Thread: Pen and Paper Style Gaming

I cant give you an official answer, and there is no die roller that I know of. What I can tell you is with people preferring to do RPs different ways PMs, forums, IM, e-mail I kinda doubt there will be one. It might be easier just to do it yourself in the real world or, if you know some programming, create it yourself. Most I RP with wants the heroes to win, but realistically allow damage as is. But as a fellow RPG rule monkey I have tried to find workarounds. Note though many here rather do free-form than get tied down on rules. Or in the case of the RPG Paranoia, screw the rules and do whatever is most funny. Here is some ideas from moi from least complicated to Are you kidding me?! complicated. Dont ask why spreadsheets makes me horny Magic system I have two. One takes Shadowruns concept and just free-form it. If its an easy spell, no problemo. Medium, the caster feels a little winded or fatigued. Hard, insert headaches and nose bleeds. The other is to decide on some sort of fuel system for spell points. And the time to refuel might be at an inconvenient time i.e. when being chased. And being what this place is, guess what the fuel is? I am all out of juice. Quick! I need some sperm and an orgasm! A fairly simple number crunching system. Warning many drop my RPs after revealing the number crunching! I also have another number crunching system for heathorniness. All actions succeed unless so much time andor situation results in failure due to the need to seek relief. Both of these are hints at on my f-list. GMDM I actually have this on a request thread . Alas, my only taker has yet to post. sniff And truth be told, the rules and setting Earthdawns Barsaive are very much intertwine. Yet even here the story comes first and willing to wave some of it off. Still, the GMDM half could do all the die rolling on his side. Rule of Averages Take the typical D20 and pretend all die rolls are 10. If you really want to succeed on a task, you can pretend you roll just enough to do that. Say a 15. However, you know have a debt of 5 and your next virtual rolls need to pay that debt. The next one might be a virtual roll of 5, or the next 5 rolls a 9. You can also go the opposite way. One is given a task requiring a roll of 7. After a virtual roll of 7, the person gets a credit of 3 to roll a 13 for later or just save it till some other time when a higher roll is needed. Decide on a debtcredit limit 10 to 20 and run with it. Virtual Cards Imagine you have 20 cards numbered 1 to 20. Instead of rolling you spend a card hoping it will be high enough to succeed in the task. After spending 10 cards or whatever you and your partner decide you get the oldest card spent back into your hand or pool. If you want to make it more complex, allow suits that are trumps giving, say, a 50 or 100 bonus to the value of the card if spent on certain actions, but penalize if you use it for other actions. Say a suit for Strength, a suit for Constitution, etc. An offline spreadsheet will help here, creating a 2D grid Early on many tasks might be easy but once you get to that number of cards its time to make some decisions. This is very similar the TSRs SAGA rules which uses cards instead of dice. The idea is you want to hoard your high cards till you really need them, gambling using your low cards on simple tasks will succeed or purposely fail an unimportant task in hopes to draw a higher value card.