BB-themed RPG?

[mattgslater]

Okay, I want to run a silly RPG. I was thinking a Blood Bowl league/RPG would be fun. My thinking is this:

Get several coaches/players together to establish a team race to play. This will be my team, or the team I play against.

Each coach/player makes a team of his own, of any race, assigning a few adjective-type personality notes to each player.

Each then picks a player and establishes a name, character sheet, and personality. The other players are designed as NPCs.

We set up a monthly round-robin BB league, where each coach plays his home team, and I run the PCs' team. Each round, the opponent may choose to play the PCs' team instead, and I'll play theirs. (I doubt more than one or two will ever do this).

We play two RPG sessions a month. Each session, each coach may take on a new player as a PC, so long as nobody else is playing him. Ditto if a coach's player dies or retires. We establish draft order randomly, and then maintain the same order throughout, in a Rochester-style format (for X coaches, 1-X then X-1, etc), with new coaches picking at the end of the order. The RPG is about life in a football season, in a cheesy WFRP-based world in which BB could somehow exist amid the rampant xenophobia and constant warfare. The players can decide which race they want to play each season, or if they want to keep the old team going.

Does this sound like fun? I'll let the players decide what race they want to role-play: I suspect my guys will want Orcs or something, which is fine by me. Any ideas about what team races specifically not to use? Obviously, if they want to play Undead, I should take a big complement of positionals....

I was thinking I'd make a home-brew system using only the block dice, 2d6, and 1d8, and using all of them. Haven't got too far: anyone got novel ideas?

[voyagers_uk]

flesh it out some more and we can look at it again.

sounds like a late night brain fart... but could have promise

[Smurf]

GURPS could handle it and there is a free GURPS lite on the sjg site.

That is 2d6 as a percentile could be easily made into a 3d6 game.

There are several rules in GURPS that can be used for 'team' management and encouragement.

IIRC the Bengals (american football) introduced the no time offensive. The idea was to tire out the defence... So introducing odd sounding plays could be fun.

On the beaches of Arruckus the coach of a woodelf team called Atribes developed the Dune Defence. The coach, Mauve Bib, could be heard yelling from the side lines 'Key Wan De'. The opposition, Revved Up Sharks, were not to sure what it meant. But Lapu, Atribes's Catcher, knew and took up position. A loose ball was scooped up and thrown to Lapu who scored. The Dune Defence was a common practise amongst the Atribes.

[mattgslater]

I could easily do something GURPSy. I was actually thinking about looking into something more d666y, even.

What about this?

Most actions are resolved as: 2d6+score vs. modified 13. Stats average 5-6; for AG and ST, the formula will be BB stat = RPG stat ÷2, round up. So an elf will have Agility 7-8 and a Troll will have Strength 9-10. Skills and Talents (using WFRP2 logic) allow bonuses and re-rolls, and each player gets 3 re-rolls per session (unlike BB, these can be combined with skill rolls, at least some of the time). Roll block dice with every roll, results modify outcome on a non-p/f level. 10 is theoretical human maximum; human PCs start with all or almost all scores at 5-6; roleplaying and development earn modifiers (up and down). In effect, playing dumb will eventually reduce your Int and give you compensatory points for it. Improvement will be semi-random (Necromunda-style), but the randomness is designed always to let you build the character in a way that you want, within the normal parameters (à la BB).

For example a master baker wants to bake a cake and weave a basket; he has no basketweaving skills, but he does have a fairly good score in their common base stat. To weave the basket, he uses his Intelligence score of 6 (above average, not Einstein). He needs to roll a 7; better than even odds, but he may need a couple tries or a re-roll. With a re-roll, his failure odds are (5/12)^2. Maybe unskilled = Loner?

To bake the cake, he has skills giving him +1, +1 on cakes that aren't easy, a free re-roll, and the ability to produce a less-valuable cake any time he doesn't snake out. So, all of a sudden, this Baking@+0 check, probably a wedding cake or something at that level, needs a 5+ on 2d6, with a free re-roll, so he's only (5/18)^3 to fail, and only 1/36*(5/18)^2 to just waste his time and ingredients and make a mess.

I don't know, I just came up with that. Probably needs some work.

D8 is for randomness, ofc.

[Smurf]

Don't reinvent the wheel. It sounds like you want GURPS because it uses default skills.

Dodge can be done by enhanced dodge
Block can be done by enhanced parry

Maybe have an 'anti powers' to negate the above.

[mattgslater]

Don't reinvent the wheel. It sounds like you want GURPS because it uses default skills.

Dodge can be done by enhanced dodge
Block can be done by enhanced parry

Maybe have an 'anti powers' to negate the above.

I'm not worried about the supposed difficulty of "inventing" an RPG using only mechanics that have already been used to replicate the same setting. I know how RPGs work, and I can hammer a playable* one out in several hours. Frankly, tooling GURPS to BB would be just as much effort. And my coaches/players mostly aren't versed in GURPS, so I can't just hand them the monstrous rulebook and tell them to go to town with (cost/100 gold) + 50 points or whatever. No, heck, I'd even have to rethink point-buy.

* By "playable" I mean better than out-of-the-box WFRP2.

[Smurf]

Like I said sjg has a free gurps light downloadable pdf.

I think it gives you scope to expand.

[mattgslater]

Yeah, I can get somebody to do the easy part for me. But if I do, how can I have a block-die-based combat mechanic?

[mattgslater]

Okay, so there are six characteristics: Movement, Strength, Agility, Toughness, Leadership, and Fellowship. Every race has a default profile for each score at each position, just like now but with two more scores.

Movement = MA
Strength = ST*2, maybe -1
Agility = AG*2, maybe -1
Toughness = AV minus "armor rating" (often 2, sometimes 1)

Skills will have categories like BB. Shouldn't be too hard to figure some out. Not tonight.

BB-based combat system should be fun. I usually use a hex-mat... but the same principles of movement and combat can apply.

[MKL]

Matt,

if you want something simple, just for laugh, you can use the block dices as a general task resolution system.

Easy task: roll 2 dices, choose the best one.
Average task: roll 1 dice
Difficult task: roll 2 dices, choose the worst one.

Flash, the action is successful.
Both down: if you got some relevant skill, the action is successful, otherwise is a failure.
Defender stumble: if you got two relevant skills, the action is successful, otherwise failure.
Push: failure, but you can try again.
Skull: failure, you cannot try again.

Skills are something like “Brutal”, “Slick”, “Cobbler”, “Blacksmith”, etc... Every player choose, say, 5 terms like this to make up their character.

For an opposed test, match the attributes of the two characters: Strenght 6 armwrestling some Strenght 4 guy is an easy task.

[mattgslater]

Yeah, I'm thinking I'll have 5 categories of skills: athletic, battle, knowledge, social, trade.

Knowledge and trade really function as macroskill-categories, with maybe half a dozen microskill categories and three or four skills for each microskill. Easy and realistic.

Athletic, battle, and social are mostly BB-style skills, in categories about the same size distribution as A, P, or S. That will take me like half a day. Then I have to come up with a parallel development mechanism and an RPG progression system (BB can affect RPG and vice-versa? Need to figure that out...), which will not add much time considering that I need to work out plot and setting and stuff too. But it will take another leap.

Block dice are for opposed actions and for multiple outcomes. Combat usually uses block dice, and block dice flavor other kinds of actions sometimes. D6 and 2d6 are for p/f actions, and as follow-up after reading block dice. D8 are for randomness.
2d6+stat ≥12: Easy roll (+1 in BB)
15: Hard roll (-2 in BB)
Pow: hit, win, or lucky roll
Pow/push: hit/win unless skill, or lucky roll
Push: lesser objective, or average luck
Both: good or bad depending on skill
Skull: miss/lose or bad luck

[Gulix]

I made a custom playset for Fiasco, titled "La Coupe du Chaos" (it's in french) here

My goal was to emulate "Friday Night Lights", and other "teenagers sports movies" with a fiasco taste, but also Blood Bowl, with the events of the week before a finale.

[Long_Bomb]

How about using a 7-s-side format for an RPG. You could have four or five PCs playing the positional players and the rest of the team made up of linemen. You could then play Street Bowl, Beach Bowl, Sevens and Dungeon Bowl with the same team of PCs taking on another team. The different formats should also keep it fresh. I can imagine Dungeon Bowl working particularly well for this format. I would also hope that you could put as much effort into the off pitch action as on the pitch.

[ryan.bright1]

I like the idea for a blood bowl rpg. I am a huge blood bowl fan and extremist rpg fan and think it would be great for blood bowl!

[Winged_Human]

I always thought about taking the WFRPG and modifying the skills and such to be all BB themed, to run a BB RPG. Though I don't think anyone would play it.