Playing with Planescape, but not in D&D

To me, System and Setting should be independent. I could just as easily run a game using Hero system, GURPS, or BESM if I am a talented GM (and my players are familiar with the rules).

 As far as possible PS-based games go, I might consider Big Eyes Small Mouth - sadly out of print, but it had a fairly rich and fun design that wasn't necessarily tied to anime. It was also a light, easy rules system.

See, I completely agree with you there: I love the Vancian system. It's one of the main reasons why I dislike 4th Ed. It just defines wizard for me: brooding over age-old books of lore for a glimpse of arcane might, studying ancient scrolls every morning, just to squeeze that little bit of barely restrained magic in your skull, to be unleashed by strange gestures and arcane incantations... that's wizardry.

  I tried to run a game with the MnM system on these forums here, but only two people volunteered, of which only one half-made a character. It never started.

And it was the one thing that MnM lacked. Yes, it allowed my players to play: -A flying frog the size of a small car (not a slaad, he was from the prime)

-A roguish trickster with the ability to turn into a shadow to squeeze through tiny holes

-An undead creature from the elemental plane of dust with the ability to turn into a cloud of sand and blast an enemies face off.

However, no one played a wizard. Because it just didn't work. I tried to come up with houserules (right after the "Banish creature" power and the powers for gates) for spells that had to be memorized, but it didn't work out.

Yep. If you ever find or invent a system that has both the flexibility of MnM and the ability to include vancian casters, I'd give you either a pulitzer or a nobel price.

Regarding the feeling of casting a vancian spell: I never read a book by Vance, but a few years back I wrote a short story (in german) from the perspective of an old and half-mad wizard in a very-low-magic world explaining how it felt to cast spells. He refered to "binding the primal forces of the universe inside your mind, forced into the shape of a spell, and feeling the power of magic howling and clawing at the walls of it's prison inside your skull, to be unleashed if you desire. A proto-sentient force, constantly trying to overwhelm your conciousness, if your will was not strong enough to chain it."

Perhaps he was just mad, but still. And now WotC tries to tell me that's not awesome.

Greetings.

Flexible how?

OK, time to expound. I am a new user here and this is my first post, and in fact I registered specifically because of the OP's questions and your ideas. So, you two are doing something interesting . Now, I have a bit of experience with role playing games, but definitely nothing compared to the people who post here. Still, the idea of a new and more flexible magic system than the one in D&D sounds cool, so I'd like to help if I can.

Noob question time: Vancian magic is the magic type in D&D right? Mages sleep before they can cast, must have spells in their spellbooks or use depletable items and all that jazz, right?

And of MnM magic (m'n'm... that's funny) I have no idea. Perhaps you could point me to a brief description?

Anyway, my point is, designing a new magic system sounds like an awesome exercise. Therefore, assuming I understood the desire to use Vancian casters correctly: flexible how?

Holy mother of your favourite deity that sounds awesome. Any chance you could post it here, or have it somewhere online? My German isn't yet at a D&D level but I think I'd enjoy this nonetheless. Please oh please don't tell me Wizards own the copyright for the stuff you send them.

Regards,

Tal Rasha

GURPS character generation at high power levels (regardless of setting) is...unique--in the most traumatic of ways. On the other hand, Planescape heros don't have to be insanely powerful, so it's not a problem at low to mid power levels (ordinary guy to very epic action hero dude is GURPS' strongest area. Flying radioactive dinosaurs with levels in wizard and giant machine guns not so much, IMO.)

I'd say you can do a transforming character, hero's journey, etc. with GURPS. It's just overwhelming at really high power levels because of the point buy.

GURPS certainly can scale; I know guys who play at the 100, 150, and 500 point levels, and that's just the games I know of right now.  Of course, how fast you get from any one of these to the next is a function of how fast your GM gives out XP, like in any system, but personal growth is eminently doable in GURPS.  It also depends on how focused your point expenditure is; some stuff does require saving up for, though some expensive items can be bought in "chunks" by taking them first with limitations and then paying to remove those.

Here's an example.  I've had a spellslinging Shinto priest in a 1940s game for a year or so now.  (He's a U.S. citizen, with a family... and he lives in San Francisco.  Current game time is December 2, 1941.  He's faced Nazi sorcerers, Japanese demons, New Orleans ghosts, and an evil Easter Island moai, but his life is about to get really interesting....)  Over the course of the game, he's picked up some skill with guns, expanded his levels of spiritual awareness (he can now see unmanifested spirits) and acquired a skill-boosting mystic symbol.  He also has some unspent points, and has been leaving small, ritually named tokens at various points he's visited on his missions around the world.  I'm not actually sure what I'm planning with that yet, but I plan to go big with it.  ^_^

Anyway, yeah.  Bumpkin-to-bad-mother is doable in GURPS, at least IMO.  In fact, one of the Dungeon Fantasy supplements, "The Next Level," is specifically about packages that can simulate "leveling up," if you like to plan out your character's development goals.

Another multi-genre system which could probably be used to run Planescape is the Hero system. In particular, there are a lot of fantasy supplements that have been published. And the character building is definitely flexible enough to build a flaming, taunting skull character.

Since Hero was originally designed around superheroics, it does include a wide array of character options. Vancian spellcasting is easy, using limitations on the power (spell). Using the more lethal options for characters can capture the fantasy feel, rather than the feel of the nigh-indestructible superheroic genre.

This thread is very interesting

I've been looking for a better system to use with Planescape for ages. I tried the RuneQuest system but it's too gritty for Planescape and when I stumbled a couple of days ago upon HeroWars/HeroQuest, I thought I had found the very system I was looking for : flexibility (flying and taunting skulls or mages on fire or undead okay with magic coming from spells learned in grimoires), fantasy and fun.

I bought the core book and still have to finish it : did someone try it before me in this forum ? Did it cost much time (for keywords and the like) ? Did it work well with PS ?

Heyhey,

I'm happily DMing (GMing) Planescape with GURPS for a few years now and can only recommend it. A usefull source for rules conversion and thoughts how Planescape ideas work with the system is this website, to the creator of which I will be eternally full of praise and thanks: http://sonic.net/~rknop/Omar/planescape/gurps/

What I am especially fond of with GURPS is the complete freedom not only in character design but also in development. There are ranges of power, not exact levels. It's much more 'organical' (can you say that in english?) than D&D. And a certain amount of character points doesn't say so much about the deadliness of a character, but more about the char being a blood. A 300 CP char can be a fighter who kills fiends with his right hand strapped to his back or an unmagical expert in planar cosmology who really has some fame and standing in certain Guvner-circles but won't stand a chance against a common 25 CP basher from the street in a knife fight. That's because all there is to a character, from social status to attributes like strength or IQ, skills, mental illnesses, sheer luck etc. is given a positive or negative point value.

In Nomine probably could yeah. And I fully believe GURPS itself could as well, it's one of my more favoured systems as a GM.

I have a campaign in which the players bargained their way into hell as minor dukes, so I agree - while the pcs can be weaker than everything around them, there is no reason they need to stay that way.  But then, I'm of the very vocal opinion that levels mean much less in Planescape, where intelligence, knowledge, a quick wit, and quick feet will get you a whole lot further than a flaming +3 sword of skewering.  There will always be people weaker and stronger, than yourself and those people are rarely as obvious as one might suspect. (and only sometimes "people" by the strictist definitions)

Everway.

Unknown Armies.

I...don't know about Unknown Armies.  I mean, the magic system for adepts does fit Planescape, but I don't really see archetypes fitting the setting very well without a lot of forcing.  And that's ignoring the major problem, which is that the modern-day aspect is really a core part of the system, and it would be essentially impossible to remove it while still capturing the same feel of the system.  A huge part of UA is taking real-life events, locations, and people and looking at them through the lens of this setting.  There's a reason why it's suggested the best location to set a UA game is your own home town, where you already know all the nooks and crannies of your neighborhoods, the rumors and legends, the major colorful figures on the street.  By taking it and putting it in a setting that's already hugely fantastical to the point where the fantastic is essentially mundane such as Planescape, you're losing a huge part of UA, peeling back the surface of your everyday life to explore what might be lurking underneath.

 Basically, it might work from a purely mechanical view, but I don't see it as feeling like an Unknown Armies game at all.  And if all you want is the mechanics, there are honestly far better mechanics to use for Planescape than UA.

Well, I can't disagree with that.

All right, I can understand that.  And yeah, thinking on it, the archetype system does fit that pretty well.  It just always seemed to me that one of the big themes to UA was "there's a lot of strangeness in real life, if you just pull back the veil a bit"; inspiring not just the characters to look behind the curtain, but the players too, you know?  And by using it in a game that's not based in modern-day Earth, you'd lose a lot of that.  But I can see your view too, and it makes sense enough to me.

Haha, you're not the only one here that's considered that.  I've thought that'd be awesome for a while.