This post was inspired by me seeing this From the Sorcerer's Skull post shortly after waking: https://sorcerersskull.blogspot.com/2024/01/two-species-two-systems.html... as with many ideas conceived in the groggy fog of the morning, or the dank confines of the bong-circle, it doesn't have much substance to it.
So you know how in D&D and whatnot there's races that are just a couple stat modifiers or special abilities, and then there's races that are classes... what if you wanted something much more cumbersome and less likely to see use at the table, yet is kind of neat to think about?
I'm speaking of course about races that use different systems. Your basic humans are OD&D, or OSE, or whatever. Elves are a storygame, Fate perhaps, or maybe 5E for less-fey more magic-superhero sort of elves. Dwarves, of course, are Mekton Zeta.
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Actually doing this would require quantitative and qualitative translation that would probably grind the game to a halt trying to do anything. Like if one character's a vampire using World of Darkness, maybe each lethal wound translates to 3 points of damage? And rolling three successes is the same as a roll of 15? I don't know exactly, and it would take too much work to figure out. And that's for two systems that use real numbers. Maybe if you made a big table of what's equivalent to what it'd speed things up.
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| This elf was originally going to be black, to pump up this blog's BlackRock ESG rating, but then I remembered a Cuphead analysis video which mentioned the problematic association of black people and dice (gambling) |
The closest thing I've seen to someone actually running a game like this is the fanfic Harry Potter and the Natural 20. The main character is a 3.5e Wizard (summoned via dark ritual), who the author actually rolls for, and everyone else is a normal Harry Potter character running on normal Harry Potter rules. Of course, that's a solo "game", only two "systems", and one of those systems is an informal literary construct. Still, it worked surprisingly well.
ReplyDeleteThat's a neato concept
DeleteIf they were bespoke systems, you could make it so they integrate better without actually being the same. I'll note the "storygame" Firebrands has no actual single system, unless you count the bit where you're supposed to take turns picking minigames, and everything else is minigames with different rules, and it works pretty well.
ReplyDelete