Thoughts on a Malifaux Roleplaying game

[Dire Hoarcat Snuggler]

I'm not an RP-er, but I can tell you I'd strongly consider it if,

a) it's Malifaux-themed, and you could do whatever class you want, not a specific character, but a faction/outcast minion type (a given)

you could use your standard Wyrd minis for it (multiple uses are a solid selling point... plus I know RPers who already USE Wyrd's minis for gaming!)

RPGs I've played before and liked are...

Call of Cthulhu

Paranoia

WFRP

~J~

[sjostrand]

@Sjostrand

Don't forget that the Cb, Df and Dg stats are highly dependant on equipment. For an RPG you might need more depth of statistics than what works well for a fast paced skirmish game. I'm not saying it should be overly complex but a lvl 1 character should be able to deal the same dmg with a gun as a lvl10 does with that same gun. But the lvl 1 char should have different Cb for different weapons as obviously is not experienced with everything. In the TTG you have sets that were made ready for you, but in RPG it can fall apart in a minute... The witchling hunter loses its broad blade and nicks the daggers from the corpse on the floor. The original game was not prepared for such situation (and why would it), but you intend to...

Yes, I know that. But I decieded not to care. Not to begin with. It's a lot of problems with this. What if the players want to combine a lot of strange talents that could be a very powerful combination. If we should be able to play Malifaux at regular basis, then I would put up a list of talents/spells and have diffrent costs. And use diffrent weapons with diffrent damage.

But for now, the only diffrence the weapon choice is going to make is range.

My players will be able to cope with it. We like "rules light systems".

Basically: Big weapon = long range/not easy to hide. Small weapon = short range/easy to hide.

[Talishko]

Hey, but Malifaux already has a great idea to regulate the naughty mind of the character creator. The suits. Let's say that certain abilities, talents, spells, etc only become available at a certain level of power of the relevant suit. To begin with you can have one suit at lvl 0 and no others. Then as you get more experienced you can either spend xp to raise the level of your source of power (suit) to get more abilities, talents, spells available, or spend xp on actually learn/raise one from the already available ones. Also, you can split the suits up to more streams (3 or 4 if you wanna stick with the original idea). One can raise everything simultanously but very slowly (therefore have some great combo possibilites but with rather disappointing effect) or go for one stream and be powerful in fewer things. On higher levels you might be able to learn to draw powers from a new source (second suit lvl 0), etc...

This should give you a tree-like system for raising your character. And the style can vary from player to player, according to what they are more confortable with between a tall, straight, stout tree and a thick bush with countless new branches in every directions.

Mind you the book describes how the different powers link to different suits (p34).

Edit:

I've read it back and got a new idea... What if all abilities, spells, talents, etc.. give you certain amount of points of the relevant suit/power when you learn/raise them. And when you're working out an effect you dont roll dice or flip a card (tho closing out cards would mean no cheating fate so that has to stay), but add the points you have in the needed suit to the used ability's value. So if you have most of your talents/spells/whatever from the 'crows' pool you will more likely do good debuffs then someone with loads of 'rams'. Also, you can allocate suits to different weapons statistics, therefore no one has to suffer from low dmg output. Fortunately the wyrd guys gave us a good dmg option for 3 of the suits out of 4. :rams Physichal Damage :crows Wounds and :tomes Magical Damage.

Edited December 5, 2009 by Talishko

[redstripe]

If the writing is as tight and intriguing as the Malifaux rulebook I'll buy it for sure.

It makes my day when I read something like this.

[Trevor Towers]

Building a RPG strictly off the mini rules is kind of short sighted; What matters in the mini's game are pure stats like CA/CB/MV... But in a RPG, a lot more stats come into play (perception, charisma...) when role playing out a session.

Instead of scratch building stats and a cost associated with them, I grabbed the old Vampire the Masquerade character sheet to get a feel for building a character and found the two match up pretty nicely.

The sheet is broken down to three (roughly) flields of interest: Abilities, Skills, everything else. Though the Vampire RPG uses a completely different game engine to resolve its struggles, I tossed it aside in lieu of the Malifaux duel resolution. I found if you were to add the Attributes and Skills (from Vampire) you would get a number very close to what Malifaux uses. In other words, a Stat like CB (in Malifaux) having 7 is pretty damn good. In Vampire having, a Dex of 4 and a...say pistol skill of 3 is again pretty damn good. With a little tweaking of points given to the pc and the ability/skills naming, id say in regards to pure stats, its a good foundation. If you want to take a look a the sheet, just type in "mr gone character sheet" in google.

With above, I think it would be possible to derive the needed stats for combat (CA,DF) from the Ability+Skill and use the awesome Malifaux game mechanic for truly memorable sorties into Malifaux.