Fallout: Equestria Resource

Are you one of those people who love to Roleplay for the sake of story? But find PnP rules to be far to complicated to comprehend for a friend you wanted to invite or yourself? Do you feel that all these hundreds of pages of rules are restricting your enjoyment of RPing or GMing? But you find that having a diceless system could complicate things more? Like, how would you be able to decide if someone succeeded or not? What if a complete lack of rules only make things even worse? And will there ever be a Half Life 3.

If you came here wanting to know the last question, I'm sad to tell you that that will remain unanswered and be ignored.

But! While making plans on how to revive my RP Group that I GMed (and put on hiatus due to a number of stuff that was going on), I have made an idea to create a very simple and easy to understand dice system for roleplaying that anyone would be able to easily understand! No more arguments in the OOC about how certain rules would work (at least, that's what I hope for). No more having to skim pages just to find one single rule that someone pointed out. In this dice system, it will only focus on skills in combat and non-combat stuff, and that's it!

The idea so far is to use a dice system similar to the Vampire: The Masquerade Storyteller system. Each character will have 3 Primary Skills, 5 Secondary Skills, 3 Flawed Skills, and the rest Neutral. The d10 will be the only dice needed. In a circumstance will a player have to roll a number of d10 to get a number equal to or higher than a difficulty level. And for each success does it not only succeed, but is more effective. Say, 3 successes do more damage than 1 success. Primary skills will have 7 dice, Secondary 5, Neutral 3, and Flawed 1.

However, this is just the beginning concept, as I still need to get some other rules that involve a racial trait system for every race that can be played, allow from the Fallout system SPECIAL, two to three Traits, Perks after a GM decides a party has "leveled" up, and borrow weapons from the FoE PnP converted to these rules, create a flexible magic system that can allow for player made spells approved by the GM, a morale system that can affect dice rolls, Health, a magic/special point system for magic or race exclusive skills, how crit successes and failures work, and perhaps more. Even the name of the rule system is not final (as I have not come up with a good name yet).

So why did I just post a big wall of text for you to read? To waste your time. To see if anyone else would be interested in a rule system like this and give some feedback and recommendations on how it could be better for anyone interested in using them. I will post updates on anything else I come up with that can be used for these rules.

hi hi

Using a diceless system, you determine success based on the character's base stat, and how much are they willing to give up. Diceless systems are generally resource games, rather than games of chance, but that's not important right now.

I can say that I've had good success designing perks in my own attempt at a simplified system, by giving bonuses to regular abilities in circumstantial situations. Like, +2 during the day, or whatever. Fate Core also has some good guidelines for standardizing them, although their perks are called "stunts."

If you're looking to make a flexible magic system that allows people to make their own spells, I wish you the best of luck, seriously. And if you figure anything out that really works, I will be eager to know.

Dalken Starbyne was running a game for me and a few others a while back, using a highly simplified system, complete with a build-your-own-spells mechanic. I'll poke him and see if he's willing to share it.

I'm not really comfortable with publicly sharing my ruleset for a few reasons, but I'll share a few basic tips for constructing a rules-light system.

Simple systems tend to focus on cinematics rather than realism. Realistic mechanics have to account for a lot of specific variables that muck up rulesets very quickly. Cinematic systems, meanwhile, allow for a bit more focus on storytelling and keeping things rolling. There's still a bit of a scale there, but the rule of thumb you want to follow with systems that don't emphasize mechanics is "less is more."

You seem to already be using another system as your basis, which isn't a terrible idea (so long as you're not trying to sell it, anyway), particularly if you don't have a lot of experience with constructing game mechanics. Just be careful about what system you're using. Usually something with a setting similar to what you're going for, or at least a fairly generic setting, is going to work better. Also be wary of how many modifications you make. Adding or changing too much is going to complicate things, which, as you might imagine, is fairly counterproductive.

Personally, when constructing my simplified ruleset, I tried to stick to a few guidelines. One type of dice and one set of rules for modifiers on any difficulty check (be it combat, skill, or stat based). Criticals, if they're even used, also tend to be very uniform mechanically, with pretty much all of the details left to the players. Static numbers are a very common yet often underutilized tool in RPGs, but they are especially helpful in games designed to minimize rolling. Is that character strong enough to lift that crate? Well, you could have them roll against their Strength stat...or you could just determine if their Strength stat is high enough compared to a predetermined difficulty scale.

Likewise, if you want to include things like Perks, Traits, and racial qualities, they should also reflect an emphasis on cinematics rather than mechanics. That's not to say they can't or shouldn't have any mechanical influence, but that their impact, like the rules on the whole, should be mechanically light and important to the narrative of the character and the group. Maybe a Trait mitigates a penalty on a character's Mechanics roll when they're working without the appropriate tools, but now they can also work with Mechanics in a way that is cinematically interesting like jury-rig something somewhat more implausible if they are equipped properly (therefore working a bit of the ol' Scotty magic).

These are all just guidelines, of course, and what you'll want to do will vary pretty wildly depending on what you're looking for in a game and system. The fact that rules-light systems tend to emphasize cinematics doesn't mean that you have to throw realism out the window...it just means that that more commonly comes out in the narrative rather than in representation through numbers and dice. Maybe you're looking for less "Scotty's givin' it all she's got, Captain!" and more "lead pipe shotgun." It really all depends on the feel you're going for.

I've got some schooling in this stuff, but mostly I'm just a guy who's passionate about games and has a fair bit of experience playing and tinkering around with them. Everyone's preferred experience is a little bit different. Find what's best for you and the folks you want to play with and run with that.

Thanks for the advice! And you're definitely right that I'm completely new at this. I'll take your advice on looking at things in a cinematic perspective rather than just mechanically. Makes it far more easier for me to be able to focus more on storytelling.

When I mentioned this thread to him, Dalken reminded me that he'd borrowed the magic rules in the game he was running from Roleplaying is Magic season 3 edition, with a few modifications, and tacked them on to his otherwise proprietary ruleset; so, for build-your-own-spells magic, I'd suggest taking a look at that.

hi hi

The conflict resolution in that one reminds me a bit of FATE. The magic looks pretty simple though, and almost complete. I suspect that for Fallout Equestria, it could probably stand to see the addition of a damage scale of some sort, but other than that, it is pretty nice.

Actually, forget it. I think dice systems are stupid to be quite honest, so I'm just going to get rid of them when I revive my game. Sorry if anyone was hoping I'd make something great, but after realizing how some luck system will compromise a story that I and players would want, I don't think it's honestly worth it.

hi hi

No worries here, my interest was in trying to help out.

Sean Borgstrom's Nobilis was the only diceless RPG I've ever played, but it was a lot of fun, and put the emphasis on how badly the character wants a certain outcome. (A thematic element that reminded me of what I liked about dice pools from Shadowrun 3rd edition and prior.) And to be honest, most of the time when I am GMing, my players and I will often go entire sessions without rolling any dice at all because things just flow naturally.

On the other hand, given the tendency of events to follow a normal distribution of results in real life, well implemented dice systems can help meet people's expectations for plausibility, and can help prevent the GM and the player's actions from being completely incongruous.