Wow, reading this I had a major memory rush of staying up until 7am on Sunday mornings playing with you and Tehan. Ahhh the joys of aborted DH and UA campaigns

 

Haha, yeah. Those were fun. Hopefully this one will go a bit better.

 

I'm wondering, has any of you ever thought of playing a Harry Potter RPG. Pen and Paper style? I've played a couple of forum based RPG of the genre, but nothing with concrete rules about spells and such, and most were based in playing students in Hogwarts (not much to do most of the time!).

So, any thoughts about the possibility? Or how we could set up something?

 

It wouldnt necessarily be hard to work out, especially if you used a pre-existing open-license product like FUDGE, or FATE (Which is just FUDGE minus XP and what not).

But your biggest problem isnt going to be designing it. Its going to be Rowling and her Lawyers. Even if we did it for personal use only, somehow it would get off the the site and thats just a mess nobody wants to be in.

(I say itll get off primarily because when I had my ebook library on line, I passed the link around DLP and explicitly told them not to share it outside of the site. 4 months later it was on another ebook share/piracy site. >_> Annoying, that.)

 

There actually is a HP rpg system, that uses 2d6 for most rolls.
It's fan made and there's a pdf floating somewhere. If someone is really interested, I might look for it in the hard drive, but I don't promise anything.

It's as average as could be expected. The spells are not too many, most of them have wrong names, just because, and the system is rather clunky.

All the spells are divided into seven (?) categories - Charms, Conjuring, Curses, Jinxes(?), Transfiguration, Mind. Maybe there was another one.

The wand has an interesting mechanic - there are templates, but you actually supposed to choose it yourself. By default every of the seven categories has +0. You can add from one category and subtract from another. For example, a wand could be "Curses +4 Transfiguration -5, Mind -2, Charms +3" I think the upper boudary was +5, but don't really remember.

The spells worked this way - Intelligence Stat (1to10) + 2d6 + whatever bonuses you have have to beat a difficulty of the spell, something ~10+, depending on the difficulty of the spell.

The main flaw of the system was that each spell cost 'mana' equivalent, thus, with Mana Stat x 10 points of mana you could effectively cast only Mana Stat number of spells in a given scene, before needing some rest.
Clunky.

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The game I played this was rather horrible and it was the fault of my friend that I agreed. The game master took an approach to the game alike a novice fanfiction writer, and he had replaced anything important with OC's, tried to make a mystery out of some crazy shit no one knew where it was from and used the maps of his old game for the situations.
Probably the last time I played Harry Potter setting.

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If I had to GM a Harry Potter game, though... I'd home-brew something.
If someone is interested - I could spend half an hour looking for my notes and there should be a blueprint of a home-brew system that might somewhat work.

 

I actually wrote up an HP system once, never got the chance to try it as not enough of the folk at my rping society wanted to try rping HP. I modeled it somewhat off of the Traveller mechanics, since they're extremely simple.

7 basic stats (Str, Dex, End, Int, Edu, Social and Psychic). I changed psychic to magic, and reworked the skills list to make sense for the HP setting. Other than that, the only change I needed to make was to the character creation system. I think I went with just a basic number of points to spend across all your skills, rather than Traveler's method of having you spend 10 hours on character creation and perhaps dying during it.

If folk are interested I can write up a clearer system guide and make it available to you all.

 

Yeah. Creating a Harry Potter RPG is something I think a lot of us have considered. I've been playing with creating one for the HeroQuest rule system, which I think could work quite well.

For those not familiar, HeroQuest is a narrative RPG I'm quite fond of. It's the latest official system for the Glorantha setting, where Runequest the RPG was set during the day of yore, but the basic rules are setting neutral. Characters have a number of abilities which they use to solve problems, each with a rating they can increase during play. These can be anything from 'Loves his mother' to 'Olympic Sharpshooter', player defined but with the GM stopping anything too broken and keeping things setting appropriate.

You also have keywords, which represent broad competencies, like Warrior or Cunning Thief, again player defined though often the GM will give a list of possibilities. They act in the same way as abilities but have some downsides (more expensive to raise and sometimes at a disadvantages against more specialised abilities).

When engaging in a contest, the player chooses an ability and rolls a D20. The GM sets a resistance and rolls his own D20. You work out who won (how isn't really important right now, just that a high ability is better than a low ability). Pretty much all contest are treated this way, whether you're trying to talk someone to your side or hit them with a sword. It's just a matter of choosing the right ability and deciding how it is used.

This makes it really good at free form magic and I've been thinking about how to do a Harry Potter genre pack for a while. Have a look here if you are interested in what I've got so far. Not done but it's a start.

 

I'd certainly like to see it!

I'm sure there could be a way to work past that no? Lexicon didn't get any problem until the guy tried to actually publish a book of its content.

Seems like a very good and simple system to play. Could be very useful in a Skype/IRC situation I guess.

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For my part, I've been playing a lot of PriaX recently (French RPG based on a D6 system and very free form skills and combat, which I like). I was thinking of making a HP RPG using that system. I'll write a quick word document with what I had thought about and post it up. Maybe we could do something interesting with all those ideas being thrown around!

 

The lexicon fell into a fucky loophole of the law in that it was a "reference" type thing, and not a legit work of ...iunno... published fanfiction?

 

Is there still a group for pen and paper games? I have a class project recently and I was assigned old school tabletop RPGs and was wondering if there's a preexisting group.

 

Depends, do you need to play or is it fine if you just read logs/watch the sessions in IRC?

 

Play preferable since I'm supposed to write from a player perspective, though watching or getting logs might do for report.

 

Evan: While I'm not aware of any games that are recruiting at the moment, and only one ongoing one which isn't using an old school system, I'd say your best bet is probably searching on roll20 for a oneshot, and if there isn't one, making a post yourself saying you want to give DnD a try.

I'd also say you're probably better off trying to find a 4e game. Easier to learn, less time investment, etc.

 

Thanks for tip, coyote. Checking roll20 right now.

 

Also, this might be of assistance.

This one for amusing stories, and the sidebar has a collection of websites like roll20.
http://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/

This one for finding a group for pen and paper RPGs, both online and in person.
http://www.reddit.com/r/lfg

 

Let's get a new group started.

According to /r/dnd, Pathfinder is a good place to start for new players.

I think we should aim for 5-7 players including the DM.
Using something like roll20, VoIP and IRC should be sufficient to play.

Depending on interest we might even get more groups going (which would be good for scheduling and timezones).

What do you say? Anyone interested?

 

Me! Just got finished with my first DnD game and I liked it. Should be interesting to try pathfinder.

 

Sure. I have an RPG itch I need scratched.

 

YES YES YES! Speaking from experience, Pathfinder is a great place to start for newbies. Been playing for a year now, and loving every moment of it.

 

I'd be interested in it. I've liked what I've seen so far on that site.