Copper Coins! The RPG
Posted: August 26, 2010 Filed under: Copper Coins!, Homebrew, News, Other Systems, RPG 6 Comments »For the past year or so I’ve bemoaned that I didn’t have the time or the drive to write a fantasy RPG. Everyone who writes RPGs seems to write their own fantasy RPG sometime in their lives – it’s that thing you know will never be successful or groundbreaking, but god damn it, you know that every other fantasy RPG got everything so wrong and you can do better. Or in my case, you just really like thinking about many different dice being thrown around. In the days leading up to the Great Math Crisis of 2010 (August 25 never forget) I actually got a lot done a thing I dubbed “Copper Coins!” the RPG or CCRPG for short–
It’s the best name I could come up with okay?
This doesn’t really mean anything for NAA D6, which is still its own thing apart from CCRPG. CCRPG is my second typewriter. I felt for a while that I was just banging my head against the wall with NAA, coming up with ideas that didn’t fit. A lot of those ideas weren’t bad – they just weren’t NAA. Now they have a place to go in CCRPG. As with everything, you can peek at the Legal page up there and you’ll see what it’ll be licensed under.
CCRPG uses a d20 and high rolling for resolution, but it’s not an OGL game. It doesn’t have the 6 ability scores, for example. In fact, it doesn’t have ability scores. The core of the game is making a character by choosing Perks, Skills and Stunts. Skills are the broad ways you interact with the game. Stunts are specific ways to interact with the game – Athletics would be a skill, and “High Jump” would be a stunt. Perks are passive bonuses.
The system is not class-based, but because of its nature, a basic system of archetypes is in place. An archetype is a collection of your starting skills, perks and stunts. You need one because otherwise your character wouldn’t be anything – there’s certain perks and skills and so on you HAVE TO pick, and it’s easier to pre-pick them for everyone. The archetypes are Fighter, Rogue, Cleric and Mage, of course. You can create your own archetypes, but it is fast and loose. The archetypes are roughly equivalent in their power and ability to interact with the game in meaningful ways but not necessarily numerically balanced, since the value of extra Wounds is different from the value of an extra skill.
Another feature of the game that I am trying to bring out is that there aren’t really races, per se. Your Mage that has the “Blood Drain” stunt could be a vampire for all the game cares – a vampire is only quantified as a collection of traits you could have, and call yourself a vampire, but you don’t have to in any instance. I’m pretty sure for some people, this may cause problems when the monster section has a Vampire and it isn’t EXACTLY like what a PC vampire would be like. But I don’t really mind that.
I’m running to class now, but that’s basically what I wanted to say about it at this juncture.
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Mmmm…now this sounds like something I could really get into. It sounds a lot more abstract than NAAD6, and more abstract, narrative-based systems are really my cup of tea more than anything. A certain level of crunch is fun and good, but NAAD6 seemed to kinda be reaching GURPS levels, which isn’t exactly my style.
NAA D6 1.6 is rather complicated in certain ways, but 2.0 hopes to streamline that, when it’s done. Thanks for the compliment though, since NAA was originally inspired by GURPS and Hero system, and is intended to be reminiscent in ways.
I’m not sure I would call Copper Coins! narrative-based. Abstract, yes, but not narrative-based. We might be operating under different definitions of it, however – when I think narrative-based I think FORGE “storygamey” stuff.
Yeah, I meant narrative-based more in the sense of it’s abstract, so you can frame a narrative around it. Stuff like no explicit race definitions, no stats, and defining things in terms of Perks, Stunts, and Skills. Basically, to the point where you can go “I want do to this”, and not have to “buy up” the abilities to do that.
In a sense you kinda do still have to buy up the abilities to do something meaningfully. There is a reason that certain abilities in the game will exist, and that is to purchase them to meaningfully construct character concepts, based on rules that more or less represent in RPG game-code what the ability is. I don’t want to give the idea that is something like Fate or Wushu, because that would be a pretty huge lie on my part – the Blood Drain attack has a cost of v XP, is rolled using Skill w and has factors, benefits and effects x, y and z. It is mechanics-driven. I would say it is a small degree of rules, since those factors are typically very succinct. Now, the rules won’t force you to buy anything. They won’t say “you must have this much to be a Vampire” but I would object to, within this system, a player just being a vampire without buying anything that approaches that concept.
I think I’ve done a poor job explaining things so far, but I hope that clears up anything.
To serve as a demonstration, here’s the pre-alpha of Blood Drain. This may or may not be how it looks a month from now, but it’s a decent illustration of a bunch of concepts.
Blood Drain [Physical] (4 XP)
Requirements: You have physical advantage over a target within 1 Step.
Roll: Labor or Simple Weapons
TN: Defense or 10 + enemy Mettle (use highest)
Damage: 1d6 weapon
Recover: You maintain advantage over an opponent for 2 rounds.
Description: Blood Drain allows you to siphon off health from an opponent to regain health yourself. If you have a natural weapon with a large die than 1d6, you use that die for damage instead.
Level 1: You regain 1d6 vitality if successful.
Level 2: You add the level of your “Weapon Power” perk to the total Vitality regained on a success.
Level 4: If you would roll a larger die than 1d6 for damage with this stunt, then roll that die twice. The second result is the Vitality you regain with this stunt, instead of rolling 1d6 for it.
Level 5: If your weapon damage result is greater than the vitality you would regain with this stunt, you can take 1 Fatigue to regain that much vitality instead.
Some things to note:
XP: This is how much each level of “Blood Drain” costs.
Requirements: “Steps” are the abstract distance of the game. 1 Step means you’re pretty much right next to the guy, but can be anything from 1 foot to 5 feet away. A Physical advantage means you have a bonus to physical skills against the character, that you earned by doing something to put yourself at advantage over the character. Equivalents for other groups of skills (Mental, Social) exist.
Roll: “Labor” here is a skill analogous to strength checks and is used for when you want to exert more strength than you would be casually capable of. Simple Weapons as a skill includes the ability to punch or in this case, bite.
TN: The target number. Every stunt has some marker for success. You want to roll high. Every archetype gets some Mettle and everyone can wear armor to have a Defense (or in certain cases, like the Rogue’s Agility perk, always has a defense). Even just wearing clothes gives you a minimal defense. In this case, though, someone with enough Mettle can still defend against being ganked, even while naked. It varies with stunts – some stunts just use defense always, and some use the LOWEST of two, so they are very hard to defend against since you have to have two different perks leveled well to protect against them.
Damage: In this case, this is so people who didn’t buy a Perk to have a larger natural attack die can still deal damage with their savage biting of someone. Or clawing. Or however you want to rationalize it.
Recover: All stunts will recover if certain conditions are met. If they are never met, then the stunt will never recover until you spend a Story Point or buy a new level of the Stunt. Some stunts are designed so you’ll have to burn story points or level them up before you get them again, because the other requirements for recovery are harsh, but these tend to be very powerful or dramatic stunts. They also aren’t any more expensive XP-wise, usually. These drawbacks are so that they aren’t XP-prohibitive.
Description: Description.
Levels: Stunts earn value as you level them up, as you can see. Of note, Weapon Power is a perk that gives you a bonus to weapon damage. Apart from the GM giving you damage bonuses for advantage (if any), this is one of the main ways you will increase your base damage (the other being buying Stunts that just plain deal more damage than you normally do). Otherwise, the die rolls are your only source of damage.
Notice that it jumps from 3 to 4. Level 3 doesn’t give a benefit – it’s there to add additional cost to levels 4 and 5. Think of it as an “unlock” level. This is typically to insure they don’t become TOO attractive. It’s also a feature I will likely null out once I’ve actually tested things more.
Sorry on the late reply, but that looks interesting. I like how it lets you custom-pick powers, and also the more generic rules. “Physical advantage” and “steps”, particularly.