TIGSource Forums

Hey guys. I recently bought the Mouse Guard RPG book because I am a huge fan of the comics. I have found my self constantly referring back to it when I design games though. I was thinking of picking up perhaps another tabletop RPG book. Any Suggestions?

I wont be playing these. they are strictly for rule ideas, and reference for building magic systems and such.

I suggest you give Traveller a look. There's a buttload of subsystems and mini games, something in there has to be useful.

As much as I dislike (but not hate) D&D 4e, I can honestly recommend the Dungeon Master's Guide. It has a terrific first 6 or 8 chapters about role playing gaming. The other books are just meh.

that Traveller is pretty cool. I like the character creation method of answering questions and that builds your character. much better then just saying I have blank in blank. The Mouse guard RPG has a similar character creation system.

I thought about dungeons and dragons but I saw the palyer guide and master guide were exactly the same price and didnt know what the difference was.

I can recommend this article:

http://userpages.monmouth.com/~colonel/rvm.html

It catalogues all the things that appear in Rogue, damage, experience, etc. Very useful for reference.

A personal favourite among table top games I had was Middle Earth Role Playing:

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JrbHy99xoaU/T3kpYGTa1mI/AAAAAAAAAOc/dcNcUaLcoO8/s1600/MERP8000-MERP.jpg)

The source books are full interesting material and the game mechanics were rather fun to play.

I've played quite a few RPGs, and Savage Worlds (http://www.peginc.com/) is easily my favorite. The rules are simple and the game plays very quickly, but there are still a lot of interesting choices to be made. It works for virtually any setting, so there's really no need to play anything else. The Deluxe Explorer's Edition is coming out soon, and it only costs $15 (or $10 for the pdf).

I agree with this. 4e D&D has very video gameish rules (if that makes any sense). I'm also a fan of the Shadowrun rulebook. It's Sci-Fi but has magic rules in it as well.

What is the general consensus on using an existing rule system as a basis for your own work? All I know is that D&D 3.5e (OGL adaption) is available for use in commercial works.

EDIT: lol, Manbaby rank? At least I have an avatar from Ultima!

If you're making a video game, you'll probably have better luck in creating your own system rather than trying to convert an existing tabletop system. A lot of tabletop rules don't convert very well.

Paranoia, apart from being a fun game to play, is a really interesting study in inter-player dynamics.  The game is set up so that the players are on the surface working together, but at the same time they all have their own secret missions and powers which screw over the rest of the team.  It's one of the few RPG systems where not only are Total Party Kills fairly common, but they don't even need to be caused by the Game Master.  I played a game once where the situation we were in was as simple as "you are crossing a bridge".  No enemies, no obstacles, nothing.  But with the...ahem...Paranoia going around, and the fact that we were subtly using our powers against each other, set things off, and shortly later, the entire party had killed each other.

Good ol' D&D is good too.  I agree with what people said about 4e being very videogame-ish.  It's become a very rule heavy game (rather than one where a lot of the action occurs in the actual role playing and DM arbitration, which is hard to simulate on a computer) with a focus on tactical combat.

The player's guide for D&D contains the core rules of the game.  I believe the DM guide is advice and charts to help the running of a game.  Also I guess it goes into more of the specifics of how certain mechanics work.

There's a long history of games modeling their rules either directly or indirectly on the D&D ruleset (the Ultima games, Bioware's earlier games, Planescape Torment, ect...).  Although those are based on older versions of the game.