An age later

Well, it has been a long, long time since I last posted. By my count, the version number is up to 11th. Alot of the original DNA is still in there, despite the core mechanic itself having changed several times - now using a mixture of d10+bonuses /d10 die pool. (a couple of older versions received some some playtesting on rpol, but mostly just enough to break them). The last two versions have been fantasy RPGs, despite the supers influences.
Nearly time to get other people to take a look!

How Professor X Taught the Ogres A Better Way

Another week of development, though I've spent almost as much time this week on formatting and arting it up than actual rules changes. Work fairly busy as usual, so not as much time as I'd like. I'm now signed on to 5 games on rpol as well, though as that's self-inflicted I can't expect much sympathy. Built a couple of characters and ran them through T&T adventures...the first one caused me to revise the attributes system and made me notice I left humans off the race list (oops!), and went on to die a horrible but balanced death (Deathtrap Equalizer, dice roll #12 - it eats most of the T&T characters that go there too) the second one only broke the Languages rules, and went on to be eaten by a mummy in Beyond the Silvered Pane. Still debating whether scimitars are broken, or maybe its just that most of the monsters in T&T don't wear armour.

Anyway, I think I promised to discuss development history of UH...
Say you want to build the ultimate RPG. The theory is simple - every RPG has a couple of awesome rules in a ton of mediocre ones. To build the ultimate RPG then, all you have to do is scavenge through every game for bells and whistle, and put them all together in one place.
After scavenging through a couple of hundred freerpgs (courtesy of John H. Kim's freerpg site) I had a fairly long list, though the complication of course is that all rules work best with different core mechanics, and they may not all be compatible within an overall rule context.We found then, that the highest number should work within a core system that was a combination of mechanic types; for UH then, we tried the combination of a Universal Table mechanic and the roll-a-bucket-of-dice-and-count-the-successes approach exemplified by Shadowrun/Storyteller.
Another moment that shaped the system was when we looked at the Mind Shield power in the old MSH Campaign Book - as used by Professor X, I believe - where the Power rating was rolled randomly but with a minimum rating of [Psyche + 1CS] (since normal characters defaulted to just Psyche). Why not, I thought, roll the Power rating up normally and just add it to the Psyche score, since with its Rank system doubling the score isn't too imbalanced.The next Aha! moment may have been Dragon Warriors, a little 80s game way ahead of its time that had an innovation called the Armour bypass roll, where after hitting you roll again vs. "armour factor" to deal damage. Ogres in dragon warriors get +1 to their Armour Factor for having tough skin, which is fine if your Ogre is wearing some furs or leather armour but which makes them tremendously tough if they're wearing Full Plate.Obviously, the stacking system I'd thought of using with Mind Shield could fix this, by giving diminishing returns. It was actually a nice, symbiotic relationship too - the MSH Body Armour rules were fairly broken, and an Armour Bypass mechanic could fix that.
So, we had a game mechanic and a plan. I borrowed a Rank system, converted it to the current
d6-and-cross-reference mechanic, and went from there.The first versions of UH looked very little like it does now, as tons of strange rules were combined together in some horrible bastard hybrid. Gradually, its mutated into its current form.

"Let there be radiation!"...and lo, there was radiation.

This blog is largely about the Unearthly Heroes RPG system that I’ve been working on for the past year or so (since a bit before Gen Con Oz ‘08). Hopefully, the blog site will be somewhere I can get feedback and discussion going to feed back into the development of the game.
UH is now by my count in version 8.2 or so now– every version number being the point I’ve had some idea which would cause so much rework that it was easier to throw the old version away and start again. Change has been slowing down and a lot of the initial clunkiness has been ironed out of the system, so now is probably as good as ever to start making it public. Shortly we should see some actual playtesting – on rpol.net initially. The system also has enough superficial similarities to Tunnels & Trolls, notwithstanding that its closest relative is the old Marvel Super Heroes RPG (the FASERIP system, not the SAGA version) that conversion shouldn’t be difficult; I’m looking forward to dragging out some of my old T&T solo adventure books and trying to run a UH character through them.
Next post – development history!