Roleplaying Mistborn?

[Glacialis]

d20 focuses on combat. It can be roleplayed, and I've done it lots of times myself. But it's more difficult than a number of other systems.

Ones off the top of my head:

Exalted: Very few charms but make them allomantic, feromantic or whatever other powers pop up. System is more granular than d20. This is a good thing.

FATE: FATE can handle anything. It seems especially suited to the world of Mistborn because of the fluidity of the system.

PTA/Prime Time Adventures: I've only played this, not run it, but I think it's worth a shot. Similar to FATE in many respects, the concepts of breaking things down into episodes and screen presence can be useful. Not sure if the system as a whole would work, but choice parts of it are certainly yoinkable.

More as I recall it.

[Entsuropi]

Your recommending systems to make rules with because those systems are very rules lite? Doesn't that kind of defeat the point, since in Fate it's literally just a word on the sheet. No distinction is made between 'Sword' and 'Small Vegetable'.  Also, Exalted is an infamously poor combat system, due to it's glacial pace.

[Fellfrosch]

If you want to try d20, I'd start with Mutants and Masterminds. My experience with that system is small, but from what I've seen it could handle Mistborn really well.

[Glacialis]

FATE isn't just words on a sheet. I've coded the first and only, to my knowledge, MUSH incarnation of the FATE system with the help of one of the developers. Customized it to Star Trek and had a hell of a good system. If it can work for warp drives, it can work for Allomancy. We had psionics in there, too. And if your FATE GM doesn't distinguish between small vegetables and swords, you need a new one.

I beg to differ on Exalted's glacial pace of combat. If you're speaking to 1st edition, I'm afraid I've no experience with that. Our group of 6 players + GM manages 2nd edition just fine. Two of us are crunch monkeys (GM + myself), two have never roleplayed before, and the other two want roleplaying with as few crunchy bits as possible. It works very well, and relatively quickly when compared to d20.

Rules lite isn't necessarily a goal. Rules minimum is more what I'm shooting for: the minimum necessary to portray allomantic combat between multiple Mistborn, which is the most complex situation I can think of. d20 doesn't allow for the flexibility that is allomancy

I'm certainly open to other systems, but I have a love/hate thing with d20. I play and run it, I like it for what it is, but I hate that it's so damn difficult to get it to do anything but what it was meant to do.

[Fellfrosch]

If you're shooting for a rules minimum, what's your problem with Feng Shui? I'm not sure I understand the objection.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I think the knee-jerk reaction to rejecting Feng Shui is that it flavors itself for Hong Kong action movies, and has a *much* less serious tone than Mistborn. However, Mistborn is a very cinematic book. Any system that gets crunchy on it is going to detract from the mood. Since the flavor is ultimately up to the gm and the players, you can use the FS system, and tone it for Mistborn. Personally, I'm tempted to start a forum game at GO using FS and the Mistborn setting.

[spence]

Rather than figuring out how to adapt a specific game system to Mistborn, I thinkwe are perhaps better off taking a good hard look at the real requirements of mistborn from an RPG system perspective:

1- Must be easily adaptable to the background... not too tied to its own races and world
2- Its magic system (or whatever it uses rather than one_ must be flexible enough to handle allomany and feruchemy
3- It must allow for a level of nature vs. nurture.  What I mean by this is that some people will have allomancy, some will always have more potential than others, and some will simply not have the ability at all.  It needs to have a way to handle that some characters are just anturally inclined to excell, rather than just saving up xp.
4- Combat, magical and physical needs to handle extremes such as iron pushing and pulling, as well as pewter arms (near super-heroic capabilities)
5- I must accomplish 4 while still being gritty, and dangerous.
6- It "should" be able to accomodate rules lawyers or rules light preferences. (this is just in my opinion)

for 2, I think that a game system with a "pool", similar to how many systems use mana is a good idea, as it accurately reflects the chemical pools of allomancy.  If such pools can be "burned faster" for more effect, then it might give us a couple of key components of both allomancy and feruchemy.

As for the combat extremes, few games have really done this well... Most heroic games tend to weaken the "normals" too much... D20 did this fairly badly... although I never played Feng Shui, my understanding is that the best way for a heroic feel is to have  alot of "mooks".  Doesn't this really sell normal's short?  I have heard that GURPS supers got a bit clunky after a certain point as well.  Perhaps the new Marvel system?  But I think it is way too low on lethality as well.  Not sure if anyone as thoughts on game systems that do "mortal" heroes well.

Of course item 6 can all come down to play style... but I would hate the system to be one that is so far one way or the other (liek Harn master, or Amber) that it is really limiting.

  Just brainstorming here


http://www.grimworld.org

[Glacialis]

I'm going back to Exalted again now that I've got a few more games under my belt. It's maybe a bit more complex then is needed here, but there's a huge amount that can be trimmed. Movement is never "okay, your turn, you can move and take an action". You can always move, even while other things are happening. Permanent Essence rating can be the "strength" of a *-mancer, while the Charm trees are cut back to one per metal per discipline (Allomancy: Ironpushing, Feruchemy: Steelstuff) and I imagine that the trees won't be very long. Abilities representing knowledge of *-mancy are needed, though there could also be ones for a particular metal. Mass combat is great and all, but is done such that the skills of commanders are merely enhanced by their troops. Hard to explain, but the book describes armies as being "worn" by commanders. Mechanically it works out. The whole system has enough situational modifiers to be quite gritty, but you can junk those and keep right on going. It's granular enough to handle gritty, yet doesn't suffer if you take much of the gritty out for a more cinematic feel.

I say Exalted only because I don't feel d20 is a good choice and Exalted is the only other RPG I'm currently playing. I will try to get a hold of Feng Shui, a current draft of FATE Generic, and any other system I can think of. It's too rich of a world not to try to wrap a RPG around.

[spence]

Question:  Okay, so regardless of what system anyone chooses to play Mistborn in, there are a few things that will be similar.  A couple of these are "races" and "magics".  So starting with races, there are obviously the "nobles", and the "skaa"  as well as the oh crap, what are the feruchemy folks called again ?  Capability-wise I was not able to really detect significant differences between the skaa and the nobles, other than that the ability to have allomancy was only given to the nobles (but could be passed on to half bloods).  For game balance purposes however, one might want to givenobles more access to allomany, but make the skaa more physically solid (due to generations of hard labor, and suvival of the fittest in such an environment).  I would also make the skaa less attractive, as thepretty ones get man-handled and subsequently killed.  But does something like this unfairly hold back the nobles in physical capabilities?  Perhaps a skaa is just "more likely" to be strong, but bot could theoretically be just as physical as the other.  Similarly, a halfbreed can be just as allomantically powerful as a noble, but is less likely to be so.  So it would have to be based on a system that allowed some level of randomness int hese respects (IMO).  I am unclear on our feruchemy friends... how much of their personality and bearing is nature vs nurture... or do any races really get any advantages at all?

As to Allomancy, it seems that the best place to start for each type is to define something outside of game mechanics... something like:
really simple and basic ironpull effect
Common, and useful ironpull effect
Fairly impressive ironpull effect
Very powerful ironpull effect (the limit for most ironpullers)
Legendary ironpull effect

If we were to do basic descriptions like these for each allomantic type, as well as each aspect of feruchemy, it might be fairly easy to come up with a 5 to 10 page guide that had conversions for various game systems... to make it easy for someone to play mistborn no matter what their system of choice.

Thoughts?

(and of course continuing to put in a shameless plug for my own system until someone tells me it is not a good fit:  http://www.grimworld.org freely available)

[MPlease]

If you want gritty and realistic combat, I suggest the Riddle of Steel system. The magic would take some custom adaptation. Pushing and pulling would be like the Movement Vagary except only with metal, while the mental metals would be like Conquer, etc. My husband is working on defining specific rules/guidelines for it, but they say it's not that difficult.

The original Riddle of Steel system was actually created by a BYU student here in Provo. When he joined the army as a linguist he sold the game and since then the franchise has kinda gone down hill, but as long as you stick to the original book and first couple of supps that Jake helped make then you're good to go.

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In response to Spence's guidelines:

1- Must be easily adaptable to the background... not too tied to its own races and world
 - Riddle of Steel is not dependent on races, the world, or even a specific time period. A lot of people 'port the rules to their setting of choice. I'm currently playing in a modern adaptation.

2- Its magic system (or whatever it uses rather than one_ must be flexible enough to handle allomany and feruchemy
 -The magic system is built for flexibility. There are no set spells, and no whatever you can imagine can be done with magic. It would take some adaptation for a Mistborn game, but it's not impossible.

3- It must allow for a level of nature vs. nurture.  What I mean by this is that some people will have allomancy, some will always have more potential than others, and some will simply not have the ability at all.  It needs to have a way to handle that some characters are just anturally inclined to excell, rather than just saving up xp.
-Riddle of Steel does not use XP. That's right! Killing things and taking their stuff will only get you the stuff! Characters advance based upon how they fulfill their "Spiritual Attributes," ie. their goals, passions, loyalties, etc.

4- Combat, magical and physical needs to handle extremes such as iron pushing and pulling, as well as pewter arms (near super-heroic capabilities)
- Wouldn't even really take any changing of the current rules to pull off the effects. Burning pewter would increase the appropriate physical attributes which then affect the combat pool and the damage an enemy takes. Pushing and pulling would require adaptation of the magic system of course.

5- I must accomplish 4 while still being gritty, and dangerous.
- Hehehehe... Riddle of Steel is a dangerous games. If you as a player aren't intelligent enough to keep your player from being stupid then your character is going to die. Probably horribly. There aren't any hit points and it's easy to get hurt and killed. Magic in TROS has never been "balanced" with non-magic wielding characters. It's an extremely powerful and flexible force that will squish even the strongest character without it. This, I think, makes it an excellent system to adapt. We had the arch-nemesis be a mage once  (had a nasty habit of trying to drop meteors on us too) and we ended up defeating him basicly by stabbing him in the back when he wasn't looking.

6- It "should" be able to accomodate rules lawyers or rules light preferences. (this is just in my opinion)
- Of course. Although I personally hate rules lawyers and I'd rather role-play rather than roll-play. But still. The rules are there to get anal about if you wish or to blissfully ignore.

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[Fellfrosch]

It occurs to me that the Inquisitor combat system would work marvelously for Mistborn--it's incredibly cinematic and very dangerous. You'd have to come up with just about everything else on your own, though, since the system is only half-formed, but the core mechanics are all there. I shall ponder this further.

[Glacialis]

Fellfrosch, link?

[Fellfrosch]

Inquisitor is an relatively recent (about 6 years) hybrid RPG/minis game from Games Workshop, set in their 40k setting. It has a lot of cool ideas but was grossly incomplete--it was essentially a tabletop game that used an RPG-style combat system, which means that it had no traditional skills or character creation rules or anything. All of the original rules, as well as a pretty good assortment of updates and articles and errata, are available from Games Workshop as free downloads, because the game is no longer officially supported.

http://www.specialist-games.com/inquisitor/whatis.asp

[DesperateDM]

Speaking of Roleplaying Mistborn (and I'm thinking more of the pen and paper type).....

I'm currently thinking of playing a d20 Mistborn world (or at least adding Mistborn elements into my existing campaign) and that primarily entails creating classes for Mistborn, Inquisitors, Obligators, and all the types of Mistlings.  I'd also be interested in writing up rules for the Terrisman and Kandra races, and maybe even stats for a Mistwraith.  Mr. Sanderson, my question is thus: have you considered releasing some world info, particularly about Feruchemy, and the Ministry?  I can understand if you won't consider releasing such information until later in the series, for fear of spoiling some surprises.... but are you planning to anytime in the future?