about sailing, (number of hours in a day), ORS continously updates the characters skill, so 2 days into the sea journey which should last 14 days (1 minute into your playing that night) his character skill has been updating continously.

Ari Black writes, “I'm a little confused. ORS is an RPG system that requires a computer to play? Does this mean that you have created an algorithm for everything and it's up to the GM, or a third party, to implement your algorithm in a piece of software?

If I'm mistaken, how would a GM manually contend with the fine resolution tracking that ORS seems to require?”

"Dreamborn responds, ORS would do this automatically, remember ORS requires computer assistance, time required 0."

No, I still don't see how that works. The computer can only increment the player's sailing skill when it knows certain facts;

  - The player is on a ship.
  - Time on a ship slowly increases Sailing.
  - On the ship is a Salty Old Sea Dog.
  - A Salty Old Sea Dog is an +2z teacher of the Sailing skill.
  - The player and the Salty Old Sea Dog talk together for 1 hour every day.
  - The player spends 14 consecutive days on the ship.

Now, you need to tell the computer this in order for the teaching process to run in zero time. I might imagine using a formal language, or a UI, to add these features to the computer's internal representation of the gameworld. Some work I can pre-empt and do before a session, some must be done inside a session.

To provide a concrete example; there's a very nice language for designing gameworlds for interactive fiction (text adventures) called Inform. It's a lovely way to describe a gameworld to a computer. ORS is going to need something similar because I must convey my imagination into an executable form within the computer.

Let's imagine ORS doesn't have the concept of ships. I'll need to add in the concept of ships and sailors, and this particular ship and the sailor, Stubb. In Inform, it would probably take me 30 minutes or so to code, by adding rules like 'if the character is on a ship, and the character is awake, apply an environmental learning bonus of +0.01z/hr for the Sailing skill.'

So -- talk me through how, explicitly, I would go about adding the six facts above to my ORS system's understanding of my gameworld. What steps to I take?

"If you as a GM only update his skill 1/game he cannot use anything his character has learned, or you as a GM must think about it and wing it."

Again, this is a non-problem. If, after a week, there is a pirate attack, then I can say "write 'familiar with sailing' on your character sheet" and we're complete.

"Which begs the question what is an Apprentice sailor? [...] Your level of granularity is very coarse."

In the system I'm banging together, Apprentice is rank 5 out of 10, 1 being Sickly, and 10 being Mythic. 'Familiar' is rank 4. Tests are also difficulty-rated on the 1-10 scale, and are resolved with a single 2d6 roll.

It certainly is coarse, because I don't need more fine distinctions. Getting the broad strokes right is extremely important -- a professional soldier should rarely be beaten by an unarmed peasant -- but finer distinctions are harder to justify. For two roughly equal characters, 50-50 is good enough for play to continue.

"ORS is designed in such a way that it does not inhibit the creative choices of the players or the GM. It just makes it more realistic, consistent, intuitive and speeds up game play. [...] ORS is very easy for the GM to use and run a game of his design.  That is one of the design goals.  ORS is a complete system, the magic system is available to look at."

Again, I'll need specifics. If I decided to use ORS as the generic part of my system, and then I decided to add my own specifics, what do I have to do?

Can you take me through two examples; one straightforward, one harder.

First example; I want to run a game where there are things called soul-stones. If you are carrying a soul-stone, it makes you elated, and sharper mentally, but it slowly destroys your sense of self. How would I go about putting that into the system such that players could have a soul-stone in their inventory, and the effects get applied automatically?

Second example; I want to run a game where players cast spells by composing poems. The more complex the poem, the more powerful the effect. Limericks can do petty magic, and twelve-book epic poems can destroy cities. Take me through the steps I'd need to perform to incorporate that magic system.

Steve writes, “No, I still don't see how that works. The computer can only increment the player's sailing skill when it knows certain facts;

  - The player is on a ship.
  - Time on a ship slowly increases Sailing.
  - On the ship is a Salty Old Sea Dog.
  - A Salty Old Sea Dog is an +2z teacher of the Sailing skill.
  - The player and the Salty Old Sea Dog talk together for 1 hour every day.
  - The player spends 14 consecutive days on the ship.”

Steve writes, “Now, you need to tell the computer this in order for the teaching process to run in zero time. I might imagine using a formal language, or a UI, to add these features to the computer's internal representation of the gameworld. Some work I can pre-empt and do before a session, some must be done inside a session.”

Steve writes, “To provide a concrete example; there's a very nice language for designing gameworlds for interactive fiction (text adventures) called Inform. It's a lovely way to describe a gameworld to a computer. ORS is going to need something similar because I must convey my imagination into an executable form within the computer.”

Steve writes, “Again, I'll need specifics. If I decided to use ORS as the generic part of my system, and then I decided to add my own specifics, what do I have to do?

Can you take me through two examples; one straightforward, one harder.

First example; I want to run a game where there are things called soul-stones. If you are carrying a soul-stone, it makes you elated, and sharper mentally, but it slowly destroys your sense of self. How would I go about putting that into the system such that players could have a soul-stone in their inventory, and the effects get applied automatically?”

Steve writes, “Second example; I want to run a game where players cast spells by composing poems. The more complex the poem, the more powerful the effect. Limericks can do petty magic, and twelve-book epic poems can destroy cities. Take me through the steps I'd need to perform to incorporate that magic system.”

OPPS my mistake...

Quote
Steve writes, “Again, I'll need specifics. If I decided to use ORS as the generic part of my system, and then I decided to add my own specifics, what do I have to do?

Can you take me through two examples; one straightforward, one harder.

First example; I want to run a game where there are things called soul-stones. If you are carrying a soul-stone, it makes you elated, and sharper mentally, but it slowly destroys your sense of self. How would I go about putting that into the system such that players could have a soul-stone in their inventory, and the effects get applied automatically?”
See Appendix, section 37 on magical items.  The GM would create the soul stones using the procedure outlined.  Once created the ORS engine knows how to use it.

Hi, Kent.

What you are describing in ORS seems very much like the Aurora adventure development tools in Neverwinter Nights;

The item designer.

So now, I think I'm understanding what the experience of designing and playing an ORS game is. I'm understanding it to be a computer RPG like Neverwinter Nights, but where certain interactions (like conversation with NPCs) switches everyone out of the computer environment and into freeform, social interactions over the tabletop. Play flip-flops between the two modes.

This understanding is starting to make me more comfortable. I was trying to fit it into a mental pigeonhole; tabletop RPG with computer assistance. But actually, the computer aspects are so dominant that it feels better to think of it as computer RPG with GM assistance.

My main reason for feeling this is considering how we'd both approach the scenario of the PCs on a two-week ship voyage. In my approach (and I think this is typical of tabletop RPGs) I'm simply describing the passing of a large amount of time in a few words. The interactions are conversational. In yours, the time is managed mostly by time spent in a computer UI.

Also, I considered the kind of people I know and the games they play, and wondered who I could get to play ORS. Some of my friends are avid tabletop RPG players but won't play computer RPGs. I think if I were to suggest we play ORS, they'd either decline, or dislike the experience. The required interaction with the computer for every action would pull them away from the things they enjoy in tabletop.

On the flip side, the players who will have LAN parties to play Neverwinter Nights would be more open to a game played like this. They'd be comfortable with the idea of designing characters through a computer interface and managing their inventory on an inventory screen.

Also, of course, there is the matter of designing gameworld; in this system I must build a great deal in a computer, and the players' interactions are largely involved with the computer model, not a discussed imaginitive idea.

--

So we come back now to the idea of design goals. This game is going to appeal to some people and not to others. It's going to be great for certain types of play and rule out others. However, at the moment the story you're telling about it misled me.

The story you need to tell is of a hybrid of computer games and tabletop RPGs. Make it clearer what experiences players and GMs are likely to have. Explain where it sits within the wide range of existing games. See if you can distill it down into an elevator pitch.

I think in order for you to pick up people willing to help, you'll probably need to start looking in some additional places. You might want to talk to people who write interactive fiction (IF), and computer RPG designers. You're going to need a team of programmers for the user interface and the networking, and you'll need a group of people who are willing to code the system itself, and a whole bunch of understanding about how the world works.

Hello All

The latest versions of the 4 core rulebooks have recently been uploaded.

Kent