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Subject: 
Re: Elements of a brick oriented RPG
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.gaming
Date: 
Wed, 15 May 2002 16:05:28 GMT
Viewed: 
3660 times
  
In lugnet.fun.gaming, Frank Filz writes:
James Brown wrote:
Probably the simplest, but I suspect difficult to capture the "feel" of a
brick built game.  My wife is in a 7th Seas campaign that routinely uses my
LEGO projects as sets and backdrops; it seems to work quite well, although
they use metal minis.

Having got interested in 7th Sea about the same time as LEGO, I
certainly considered a connection there... Actually, I think my interest
in LEGO Pirate ships may have been an influence on checking out 7th Sea
(a demo game which I was actually able to attend the day after I picked
it up in the store helped also). 7th Sea mechanics seem to be a good
possibility for a brick based RPG also in that they are geared to
"cinematic" play (i.e. less serious).

Yah.  They certainly seem to have fun. :)  I haven't looked at it too
deeply, but the mechanics seem fairly clean.


7. What is the intention of the game? A game for one off con events? An
alternative RPG to give a break from something else? A long term
campaign as a primary game?

I would suggest the latter two; a well-built game is certainly adaptable
enough to be either a short break from other games or a long running game in
it's own right.  For con events, I would suggest that the Pirate Game and
Brick Wars are probably better suited, although a appendix that would gave a
conversion formula to Brick Wars would be neat.

Though it could be neat to spec out a HUGE dungeon and have players
supply various bits of it, and set up the whole dungeon. Then perhaps
the game is run as two teams. One running the defenders, one running the
adventurers... Of course there would have to be rules on activation of
the defenders and possibly reasons they won't stray far from home. Of
course the adventurers have a map (which probably has some inaccuracies)
to justify the layout of the whole dungeon from the start.

Take a peek at Space Hulk.  It's a board game spin-off of Warhammer, but
it's got *good* two player good-guy/bad-guy balance.  Also for this sort of
thing, consider a mechanic like the various tile-laying board games (names
escape me ATM) where you draw from a random pool of face-down tiles to
figure out what's behind the door or around the corner.

Something like the Pendragon system might work for this, where you mark off
the skills you use (successfully) in the games and once every X sessions,
you can attempt to improve those skills.  Or look at a system like Star Wars
where you can usually gain enough points in an adventure or two to raise a
skill, but need to save if you want to raise something you're already very
good at.

Rune Quest had a decent system which allowed incremental experience.
There was also a system a friend developed for Traveller where each game
session you got a few experience rolls. To raise a skill to the next
level (N+1), you needed N+1 skill points. To get a skill point, you
rolled 2d6 against 8+N (7 + new level). If you failed that roll, you
made a tick beside the skill. You added the ticks (failure points) to
the roll. I ran a game for a while where I ended up reducing the skills
list to about 30 skills (each with binary specializations) with a max
skill level of 6. It worked pretty well.

Traveller might translate well, so reduced.  It could also be run with the
sort of Space Opera feel that a lot of .space MOCS seem to carry.

Rune Quest is a system I never really got into, so I can't comment there.

I'd like to base the game heavily in an existing rules set to make it
easier to recruit players (this makes me wonder if I should look at D20,
though long ago I got tired of many of the elements of D&D).

Sounds like you need GURPS LEGO. :)

GURPS would be a nice start, especially as it's a well known game
system. Unfortunately, I think it has way too much detail, and I have
serious problems with it's core mechanics (skill rolls, combat, damage).
It does have a great set of advantages and disadvantages though (the
game I spent the most effort at designing, which actually started from
that Traveler system but sought to replace the experience die rolls with
a points system, ended up with a points based character system which
conveniently used a similar enough point scale that GURPS advantages and
disadvantages could be easily converted over).

I was mostly tounge-in-cheek with that; given GURPS's propensity to licencse
other properties. :)  And the tie-in with Evil Stevie and the Pirate Game,
of course.

I had been thinking of trying to use LEGO pieces to build the character
sheet, but I think that wouldn't really work out (you'd be constantly
looking at the rules to determine just what skills you had).

Have the character generation be a building process, and then put on plain
paper.  There's a lot of graphical possibility for making a character sheet
look "LEGO".  Skills are listed with a number of bricks above them that are
shaded in as you go up in skill, as an example.  Include a sticker sheet (or
printable file) that has all the skills etc. for a character.  This would
let the die hards make their own sheets by stickering tiles.  Lego offers
some neat possibilities for 3D character sheets.

Hmm, using brick graphics on the character sheet is a thought. Certainly
if I go with the printed tiles to represent items, I would be printing
some stickers.

I had some neat ideas while I was mulling this over last night.  I'll try to
throw a mock-up character sheet together tonight to give an example of how I
was thinking.  (...but I'll point to my track record before offering
guarantees of anything)


James



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Elements of a brick oriented RPG
 
(...) I can't comment really on Traveller because my only experience is with the original dreadful system (fun to roll up characters, and that was it). RuneQuest experience was all about mini-maxing. I hated it almost as much as I hated the endless (...) (23 years ago, 16-May-02, to lugnet.gaming)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Elements of a brick oriented RPG
 
(...) Having got interested in 7th Sea about the same time as LEGO, I certainly considered a connection there... Actually, I think my interest in LEGO Pirate ships may have been an influence on checking out 7th Sea (a demo game which I was actually (...) (23 years ago, 15-May-02, to lugnet.gaming)

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