An Idea for a Table Top RPG system

These ideas have been in my head for a while, now. I’m putting them to paper so to test if it all makes sense. This is probably not going to be the most coherent, organized rules set (it might not even be that) you’ve ever read, but that’s OK. If it all falls into place, if after I write this I feel there’s potential in these ideas, that there is a game somewhere in there, I’ll write a second version, rewrite everything, do what must be done. Until then: buckle up.

Quests

The conceptual idea of this RPG is that its most basic rules element is the quest.

Characters, PCs and NPCs alike, could be described by the quests they are famous for. For instance, a particularly seasoned hero might be described as:

An Unnamed Hero
Climbed the Mountains of Corruption and slayed its Dragon King
Negotiated peace with the orc tribes of the Blue Marshes
Delivered an important message to the Yellow Court in the Faery Realm
Bought a Thunderclap Gun from the Errant Wizard of Qaweq

If we consider the actions necessary to complete them, these quests can implicitly define the capabilities and skills of this character, can’t they? To a certain extent?

If this hero were challenged with reading a faery manuscript, for instance, one could argue that it is possible that he might recognize a word or two. And if another dragon tries to avenge his now dead friend, it is likely that he has been prepared for such an encounter. Right?

(We’re kinda already talking about action and/or conflict resolution at this point.)

But could we quantify this? What could help us determine how much a quest prepared the character for a certain challenge?

One thing is to look at the verbs of the quests. Looking above at our unnamed hero, we can find climbed, slayed, negotiated, delivered (a message) and bought. They kinda objectively describe what the character did, don’t they? We can easily accept that he knows how to slay things, because that is what one of his quest consists of, precisely. If we are unsure of his ability to read faery language, that’s because he merely delivered a message to their court. We’d think that for him to have this knowledge would be unlikely.

However… unlikely things are not necessarily impossible, right? Maybe someone has an explanation for how could our hero have learned faeric, having been their mere messenger.

If anyone can explain, with a plausible and entertaining story, why is that not unlikely, it suddenly isn’t. It only seemed unlikely because we didn’t know this part of the quest yet. And now we do.

Strained Successes and Reparation Quests

OK! So now we know that if we have a character and a challenge is thrown in her or his direction, it could be overcome by one of his or her quests that clearly prepared her/him, or one could detail a quest so that it does (let’s call it like that, for now.)

But what could happen if a character can’t defeat a challenge on his own? What if the character has no previous experience and no one can think of how one of his previous quests could help defeating a certain challenge?

I guess it would be reasonable if the character could… by contracting some sort of consequence? Maybe using sheer willpower, a strong desire or a pure heart.

My game designer instinct is to map these consequences with quests, as well, since so far they’re all we have. What if every failed challenge inflicted a consequence quest (let’s use this name, for now) which the character would need to complete in order to restore things to their normal state?

Let’s say someone challenged our exemplary hero with the task of building a bridge. Having no previous experience to draw from, he still want to go through with it. What could be the consequences of his stubbornness? And, more importantly, how could these consequences be turned into quests for him?

Maybe he builds the bridge, but a clearly shoddy one, and his confidence sinks (like his bridge in a few months) and he needs to go on a soul searching quest to regain his self-esteem? Maybe the villagers who asked him for help will ungratefully spread a rumor that he did a bad job on purpose. He now needs to go on a quest to clear his name.

This kind of strained success is always an interesting option and it shouldn’t be looked down as a less desirable route. Preferably challenges will be constructed with interesting “brute force” solutions and consequence quests (the name reparation quest comes to mind now and it doesn’t sound bad) already in mind.

Strained successes create quests, and instead of halting the game down, take it into new directions.

Auxiliary Quests

Another idea: instead of strained successes, though, characters could opt to undertake auxiliary quests. What are those?

An auxiliary quest is a quest you undergo in order not to go on a reparation quest. You do it before, in preparation for the challenge, instead of after. Examples of auxiliary quests for the bridge building example above could be a quest where the hero needs to find a temple where sacred bridge-makers live, or simply learning how to build one with a very strict and troubled master bridge builder.

Abandoning Challenges

If a character is faced with a challenge, can’t deal with it directly with one of his quests and don’t want to contract reparation or auxiliary quests, she or he might just abandon it. This is how a character fails a challenge in this system.

There should be, of course, consequences for this, in the story being told.

Quests and Challenges

OK! We’ve apparently defined two specific types of quests, to handle challenges, and called them reparation quests and auxiliary quests. But these, along with the quests our characters will attempt to finish during the game, are not yet completed! Unlike the quests our characters start with. So what is a quest, anyway?

How does this sound: a quest is a collection of challenges.

This sounds good to me. Maybe a sequence of challenges would be nicer to write, but I guess some quests can have challenges which can be overcome in any order?

For now let’s imagine a quest where our hero has to steal a magic mirror from a cursed aristocrat. We could write it like this:

To steal the Mirror of Sighs from the mansion of Baron Omphelios:
Sneak in his heavily guarded mansion
Defeat Omphelio’s Phantom Bodyguard
Steal the mirror without being corrupted by its curse

A quest with three challenges. I’m still not sure whether the obstacles should be described with specific verbs on how to overcome them, since this prevents them from being solved in more than one way. Maybe it’s better to write quests like this:

To steal the Mirror of Sighs from the mansion of Baron Omphelios:
Heavily guarded mansion
Omphelio’s Phantom Bodyguard
The mirror’s temptation

The important thing is: once all challenges of a quest are resolved (either by being overcome directly, with an auxiliary quest or failed and then repaired with a reparation quest) the quest is complete. Hooray! The character now safely adds this quest to his resumé (and might use it to overcome future challenges).

Another very important thing to realize is that a lot of things happen in quests that we don’t initially know about. Quest’s challenges represent only its major obstacles: as the character faces new challenges, we will often get to hear (thanks to the stories players will tell) its hidden parts and secret moments. Remember the detailing rules.

Quests can be failed, such as challenges. If any of the challenges of a quest is failed and not repaired, the quest fails as a whole. Along with all the fictional consequences of the failure, this quest isn’t added to the list of completed quests of a character.

Dependencies, Time Frames, and Challenges per Quest

Great. We’ve decided that quests are just a bunch of challenges. Let’s keep thinking about them.

We’ve hinted before about quests whose challenges need to be dealt within a specific order. Remember? Our Mirror of Sighs quest above is probably the case. A quest about gathering different ingredients to concoct a healing potion (maybe a reparation quest, after being poisoned by a strange creature?), on the other hand, is hardly sequential.

We could call these relations the challenge dependencies of a quest, if we wanted to. Which challenges can only be tackled after other challenges? Whenever you are writing a quest, think about this.

It also seems reasonable to me that some quests can not linger uncompleted forever on characters’ todo lists. It can be nice to think of the quest’s time frame or time window. A quest like To Find the True Meaning of Life probably have an infinite time frame, while To Save The Children From The Burning Building is arguably more of an immediate endeavor.

(One interesting effect of the time frame rule is to think of how the challenges of immediate quests can’t be solved with auxiliary quests. Remember them?)

Also: we haven’t yet talked about how many challenges go in a quest. Oh gosh. It depends. Simple quests can have one or two challenges. Epic quests can have six to ten! Can you imagine?

Teamwork

So, I’ve realized now that we’ve been talking about quests and challenges as if heroes always faced them alone. But this is usually not the case. How should we manage parties and groups of characters?

My instinct is to rule that characters can go on quests together, but that challenges must be faced individually. By this I don’t think I mean that every character should face every challenge of a quest. I wanna say: characters help each other out in quests by facing challenges that their peers couldn’t.

Going back to the Mirror of Sighs example. Our knightly Hero doesn’t seem to be the sneaky kind. He might have a hard time sneaking past the guards of the Omphelio’s mansion on his own. But if he’d joined a thief for this quest, it’s not hard to believe that this thief has at least one completed quest in his “quest belt” which could help them. Our Hero could let the thief do the sneaking. Maybe later he’ll be the one battling the phantom bodyguard.

Good. But what about challenges that two (or more) characters could overcome together, but not alone? Let’s go back to the Reading Of The Faery Manuscript example. Let’s say our Hero meets a scribe who knows lots of languages, but not the faery tongue. Maybe they could read the manuscript together: the scribe bringing in his knowledge of languages and the Hero helping out with the basic knowledge he had to pick up while in the Faery Realm.

And I guess that’s it for teamwork rules, for now. I’m good.

Inventory Rules

Let’s keep moving! Many storytelling games worry about inventory and what items and weapons each character is carrying. Should we worry about this too?

I think we don’t need it. Let’s say that our thief character is challenged with a safe that needs cracking. Does she have the tools for the job? Is it likely, from the accomplishments in her career, that she’s always carrying them, or, at least, that she carries her tools on her missions? This should be enough.

Enough only for common equipment, I suppose. But what about unique items? What if our characters are trying to get across a room full of violent Granite Golems, ordered to destroy everyone instantly unless they’re wearing the famous artifact known as the Marble Mask?

Well, unless a player can satisfactory explain how this mask could’ve been casually obtained in one of the characters completed quests, we’re going to need (you guessed it) another quest. The obvious auxiliary quest is how the unique item is obtained. The players should decide if a strained success and a reparation quest can be used in this case.

Our hero’s not yet mentioned Thunderclap Gun now seem to me such an artifact. Too keep things simple to track, I’d say once a character has acquired an unique item, he can only be separated from it by a strained success, the obvious reparation quest being to recover it. Until the character finishes this quest, she or he can not use the item. Good luck, character!

Character Creation, Monsters and Magic

I’m running out of things to think about. There’s clearly no need to talk about character evolution, the game system is nothing but that. There’s still character creation, but this will be a fairly short subject. There are some ideas in my head already about monsters and spells, too, but that won’t take long, either. Let’s see what we’ve got.

Character creation. I think that a name and three quests is a good place to start. The scope of these quests will somehow scope the rest of the game. If they are low power stuff, the stories these characters generate will probably be less heroic and epic as well. In my mind this game will work equally well for low powered and high powered stories. Just remember to create challenges and quests accordingly.

Since there’s a clear connection between the quests that define the characters and the world where they happened, character creation can be, in a way, express world creation, too. If the game is not happening on a preconceived setting, the places and people mentioned in the quests can become a way for players to start defining the world where their stories will happen.

Now, for spells and enemy monsters, staples of fantasy gaming. Monsters can easily be modeled after challenges or whole quests, depending on how tough they are. Taking down a big baddie could consist of a series of challenges: first, one which its weak spots are first studied; than, another one in which it is lured in to a place where it can be more effectively attacked; then, finally, a challenge for the ambush itself.

Spells are usually a way for the characters to achieve something. Magic wielding characters can use their magic in order to get rid of challenges. But beware: it’s very easy and incredibly uninteresting to breeze through several quests just saying I’ll just use Magic! Poof! Never forget to make magic users limited in more than one way.

Rituals and otherwise Very Big Spells being quests is something I like. To Reanimate the Undead Army of Rus-Katur. Open the Underwater Portal to the Seventh Sky. I believe that quests like this, with challenges representing the different formulaic steps needed for the magic to work as intended, can make magic using feel mystical, instead of instantaneous and boring.

Narration and Story Control

Whew! Won’t I ever stop talking. One last important thing to mention, though.

We’ve established how we’d model characters and their experiences and how to determine whether a character succeeds or fails. However, this still is a narrative game, and, thanks to the weirdly informal and doubtful presentation used in this text, I still haven’t touched the topic of narration. At all. How’s that possible?

Maybe my intention is that, in this game, players can share the story control as much as they want to.

At least one player should be throwing quests towards the player characters. This could happen in a centralized, traditional GM/Players division, with the GM responsible for narrating everything and creating quests for the players, and the players responsible for their characters actions. It can be interesting to note that, however, fleshing out a quest (determining its challenges) can be similar to creating a plan to complete it. Take a look at the Mirror of Sighs example again. A different approach could be employed, right? Who decides this? The GM or the players?

A more “modern”, decentralized fictional control could leave the players to narrate their own story lines, and to help other players narrate theirs. The detailing and the likely/unlikely mechanics hint at this play form.

What now?

My intention is to write another text, following this one, where I’ll write how I imagine this game being played.

This “imagined playtest” will certainly clarify (specially to me) how this confusing pile of rules should translate to the narrative tabletop game I intend this to be. I’m confident there’s a game somewhere in here and I’m genuinely curious to see whether I’m right or wrong.