So @ashekchum and @redviiper were asking me about running a PbP in the s/DnD newsub thread. I love D&D in almost all of its iterations for face-to-face games, but in my experience they translate terribly into the PbP format, especially once combat breaks out and things are resolved in tiny steps in a fixed order.
All of the following RPGs are freely available, keep working fluidly even in the PbP format, and I am proficient enough in them to get them running on relatively short notice.
I've ordered them from least complex to most.
What I am trying here is to gauge general interest, and to see which games would be preferred.
Wushu
Wushu is a rules-lite and abstract RPG about emulating action movies. The rules are dead simple and stupid, but fit the premise to a T. You narrate your action to rack up dice, divide the dice into offense and defense, check how many successes you get in each category, and then dish out and take damage as the dice indicate. Mook hordes are just a bag of life energy with a static damage per round, while major villains are built like PCs.
You can read the rules for free as HTML or get a nicely formatted PDF as pay-what-you-want.
The Pool
The Pool is a rules-lite and abstract generic RPG, that apart of its brevity and simplicity stands out for two things:
- Rolls don't simply decide success/failure, but grant the player the right to narrate the scene. Flipside of this is that players should be ready and willing to think beyond their character, but want to shape the plot, and that the plot tends to shake and twist a lot.
- It self-balances spotlight. A player who aggressively initiates conflicts and gambles a lot of dice to narrate outcomes will eventually fail and lose those dice, forcing him to slow down and rebuild his pool. A player who plays conservatively will bank a lot of dice and be able to initiate and win a conflict when it really matters.
You can read the rules for free as PDF.
Risus
Risus is a rules-lite and generic beer&pretzel RPG revolving around clichés. Your character is simply defined by clichés and a strength associated to it such as Constantly Drunken Viking Warrior (4).
Any conflict can be expanded to a full-blown combat (such as a cooking contest), and clichés that are inappropriate for the task at hand but humourously explained get a massive damage boosts in them. So it pays off to pick up a few clichés that are inappropiate in a wide number of situations, such as Flamingly Flamboyant Hair Dresser or Cajun Cook.
Risus works best as a kitchen-sink game where all clichés are allowed, and things are whacky and nonsensical. (Risus can also be played as a serious game, but where is the fun in that?)
You can read the rules for free in various formats.
The Shadow of Yesterday
TSoY is by far the longest and most complex RPG on this shortlist at 76 pages, but also the most game-y with the most tactics and building blocks. It is a pulp fantasy RPG based on FUDGE, a generic RPG that has been on the internets since the early 1990s Usenet days (and is today probably best known and most successful in its incarnation as FATE).
Conflicts are resolved in just one roll, but players can zoom in to turn it into fully-blown "combat" in a process called Bringing Down The Pain to either "re-match" a lost conflict they don't want to lose, because they think it deserves more attention and detail than a simple roll or to permanently kill a named NPC. Like in Risus, any kind of conflict can be turned into a fully blown BDTP, not just physical combat.
Another outstanding feature is the XP system. While there are XP for participating in key scenes (similar to milestone/attendance XP in other RPGs), the meat and potatoes are so-called Keys. Keys represent motivations, personality traits and goals of a PC, and you gain the bulk of your XP by triggering the reward conditions (with more XP the more extreme and dangerous the trigger is). There is also a buy-off condition that represents the opposite of the Key and allows you to burn the Key entirely for a huge one-time pay-off in XP, with the caveat that you can never buy the Key back.
TSOY doesn't lend itself so well to traditional party play. It works best when PCs are allying and conflicting with each other, and even with a tightly knit party concept like an exploration team there tends to be a lot of undermining and backstabbing as players try to trigger their keys.
The setting itself focuses a lot of cultural conflicts (both internal conflicts inside of cultures, as well as between cultures) and faciliates them with culture-specific crunchy bits. You don't have to focus on this stuff, but it will always be an underlying current colouring the play.
(If there is interest, I have also made an adaption for 7th Sea, the swashbuckling RPG in pseudo-historical Europe, but I'd need to undust and translate it first as I had written it up in German.)
You can read the rules for free as a PDF.
If I run the trek based one I'll mostly try to run it off scifi, thigh I can try to do some stuff here. Cause that's where I'll get the most and well IRC.
Somerging basic could be great to run post by post here though. Also I'll have to switch to using a comp on the site again.