I’ve put together my take on a simple rock-paper-scissors larp system that could be used for both one-offs and campaigns:
Realtime.pdf (91.4 KB)
It’s inspired by a mixture of the (ever evolving) Kick Arse system, and the TriStat system, with my own ideas gluing it together.
Interested to hear your thoughts, whether on the mechanics or how it’s described.
I like it, and I’d like to play it sometime to see how it flows.
Initially, I read the dark section first, and got a bit confused when we got to the calls of “medium” in the fight, but I got there in the end. The flow diagram is very good for getting a handle on how it works.
The combat is pretty similar to how the Kick Arse system was implemented for A Town Called Refuge, so it’s kind of been tried out already. If you swap the low, medium, and high Body ranks for half-arsed, normal and kick-arse you’ve got much the same system as the Refuge one. Realtime has some added complexity in giving people with a melee weapon an advantage over people without, and it has the “low always beats high” rule, which Refuge didn’t, but otherwise I think melee is the same. Ranged is different with the Hit and Dodge calls, because I don’t think rock-paper-scissors works well at range. Realtime is a touch more complex than Kick Arse, partly because it’s intended to be usable in campaign play so characters can develop.
My thought is to come up with one-page Realtime extensions for various genres like fantasy, horror, science fiction, etc. Each would give some typical talents and items for that genre that could be used alongside the core page rules. They could also be used as templates for people to come up with campaign specific one-page rule extension, e.g. a Harry Potter extension would probably be similar to a Fantasy one, but require possession of a wand items to cast spells… I imagine some book-learny Harry Potter spells like potions would come off Mind, while other more willpower-type spells like that one that repells evil would use Soul. (Edit: Patronus, I meant. So you could represent a Hermione type with high Mind, and a Harry type with high Soul.)
Edit: and yeah, my layout is a bit stuffed in terms of “read this first” indicators. I kinda painted myself into a corner with that.
I like it. The flowchart, however, doesn’t match the text on draws - it only talks about weapons, not stats.
True, I seem to have skipped the body stat comparison in the flowchart, will add that in. I think the flow chart needs to be different somehow, less linear in presentation, to be a better mnenomic.
I actually have this nagging feeling that the melee combat should be simpler.
Ranged combat is as simple as I can imagine it to be. You must have the Hit talent and a ranged weapon. You call “hit”, and unless they call “dodge” they are defeated (actually, it occurs to me that this is inspired by the Freeform Games rules, I should give them some credit). The only complication is in the resource management: players with High body have to decide whether they want to try calling “hit” again and use up another use, and targets have to decide whether to use up a dodge or take a fall this time and save their dodge for later. My only concern is that once you’ve used your “hit” call(s) up, your gun is useless. Which probably works in terms of game balance, but may feel weird. One solution would be to give players more “hit” and “dodge” calls… which won’t make any difference in a shootout between two characters with dodge, but will allow the shooting of more characters who don’t have dodge. Perhaps medium stat should allow 2 or 3 uses, and high stat allow 4 or 6. The appropriate count kinda depends on the scenario I think.
With melee combat it’s all over in one RPS (or none, if it’s high vs low Body). But the logic flow to decide who has won that RPS has 5 steps to it, to take account of:
in that order. That’s fairly easy for gamers to remember, but I suspect it’s too many steps for casual players.
I’d like Realtime to be easy for walk-in players to learn and use. The Refuge system was. It also used a single RPS but didn’t consider overwhelming stat difference or item. After RPS it just considered outright winner (chance), higher stat wins draw (advantageous stat), and who started the fight (initiator). At least I think initator won if there was no other advantage to be had.
I think that worked nicely for Refuge. While a kid (low Body) beating up a tough cowboy (high Body) wasn’t very believable, it had simplicity on its side. So I’m considering doing away with the “overwhelming stat difference” consideration. That would mean a character with low Body and a character with medium Body both have the same chance of defeating a character with high Body (1/3 chance). Or is the “high always beats low” so easy to remember that it won’t take up significant mental space in casual gamer’s minds? I don’t really want to do away with the item comparison though, I like the idea of giving weapons some due (which wasn’t much of a consideration in Refuge, where fisticuffs were the order of the day).