Fallout d% System

[LordofPlataea]

Hey guys. I'm looking for some help on a project that's been rolling around my head for a while. Now I know there are some Fallout Pen and Paper games out there already but they don't appeal to me, as they're either based off Fallout/Fallout 2 (as is the case with Fallout PnP), designed for d20 (Fallout d20 and Exodus RPG), or reskinned for GURPS (Fallout GURPS).

I want to create a percentile based system, taking my inspiration from Fallouts 3 and New Vegas as their skill systems are the most enjoyable in the franchise. What I have below is super rough, it's pretty much just my notes, but it's enough to get an idea of what I'm trying to do. I would love your comments/suggestions on what I have and what I can do to make this game the best it can be.

A note on combat: the current idea for combat I have is based on the Combat Skills like Guns and Melee Weapons. My working idea right now is that, in order to hit with a gun, assuming a gun skill of 25, the player would need to roll 76-100 on a percentile. I'm thinking of increasing the difficulty of this check, depending on the armor/agility of the person you're shooting at. Maybe this works? I'm not sure, thus why I'm here :D

Lastly, it is very late as I post this, so bear with the poor formatting for the time being and I'll fix it at a later date. Also, I do not know the Metric system that well, so I'm attempting to learn it as I make this game so if I make any glaring mistakes in my metric measurements, please forgive me. Thanks in advance guys!


S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
This section deals with the effects that the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats have on your character and summarizes each stat and what each effects. S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. These are your primary stats, and they directly influence your skills - and thus gameplay.

Strength allows you to hold more items in your inventory and increases your unarmed damage. It also influences which weapons you can and cannot (effectively) use.
• Associated Skills: Melee Weapons and Unarmed
• Derived Stat: Carrying Capacity = Str x 15 kilos (about 33lbs.0)
• Adds extra damage on melee and unarmed damage rolls.

Perception lets you spot enemies easier, assists in precise activity, and helps you spot danger.
• Associated Skills: Explosives and Lockpick.

Endurance increases your maximum health, poison resistance, and radiation resistance.
• Associated Skill: Survival

Charisma improves your success when talking to people.
• Associated Skills: Barter and Speech.

Intelligence increases the amount of skills points you gain to distribute over your skills when you level up.
• Associated Skills: Energy Weapons, Medicine, Repair, and Science.

Agility increases your Action Points in V.A.T.S., and improves how fast you draw, holster and reload your weapons, as well as your running speed.
• Associated Skills: Guns and Sneak.
• Derived Stat: Action Points (AP) = AGL x 3
* Derived Stat: Sequence = AGL

Luck increases your chance to deliver critical hits and boosts all your skills. Enemies will more often miss their shot at you.
• Associated Skills: ALL.
• Derived Stat: Critical Chance = Luck Score





Table 1: Skill Modifiers



Stat ScoreModifier
1+2
2+4
3+6
4+8
5+10
6+12
7+14
8+16
9+18
10+20
Table 2: Poison and
Radiation Resistances


ENDPoison Radiation
Resistance Resistance
1 0% 0%
2 5% 2%
3 10% 4%
4 15% 6%
5 20% 8%
6 25% 10%
7 30% 12%
8 35% 14%
9 40% 16%
10 45% 18%
Table 3: Skill Points Per
Level


INTSkill Points
110
2-311
4-512
6-713
8-914
1015


Table 4: Luck Skill Bonuses

LUCSkill Bonus
1 +1
2-3 +2
4-5 +3
6-7 +4
8-9 +5
10 +6







Skills
Base Stat Calculations (before TAG): Stat Score + Stat Modifier + Luck Bonus
Example: assuming all scores at 5, Guns, which is based on Agility, would have a base score of 5 (stat score) + 10 (stat modifier) + 3 (luck bonus) for a total of 18. So at 1st level, a character is relatively assured to succeed at a task 1 out of every 5 attempts.
TAG Skills: at character creation, each character chooses 3 skills that represent areas of expertise for that character. Each of these skills receives +15 points to the base skill. So, our gun skill in the example above would increase from 18 to 33, at 1st level!
Skills can be separated, and on the character sheet should be separated, into combat and utility skills. The separations are thus:

Combat Skills:
• Energy Weapons (INT): Proficiency at using energy-based weapons.
• Explosives (PER): Proficiency at using explosive weapons, disarming mines, and crafting explosives.
• Guns (AGL): Proficiency at using weapons that fire standard ammunition.
• Melee Weapons (STR): Proficiency at using melee weapons.
• Unarmed (END): Proficiency at unarmed fighting.

Utility Skills:
• Barter (CHA): Proficiency at trading and haggling. Also used to negotiate better quest rewards or occasionally as a bribe-like alternative to Speech.
• Lockpick (PER): Proficiency at picking locks.
• Medicine (INT): Proficiency at using medical tools, drugs, and for crafting Doctor's Bags.
• Repair (INT): Proficiency at repairing items and crafting items and ammunition.
• Science (INT): Proficiency at hacking terminals, recycling energy ammunition at workbenches, crafting chems, and many dialog checks.
• Sneak (AGL): Proficiency at remaining undetected and stealing.
• Speech (CHA): Proficiency at persuading others. Also used to negotiate for better quest rewards and to talk your way out of combat, convincing people to give up vital information and succeeding in multiple speech checks.
• Survival (END): Proficiency at cooking, making poisons, and crafting "natural" equipment and consumables. Also yields increased benefits from food.

Using Skills:
Method 1: To accomplish a task, you roll a d100 and the result, taking into account any relevant modifiers, and compare it to whatever skill you are trying to use. For example: you are trying to Repair an item. In order to do so, you are required to pass a Repair check. Unbeknownst to you, the Player, the Overseer sets the difficulty at normal (DC 25). Your character has a Repair skill of 30, so you can attempt to make this check. You roll your d100 and roll a 26. This doesn’t exceed your skill rating, and therefore counts as a skill pass, and exceeds the DC your Overseer sets and therefore counts as a successful repair check. DCs and Skill ratings essentially set a “window” your character has to roll within to be successful.

Method 2: instead of the window method, which after a read through seems stupid hard, your character should instead take the DC as a penalty on the check. So, with a Repair skill of 30 and a DC of 25, you would have to roll a 5 or lower (30-25=5) in order to succeed. Add to this your LCK stat (say it’s 5 in this example) and your chance to pass this check is effectively 10 or lower. If instead the DC is 50, your success chance would drop below 0% (30 – 50 +5= -15%) so the only way to pass this check would be to Critically Pass the check, or roll a natural 1.

Method 3: each skill, after being calculated fully, will be followed up with the inverse of the skill to represent the chance of failure. In order to succeed at a task, one must roll higher than one’s failure chance. For example: the Repair check from above has a rating of 30, its chance of failure would therefore be 70%. Factor in the DC25 check and the failure chance increases to 95%. In retrospect, no luck would factor into this check as a luck bonus is already imparted on each skill at character creation. The skill list would look like this: Repair 30%/70% with the first number being success and the second being failure.

Difficulty Checks: rather than the normal fallout DCs of 25/50/75/100, it would probably be better if we had no more than a 60% penalty to any check. So a Very Hard locked door would have a difficulty adjustment of +/-60 depending on which method of skill checks we use. We can separate the 60% into increments of 5% or 10%, to reflect varying levels of difficulty. Super easy checks would only have a difficulty adjustment of 5%.

Another method would be to have an 80% difficulty adjustment, to represent things only a master can do, and then only rarely. We could use the standard Very Easy to Very Hard scale of checks in fallout by separating the checks into 20% increments. So Very Easy checks have a difficulty adjustment of 20% whereas a Very Hard check has a difficulty adjustment of 80%.

[Grod_The_Giant]

So, the most important question of all is "what do you want the system to do?" Not so much the nitty-gritty "I want a dice pool system with races and point-buy," but... what kind of feel do you want the game to have? What sort of stories do you want to use it to tell, what areas do you want it to emphasize?

For a d% system, I think the standard is "roll d100, add/subtract modifiers, and compare to your stat; if you rolled lower, you succeed." So for an Easy repair check, you might roll and subtract 20 from the result, while for a Hard check you might add 20.

I'd also steer you away from basing skill points/level on a given stat. Int was kind of a god stat in the games, and it'll wind up the same here.

[LordofPlataea]

First off, thank you Grod.

Mostly, I want the system to "feel" like a decent pen and paper representation of the SPECIAL system from the games. I want the game to feel very disparate between what skills are/aren't TAG skills so the players feel like their characters are specialists in whatever skill is their TAG skill(s). To be honest, one of the biggest reasons I don't want to use a d20 system is because I'm a tad tired of that system and want to try something else.

The original idea behind homebrewing a system is to make a skill based, rather than class based system, so that 2 characters could be built exactly the same, save their skills, and those 2 characters would be entirely different, or at least feel different. I've never played a classless system, nor built one, so I thought this would be an excellent challenge.

Overall, I'm not looking for a super simulationist game. I'm more a rule of fun type gamer so a set of rules which give a good base to do just about anything and allow the GM and players to adlib when necessary would be ideal. So a slightly "rules-light" feel is ok by me.

More Ideas:


Races: there will be 3 races to choose from: Human, Ghoul, and Super Mutant. Later on, I intend to add in Robots and Synths.
Hit Points: hit points are based on Hit Die with a bonus from Endurance, identical to d20 (if it ain't broke, don't fix it right?) So our three races would have Hit Dies of d4 (Ghoul), d8 (human), and d12 (Super Mutants) + Endurance per level. Alternatively, rather than the above spread of dies, I could keep the spread tighter by giving the races d8 (Ghouls), d10 (humans), and d12(Super Mutant). Both spreads represent ghouls being a little (or a lot) squishier than humans and Super Mutants being a little more hearty.
Weapon Damage: since I'm going with d20 Hit Point generation, I thought using d20 modern weapons (or, more specifically, Fallout d20 weapons from the Fallout d20 supplement) would be a decent way of representing weapon damgage.
Advantage/Disadvantage: stealing from 5e, this seems like a decent way to deal with a lot of those pesky status effects. Normal advantage/disadvantage would be +/-10% and major advantage/disadvantage would be +/-20%.


As of now, what I'm really struggling with is Defence. If I want to shoot you with a 9mm, the current idea is to roll against my Gun skill and if it meets or is under my skill, I hit. However, what should adjust my "to-hit" roll? Your Agility? An Armor Class and agility? Should it be a carefully controlled number from 1-20 or an unlimited number so you can always have better armor. My working idea is to have a Defence similar to AC which modifies an attack roll. The only problem I see is if someone with a high AC wants to, they would be damn hard to stop if one were low level. If my Guns skill is only 30 and your AC is 20, I only have a 10% chance to even hit you.

Another idea would be the Fallout New Vegas method where each character has a Damage Threshold that functions almost identically to d20's damagae resistance. What do you guys think? Once we get the base system done, we can work on the fun stuff like Perks, Traits, and Equipment :D

Thanks in advance ya'll.

EDIT: hey Grod, I forgot to say, in response to your comment about Int being a "god" stat in the game, I couldn't agree more. What would you suggest as an alternative to basing skill points/level on INT? Perhaps make it a racial thing with Super Mutants getting less and Ghouls getting more? Or just a bas X per level for all races? What do you think about lowering the number of skill points from 10-15 a level to 5-10, so you can stretch out a game over, say, 40-50 levels? Once again, thank you!

[Grod_The_Giant]

Mostly, I want the system to "feel" like a decent pen and paper representation of the SPECIAL system from the games.
So you want D&D-style six ability scores?


I want the game to feel very disparate between what skills are/aren't TAG skills so the players feel like their characters are specialists in whatever skill is their TAG skill(s). To be honest, one of the biggest reasons I don't want to use a d20 system is because I'm a tad tired of that system and want to try something else.
Point-buy, then, focused around skills. To really make Tag skills count, you'll need something beyond just a numerical bonus, I think-- remember how quickly the starting bonus became irrelevant? More than an experience bonus to, perhaps. Maybe each skill has a special perk or two that are only available to those who Tagged it? So if you have Repair Tagged, you can modify guns to use different ammo types, if you have Medicine Tagged you can use Stimpacks as a swift action, if you have Guns Tagged you can attempt sharpshooting stunts, that sort of thing.

Exalted 3e did I think the coolest version of this I've see. It lets you ignore all level-based prerequisites for your signature skill, letting you start the game with the most ridiculous "go super-sayan and chuck a mountain at a dude" powers you want. But that's also something of a long haul game, and partially controls things with intricate skill trees.


The original idea behind homebrewing a system is to make a skill based, rather than class based system, so that 2 characters could be built exactly the same, save their skills, and those 2 characters would be entirely different, or at least feel different. I've never played a classless system, nor built one, so I thought this would be an excellent challenge.
You should probably read up on a few then, just to get a sense of what's out there. GURPS is the classic example; maybe also look at Mutants and Masterminds 3e (free online! (www.d20herosrd.com)), Fate (https://fate-srd.com/), Savage Worlds, something from White Wolf, maybe Apocalypse World... really, the more sources you can draw inspiration from the better. You should also perhaps try to check out some d100 games to see how they handle things-- the various Warhammer RPGs all use d100, I know, as do I think Rolemaster and RuneQuest from the old-school set.


Overall, I'm not looking for a super simulationist game. I'm more a rule of fun type gamer so a set of rules which give a good base to do just about anything and allow the GM and players to adlib when necessary would be ideal. So a slightly "rules-light" feel is ok by me.
Sounds good. Easier to plan, too.


More Ideas:


Races: there will be 3 races to choose from: Human, Ghoul, and Super Mutant. Later on, I intend to add in Robots and Synths.
Hit Points: hit points are based on Hit Die with a bonus from Endurance, identical to d20 (if it ain't broke, don't fix it right?) So our three races would have Hit Dies of d4 (Ghoul), d8 (human), and d12 (Super Mutants) + Endurance per level. Alternatively, rather than the above spread of dies, I could keep the spread tighter by giving the races d8 (Ghouls), d10 (humans), and d12(Super Mutant). Both spreads represent ghouls being a little (or a lot) squishier than humans and Super Mutants being a little more hearty.
Weapon Damage: since I'm going with d20 Hit Point generation, I thought using d20 modern weapons (or, more specifically, Fallout d20 weapons from the Fallout d20 supplement) would be a decent way of representing weapon damgage.
Advantage/Disadvantage: stealing from 5e, this seems like a decent way to deal with a lot of those pesky status effects. Normal advantage/disadvantage would be +/-10% and major advantage/disadvantage would be +/-20%.


Races are good; I'd try to base the distinction more on active special abilities than passive stat bonuses, though. To paraphrase a quote from someone's signature, "active racial abilities are great. You're not just being a dwarf, you're actively dwarfing your way through obsticles."
I don't think D&D style hit points are really good for a post-apocalyptic game, but they're easy and the games basically used them, so <shrug>
I'm a fan of Advantage/Disadvantage, yeah. I think 20%-25% is a good general investment, since it feels kind of like one level of competence: 100% to 75% to 50% to 25% to 0%.



As of now, what I'm really struggling with is Defence. If I want to shoot you with a 9mm, the current idea is to roll against my Gun skill and if it meets or is under my skill, I hit. However, what should adjust my "to-hit" roll? Your Agility? An Armor Class and agility? Should it be a carefully controlled number from 1-20 or an unlimited number so you can always have better armor. My working idea is to have a Defence similar to AC which modifies an attack roll. The only problem I see is if someone with a high AC wants to, they would be damn hard to stop if one were low level. If my Guns skill is only 30 and your AC is 20, I only have a 10% chance to even hit you.
If you want D&D style AC, it should presumably be a penalty-- and a pretty small one at that, perhaps Disadvantage for light armor and Major Disadvantage for heavy. I certainly don't think you should have some sort of skill-based defense roll. But then again...


Another idea would be the Fallout New Vegas method where each character has a Damage Threshold that functions almost identically to d20's damagae resistance. What do you guys think? Once we get the base system done, we can work on the fun stuff like Perks, Traits, and Equipment :D
This is probably a better way to do it, especially for guns.


EDIT: hey Grod, I forgot to say, in response to your comment about Int being a "god" stat in the game, I couldn't agree more. What would you suggest as an alternative to basing skill points/level on INT? Perhaps make it a racial thing with Super Mutants getting less and Ghouls getting more? Or just a bas X per level for all races? What do you think about lowering the number of skill points from 10-15 a level to 5-10, so you can stretch out a game over, say, 40-50 levels? Once again, thank you!
If skill points are to be the main focus of the system, by all that is radioactive and holy keep them consistent between players.

As for skill points/level... now you're starting to get at some of the grittier bits. Without restriction, I suspect players will tend to push their main few stats as high as possible as fast as possible, and only then branch out-- you might want to have some sort of cap, especially if you're using levels. That'll force characters to diversify a bit. And for setting a cap, and setting skill progressions... you have to decide how good you want players to be, and how versatile.

Speaking of, you might have to expand the skill list a little bit. 13 skills is on the low end-- it misses things like Insight and Perception altogether, it's overweight on combat skills, and it groups a number of social skills into one (a personal pet peeve, since it makes playing a socialite somewhat more boring).

[Zireael]

For a d% system, I think the standard is "roll d100, add/subtract modifiers, and compare to your stat; if you rolled lower, you succeed."

Yeah, that's called d% roll under and seems like the standard.

As for what Int can do and NOT be a God stat, I'm stumped.

P.S. Guys, could you check my d% system thread and help out a bit? I'd like to avoid god stats, too.

[Grod_The_Giant]

As for what Int can do and NOT be a God stat, I'm stumped.
I'm a fan of using Abilities to set minimum competencies. Like, you start with Str 20, so all of your Str-based skills default to a 20% success rate.