Cerrisian Blog

I’ve been talking with my friends about making a RPG website and hosting a Transformers RPG. This brings up what type of gaming system we should use: D20, GURPS, JAGS, etc.

Now, the problem for me is that there isn’t really a lot of Transformers source material that I see kicking around, and a lot of the pre-existing systems are somewhat complicated, and I don’t like spending a lot of time on mechanics. It would also be nice if the system could easily be used on a simple website, where people post actions and discuss.

Then it hit me. Nomic! Nomic is a game of self-amendment and rule changes that serves as an analog to a real legal system. If we have a system of self-amendment to the game rules, in the game itself, it can evolve based on the skills of the players as they play. There are a couple variants that I like, Minic and Pure Nomic are a good start, as is this Nomic RPG ruleset. I also like the feature of Nomopoly where the “Administrator” has veto power over anything that is paradoxical, hard to implement or unfair.

A lot of the ruleset can be implicit in the RPG, because I’m assuming a somewhat cooperative audience. Modifying the RPG rule set to use D20 dice, I come up with something like this as the initial rule set:

1. To make a proposal to change the ruleset, shout “Proposal!” and state your proposal.
2. Unless otherwise stated, a proposal adds a new rule to the end of the rule set.
3. Each player has one vote on any given proposal, which may be AYE, NAY or ABSTAIN. Robert’s rules of order style voice votes will be used unless a contention occurs.
4. Proposals that have a unanimity of AYE votes at any time become part of this rule set.
5. Players may change their votes at any time before a proposal is passed or failed.
6. Each player’s character has six attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma.
7. Each time a character does a task that may succeed or fail, they must roll a D20 and add modifiers for the ability used. If the character beats a value determined by the game master, they succeed.

There are probably some big problems with this rule set, but they should be shaken out after some peer review and a few rounds of voting.