First, please bear with some initial context:
I am creating a MUD engine from the ground up. I am nearing the point in development, where I will have to carve out a player/combat system, however I admittedly have zero experience playing TTRPGs. The only understanding I have is of being a player of existing MUDs and RPG computer games.
My understanding is the majority of MUDs are based upon D&D rulesets, occasionally modified to varying degrees. I would personally like a bit of an edge, and model my system after something else.
The engine is geared towards worlds that:
- Encourage solo exploration and survival.
- Have distant sci-fi, cyberpunk, and dystopian themes.
- In addition to equipment, implant, and class bonuses, will incorporate gunplay.
It would be ideal to base off a ruleset that isn’t [[[extremely]]] complex, but also allows for customization and flexibility.
Any suggestions are appreciated, and if there are any further questions, please ask.
Thanks!
EDIT: If anyone is curious about or wants to follow development, here is the github repo.
You might actually want to look for RPG systems that are a particular kind of bad.
Some systems with decent math behind them fail because they are too fiddly. They might have tons of modifiers to track, cumbersome rolling, lots of traits based on averages of other traits, and so on. Those types of systems can often be great for things like MUDs, because the computer can hide most of it from the player. And, maybe a roll takes 10 times as long, but that just means the software can do it in 10ms instead of 1ms, so who will care?
If Earthdawn was open licensed, I’d suggest it as being “the right kind of bad”. It’s weird exploding pool step system is interesting because the dice for each step are set up such that the average roll of the pool is approximately the step number.