Just In Time RPG System

This system as designed as to have as many flexibility as a player could want and at the same time to be fun to play with. This means:

The rules are simple, and can be read in 30 minutes.
Build the characters can be done in about the same time.
The rules are enough important as to the make each caracter unique.
The rules are not overly complicated as to make the character complicated.

Basic Rules

The complete rules are available on this file. What follows is a short version with some comments.

The basic character design envolves thinking a backgroud story and distributing 25 status points that will describe the native features of each character.

Native Features

These are the features your character is born with. A character can learn magic, but can't become as magical as a Fairy, can become stronger but not as someone that was born a lot bigger than he was, and so on.

The attributes on which these points are distributed are:

Dexterity: Describes how good your character is at manipulating objects. It affects tests envolving hand skills, and the chance of hitting a target during battle.
Agility: Describes how fast your character usually moves, and how good is its balance. It affect tests envolving balance, speed and physical control; it also describes how fast is your reaction time and how well you can dodge attacks.
Intelligence: Describes how smart, your character is and its expertise with magic. It affects tests with magic and intelligence, as well as how many mana your character have available.
Life: Describes how tough your character is, and how well it deals with illness, poison, etc. It affects constituition tests and also define how many Hit Points your character has available.
Strengh: Describes how fit is your character, how much strengh you can put on melee weapons and how easy it is to subjulgate another character in Strenght tests.

This system has several advantages, first each attribute is important, and useful during game play and combat.

Second the status of each character are fixed so:

Its easy to rememeber what each character is good at, and to calculate attacks without having to look back on the statistics all the time.
It is easier to create fair balanced skills, since the average HP, magic resistance, dodge speed, etc are fixed values and are not ever changing.
Role play logic works better, a human is weaker than a Troll, a Troll is weaker than a Dragon and that is it, you can't change nature.
Finally there is no need to erase and overwrite your stats all the time.

One important detail is that different from D&D the charisma of a character is not a statistic, if you want to have a charismatic character show that on the role play!

Luck - A Role Play Rewarding System

Lucky points are an awesome feature of this system, each character can collect Lucky Points by making the game fun, and the game master is responsible to proper reward that behavior. After that in desperated moments it really fun to be able to increase 2 points on the outcome on a dice and make that critical hit on the right moment to end a battle and save the day.

This system is very simple, you get Lucky by making the game fun, and you spend it increasing the outcome of tests when you think its necessary. Of course that too many Lucky points can take the fun out of rolling dices, but the master is responsible for not letting that happen.

Attack and Defense

Attacking is interesting, makes sense and is not overly complex:

Atack:

A player throw a d20 dice, the game master sets the difficult, lets say 15.

The outcome is 13, but I have some modifiers:

My Dexterity modifier gives me +2
My Bow Expertise Skill gives +2

So the final outcome is 17, so I could hit the target.

To know how hard I hit it I throw my attack dices, one for each weapon. I have a Bow whose damage is of a d8+3, if the outcome is 4 the damage is 7(4+3).

Defense:

This damage is then subject the the enemy's defensive steps:

The defender will spend his dodge points to evade the attack, suppose he has 3 DP left this turn. It will decrease the attack to 4 damage.
Now It hits the defender's armor. Its a light armor and stops only 2 damage. lefting other 2 to the last defensive step.
The last step is received by the defender's HP, he has 6 HP and this hit removes 2 from his HP.

If a next player attacks this same target in this turn he will have no dodge points left, meaning he is too much out of balance and cannot evade a second hit. So if the second attacker deals 6 damage 4 would hit his HP causing him to have 0 HP. A character with 0 HP is consdered out-of-battle but still awake.

Custom Skill Creation

There are only 3 rules for creating skills:

They should always be congruent with the role play.
They should have fair Skill Point prices as defined by the game master.
Each skill pricing should be based on the basic skills of the game, so that it is easier to reason why one skill is cheaper or expensiver than another.

The third rule means that if you want to create a new skill, you should make it from rules of other skills that look like it, and use the sum of their prices to calculate the price of the new skill.

These 3 rules have several implications:

You can create any skill you can imagine, it is up to the master to make sure its price is fair.
You can declare an non existent skill to exist at any time (even during battle), But only if it makes sense for your character to have that skill and you have enough SP to buy it.
You can learn new skills during game play (after battles or events). If you have enough SP and if you were exposed to that knowledge during gameplay. For example a cave men can learn how to use a laser gun, but cannot declare to know it in advance.
You can upgrade an existing skill to become better (after battles or events). If you have enough SP to do so.

So a common event chain is like this:

A player to spend some SP during character creation so that he has his basic skills, e.g.: I am a hunter, I should have critical hit, expertise with bows and a special skill that makes my arrow blow once per day causing magical damage (just because I want).

After that during gameplay the party gets to a forest and the game master asks, does anyone has skill to survive in the wildness? It makes totally sense for the hunter to have that skill, so he can spend some of the SP points he still has, declare to have that skill and use it after that, no problem.

Some time later after some fights he decides he want to use his special skill of blowing arrow twice a day, he has gained more SP by winning some challenges so he has enough to upgrade it. The master allows it and now he upgrades his skill.

Some time later he was hit several times with poisonous attacks but survived, he then wants to declare that now he has learned some level of poision resistance, the master allows it since it makes sense to his background and now he has it.

Then during an adventure they have the chance to perform a sneak attack (during battle) for the first time! Wait he is a hunter, obviously he should be good at it, he can then declare to have that skill, and use it.

Note that with this workflow he character does not have to predict all possible circunstances his character is be exposed to during character creation. This makes the process a lot faster and make all characters more credible, since they will probably have the skills they should have when the time comes.

This make everything you write on your character sheet useful. So you waste no time, and it is fun to write every new skill on your character.

The draw back of this approach is that a lot of weight is deposited over the game master shoulders.

This problem is minimized by the existence of several examples on how to create new skills, so that the master can use them as base and and reason a good price for the new skill.

For example the blowing arrow skill should require some area of effect damage, e.g. hit up to 3 adjacent characters, I would charge 6 SP just for that, It would also cause some damage e.g. 1 d12 + 3 distributed among all 3 targets. For that I would charge another 9 (6 + 3) SP.

The price up to now is very expensive 15 SP, a normal character starts with 15-20 SP.

Now lets evaluate the draw-backs of the skill: It can be used only once a day. To evaluate that we can think of a good discount, lets suppose we are expected to have an average of 3 battles per day, this would mean that he would use it a lot less than other characters would. So lets divide this price for 3. The final skill will cost only 5 SP. Which is a fairy normal price for a skill. If he wants to upgrade it I would charge 1/3 of the normal price. Now if he wants to shoot it twice a day, I will have to go back to the pricing, now it will cost 2 * (15/3), so to make to use it 2 times per day he would have to pay +5 SP.

If a game master thinks any skill a players suggests is to complicated he can ask the player to think of some think else, or something simpler. But things usually work well even if the pricing mechanism may get a little abstract.

VinGarcia / jit-rpg-system