Feats of Strength-Highly Versatile RPG System

Want to go on an adventure as a goblin bard with a pet monkey? Maybe you would prefer to be a giant flying manta ray that shoots lightning? Perhaps racing down the streets as an artificially intelligent motorcycle on the run from the law is more your speed? How about being an alien with incredible abilities powered by his belief in the divinity of an ordinary pickle? All of this and more is possible with Feats of Strength.

OVERVIEW

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Feats of Strength was a system I started writing several months ago in some sort of manic episode. The story of that is more or less explained in the introduction. Since then I have significantly improved and simplified it. It should work well in both a pen and paper setting and when doing play by post. I will almost certainly be running an adventure with it either here or on Chocolate Pi, possibly with a Sci-Fi theme.

The core design philosophy of Feats of Strength is that everything should be built of individual pieces that can be swapped and recombined in different ways. Instead of classes, characters get an Identity made up of their Race, Profession, and Aptitude. The main effect of the identity is what feats it allows the character to choose. Feats give small bonuses, abilities, and other things to the character that picks them. This pretty much determines what the character can do and what they are good at.

The mix and matchable pieces don't end there though! There are a number of different varieties of weapons that can have several different properties. Armor, traps, and potions work more or less the same way. Players who take the correct feats can build all of these things themselves, breaking through the barrier between NPCs and Player characters.

There are also 5 skills that allow the players to do different things. Any player can try to use a skill and has a chance with most things, but players can take feats to give them bonuses to all checks with a skill or to specific uses of the skill.

The game is designed to be simple and easy enough for people who don't play many tabletop RPGs (though some experience with other kinds of RPGs may be required to fully grasp it) while providing enough depth for long time gamers. There are two main ways that this is accomplished. Firstly, all the dice are d6's. Since most people have access to d6's, that significantly lowers the barrier to entry. Secondly, combat uses a system of zones instead of a normal grid. This simplifies combat by making it less precise while still allowing plenty of tactical strategy.

Everything can be found in this massive PDF that I've made. The final version will have links to make navigation much easier, but I have to redo it every time I update the document so I don't have it set up now. Just hit Ctrl-F and use the nice guide I have below to help you find your way around.

If you have an ebook reader like iBooks, I would recommend sticking it in there. It makes it MUCH easier to read than a straight PDF.

There are a few minor errors in the PDF. If you guys see any you should let me know.

CHAPTERS

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1-The Basics (Page 3)

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Skip section 1 since it's for people who don't know how tabletop RPGs work. Section 2 has a little bit more of that, but also explains the circumstance modifier and a few specific things about the system.

2-Character Creation (Page 10)

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Probably THE most important chapter since it contains all the feats and everything. It also explains about levels, death, and identities.

Races

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Race is just a broad category of what a creature is. For example, elves and dwarves are both part of the humanoid race.

Bestials: Literally animals. The undisputed masters of unarmed combat.
Constructs: Robots, golems, undead, etc. Build items right into your body.
Humanoids: Humans, elves, dwarves, trolls, etc. Can turn anything into a weapon and are too stubborn to die.
Unnaturals: Aliens, creatures from other dimensions, and weird stuff. They have fantastic mental abilities.

3 other races are planned in an expansion, but that's a long ways off.

Professions

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Professions are the character's actual job. The game assumes that they had some training in being something before they became adventurers.

Scholars: Bookworms that know a little bit about everything.
Craftsmen: Make ALL the things!
Criminals: The best at sneaking and pretty good at deception.
Guardians: Good defenses and great at protecting allies.
Entertainers: Highly social and talented distracters.

Two more professions are planned in an expansion, but that is a long way off.

Aptitudes

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Aptitudes were initially based on the concept of Power Sources in DnD 4E. They are where a character's more supernatural abilities come from.

Arcane: Straight up magic. Shoot energy or perform sorcerous deception.
Divine: Power from belief, but not necessarily belief in gods. Buffs and debuffs.
Nature: Communing with nature itself grants you power. Control yourself or the world around you.
Martial: Badasses who gained their abilities purely through training. The best with basic attacks.

3 (possibly 4) more aptitudes are planned in an expansion, but that is a long way off.

3-Combat (Page 57)

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Probably one of the most important chapters. It explains all the things that a character can do in combat and lists the afflictions (status effects).

4-Movement (Page 73)

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Explains the zone system and long distance travel.

5-Skills (Page 87)

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Skills let characters do a lot of awesome things.

Finesse: Anything that requires fine detail. Crafting, sneaking, lock picking, etc.
Knowledge: Identification, medical aid, giving advice, etc.
Sense: Foraging for stuff, finding hidden creatures, detecting lies, etc.
Social: Making friends, intimidating, deceiving, etc. Most social checks get modified by a reaction modifier based on identities.
Toughness: Enduring, climbing, rolling with a fall, grabbing, etc. Grabbing opens up a ton of possibilities.

6-Equipment and Crafting (Page 103)

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Explains buying stuff and how the crafting system works.

7-GM Overview (Page 133)

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GM stuff like creating enemies.

8-Where an example adventure will go eventually.
9-Examples (Page 151)

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Tons of example characters.

Right now I'm mainly just looking for feedback. I'd love to see what you guys think of the system. If navigating the PDF is too frustrating, I may cave and fix the links.

will this thread be up in 2 weeks.

if so, i can give feedback then.

I'm guessing that's a joke about how much I packed in the PDF. I wouldn't expect anyone to read that thing in detail before I stick in some eye candy, just skim it.

But yeah, I expect the thread to still be here in two weeks.

this is exam period ;_;

EDIT: at a glance, I can already tell I'm going to run with an unnatural monkey-platypus with a million eyes, an inarticulate, but capable, art thief and a dabbler in the art of distraction.

The Modeled racial feat for constructs (and I just noticed too the Criminal's Questionable Experience feat): does that essentially allow a Construct character to take any one feat from another racial table? Or do you have to spend a second racial feat on top of that?

Modeled and Malformed allow you to take feats from other races, but no you don't have to spend an extra feat.

Questionable Experience, Studied Technique, and Multi Talented do the same thing, but with professions. Dabbler is the same thing again, but it's a Humanoid Race feat.

Dual Degree (requires Dabbler) and Mastered Technique (requires Studied Technique) do let you take a feat from another profession AND make you a member of that profession. That way you can keep taking feats from that profession and it helps with reaction modifiers on social checks.

Studied/Mastered Technique can't be taken through another feat, because then there would be an exploit to get an extra profession by spending 1 feat.

So, obviously, there are a lot of ways to kind of dip into other races and professions. Aptitudes are the only category that cannot be dipped into like this.

Sorry, I haven't looked at the PDF yet, but one thing that does stand out to me, is that there seems to be no technically-inclined aptitude. I get that aptitudes are supernatural, but would an engineer-like or scientist character simply be under Martial, even if they aren't great at hand-to-hand combat?

edit: yeah looking at the PDF now it seems that technical skills fall under Professions rather than Aptitudes which makes complete sense. Ignore my previous question, and let me say this looks super interesting! Also, can I suggest a revision of "Martial" to something like "Normal" or "Non-Magical"?

Glad the system has piqued your interest Garuru!

Yeah, technical stuff is reserved mainly for professions, though Guardians get a good bit of combat related stuff.

As for renaming Martial to Normal, I don't think that quite fits. Martial kind of implies that the character has spent a long time developing their combat skills or are just naturally good at hitting things. If a character would be "normal", then they wouldn't be martial.

Which brings up a point. Player characters all have three parts to their identity because they are usually pretty special. NPCs and some simpler enemies might have nothing more than a race or a race and a profession. A "normal" person just wouldn't have an aptitude. If a GM wants to run a game where the players are "normal", they can just leave out Aptitudes.


For example, Batman would be a Humanoid Criminal Martial character (probably with some Craftsman and Scholar thrown in via feat shennanigans. Possibly even a smidge of Entertainer or Guardian. Batman knows everything, but I digress). A regular blacksmith would probably just be Humanoid Craftsman. A rat would just be Bestial.

I see! So the Professions and Aptitudes are optional for the most part... though of course leaving them blank would weaken your character considerably.

This system does give a lot of opportunities for character creation. It also seems like it can be handily overlapped with a massive number of settings and other arbitrary restrictions... I'm assuming that's what you're going for, though.

I might want to actually run one of these games in the (probably far) future, if that's fine?

Of course!

Once I dress this up with some eye candy and tweak a few things, I plan to release it under OGL on RPGNow for pay what you want/free. I'll also be pumping out some expansions, some (but not all) that will cost a few bucks. That's the plan anyway.

So short answer: I am ok with you running a game with this sometime in the future as long as I'm given credit for creating the system.

I'm probably going to be running a play test of FoS either here or on Chocolate Pi within a few weeks. Before I do, I've got some questions:

1) Should the game be here on Eagle Time or on Chocolate Pi? I'm leaning towards Choc Pi mainly because games seem to do a bit better there, but I can be convinced otherwise if enough people would rather play on this forum.

2) I have ideas for 5 different settings/adventures. I need feedback on which one people want to play.

Soul of the Dragon: Fantasy! You've been hired to go slay a dragon up in the mountains. Part of this one has already been written.

Pieces of Hate: Pirates! You are the crew of a ship trying to get your precious cargo to it's destination safely.

Wild Wild Wombats: Cowboys! The Wombat gang is tearing apart a simple frontier town in search of the one who stole their stolen gold. It's up to you to protect the citizens and find the gold.

Cannon Hill: Modern! Less combat and more RP focused, this adventure has the players using their skills to petition the government to save a historic monument. Alternatively, they could just pull some magic body snatching to accomplish their goals.

Venomous Bounty: Space! You are alien bounty hunters who have been contracted to retrieve the data from a crashed alien space ship. I have an overview written for this.

Try gathering interest in both places. Though I think people would be more responsive in chocpi, esp. in the gen. games chat thread.

There are too many space adventures at the moment :/ I myself would like to see some Unnatural Cowboys screeching obscenities at western men

I do like options 2 and 3 most, but all would probably go over pretty well (and I'd probably sign up in either forum).

I've updated the rules in the pdf. Changes include:

• Instead of using Zelda stuff, the cover is now a drawing I photoshopped into something passable. There's also a logo, but I feel like it needs more work.
  
• Criminals are now called Rogues. "Criminal" had some negative connotations associated with it and was only used because I wanted to try to be different.
  
• The Steady Pace feat has been changed so that it has no penalty and only applies to a single movement type.
  
• There is now an Ablaze Affliction and the Scorch feat has become Arsonist. These means you can set people on fire. Alternatively, you can set yourself on fire so that anyone who grabs you starts burning. Your punches may also set people on fire.
  

Dropbox may take a while to finish uploading it.

The thread may open sometime in the next week or two and will be on Chocolate Pi. I want to work on a few more "hidden" rules to help me and of course I need to write the actual adventure.

It still looks like Legend of Zelda to me.

It's Habbo Hotel-esque, Willy. Fix it. Fix what isn't broken.

Well the second image is still Zelda because I haven't made a second image. There's also a ton of basic stock images in there that my program sticks in there. It's only the cover that changed.

Is...is Habbo Hotel still a thing? I thought 4Chan killed it.

I can confirm that not only is Habbo Hotel still a thing, my sister is way into it and is some kind of, I'unno, upper management of some kinda habbo company thing it's kind of dumb. I'm pretty sure she totally knows how dumb it is in any case.

I'd like it if you'd add how many times a feat can be used in the tables

That's probably a good idea. I'll look in to increasing the information available in the feat tables. The main issue there is space, so I may have to spread things out.

THE GAME HAS BEGUN

Also I replaced Climbing Vines with Instant Forest. Now you can make trees grow as a wall.

I replaced Flurry and Improved Flurry with Dual Wield and Reflexes. Dual Wield is exactly what it sounds like and Reflexes is a passive defense bonus that goes away if you get one of many afflictions.