Tomb Raider game

[klofft]

So I'm enjoying the crap out of Tomb Raider Legend right now and I got to thinking about the Tomb Raider genre as a tabletop RPG option.

What would be a good system for this sort of thing (perhaps the genre would be "modern day exploration" or just "tomb raiding")? Obviously, I'd ditch the "hero with off-camera sidekicks" model in favor of a team-based approach (more like the Danger Girl comic with more seriousness).

The system or ruleset would need fairly robust rules for making physical actions other than combat to be exciting, and it would need enough flexibility that supernatural elements could be used without too much hassle.

Thoughts?
C

 

[Aussiegamer]

mine

I have converted the simple d20M and D&D to a still easy to play but more robust RPG.

It has deeper supernatural abilities than modern, as I have put back the 5 to 9 spells, also having up to 9th psionic powers as well. It will work with the modern game with ease.

More feats and skills means a more diverse player base.


PS Nexus is free

 

[Vigilance]

My Blood and Relics campaign model for d20 Modern is designed with the Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones type adventure in mind and comes complete with a Relic Seeker and a Graverobber class.

It also has information on secret societies, supernatural creatures and low-magic magic system.

But don't take my word for it, if you click the link, the book's been reviewed 9 times, with an average score of 4.7 out of 5. I recommend you give it a look anyway.

http://enworld.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=3107&

 

[NMC]

I'll add to the list of shameless plugs by recommending Treasure Hunter from Emerald Press; there are a core rulebook and a trilogy of adventures available, with more adventures currently in development.

-Nate

 

[takyris]

I've also heard great things about Blood and Relics.

In addition, I actually made a pretty decent Tomb Raider-type person in Grim Tales once, just to show that it was possible to make a Smart Hero who wasn't a geek with glasses. Since Grim Tales is more flexible than Modern with respect to skills, it was actually possible to make an absurdly skilled person, have several of those skills be in things like Knowledge(History) and Craft(Cartography) and Appraise and Disable Device and other Tomb-Raider-appropriate Int-based skills, and then dump the rest into crazy acrobatics and Drive.

You don't really need an entirely new system. You're fine with d20 Modern, possibly with a few additional tweaks (like you'd find in Blood and Relics) or a system that uses d20 Modern (like Grim Tales).

The key, though, would be making people decently high-level. You want somebody who can take 1 and still nail a 20-foot running jump, that means that they need a +19 on their Jump check. That could mean:

Strong Hero, Level 9:
+12 ranks in Jump (max'd out, normal use)
+1 occupation bonus (picking Jump as a permanent class skill)
+2 for Strength 15
+4 for Improved Extreme Effort (by level 9, you can have that and the Melee smash tier)

So right there, you've got a 9th level guy with a +20 Jump check (provided that that's all he does that round -- it's +16 otherwise). If that's the right power level, then you know that you probably want people to be somewhere between 8th and 12th level -- much lower, and they can't do the cool stuff that thematically you want them to be able to do, and much higher and too many things get too easy.

Good luck!

 

[klofft]

These are some great ideas that I'll need to check out - thanks for all of them!

However, I'm still concerned about the "action" in a game that would probably not involve much combat. I haven't tried this out in play ever, but is there really much excitement (strictly from a "game" POV) in saying, "OK, make a Climb check"? Sure, there's the danger of falling, but it seems to lack the dramatic give-and-take of a good fight scene.

I don't know if that makes any sense or not, but it's the one thing I'm still wondering about.

C

 

[cwhs01]

"hong kong action movie theatre" (i think it´s called), is supposed to emulate the action from HK films (john woo etc), in a simple and cinematic way. Add a dash of pulp, a pinch of mysticism, a handfull of drama, and a british accent. and voila. youve got a good tombraideresque game going.

 

[klofft]

Actually, I do own both versions of that. Their way of doing stunts is largely the rules-lite approach: keep the die roll difficulties relatively easy and have the players describe cool stuff. That doesn't really work for my group for two reasons:
1) They actually prefer a slightly more rules-y game.
2) Part of the "conflict" of a Tomb Raider style adventure is the physical actions involved. In other words, climbing a rock, for instance, is both a "combat" situation (i.e., needs rules for resolution) and a "puzzle" situation ("what's the best way to handle this?"). The rules-lite approach makes the 1st part of that equation easy and interesting, while completely removing the latter.

IMHO, of course.
C

 

[takyris]

Indeed. The time you're not spending on monster stats, you're spending making your dungeon traps more interesting than "Reflex Save Half". For example:

There's a tunnel ahead with extremely fast swinging blades. You can try to jump through, but it's a killer -- 10d6, Ref20 half. It's also immediately after a long (20 foot) jump, with no time to prepare, so anybody who doesn't have Uncanny Dodge takes a -4 penalty on the save.

The tunnel you're in is actually very high (50 feet), and cables going across the chasm make it clear that there's a mechanism up there. Climbing up will let the player find a mechanism to partially disable the blades -- the damage drops to 5d6, and the save DC drops to 15 -- but a rocky patch will crumble as you get close to the mechanism, doing 3d6 damage (Reflex 20 half) and forcing you to make an immediate Climb check to not fall 50 feet back to the tunnel floor.

If you climb down into the chasm, you'll see spikes down below you, as well as a mechanism that extends a bridge across the chasm. However, once you extend the bridge, automatic dart traps start firing (+12 to hit, 2d4 damage and they force another Climb check). You have to choose between climbing up quickly to suffer less damage, but having to make a riskier Climb check, or Climbing up slowly and relying on your Defense to protect you from the darts.

So a player who does everything extends the ramp, obviating the Jump check entirely, and has a much easier save for much less damage. But they've also done a lot of other work along the way, exposing themselves to little bits of additional danger that they wouldn't have faced otherwise.

And that's a relatively easy puzzle area -- all you have is Jump and Climb (and the question of the player's Reflex save and Defense) to deal with. In order to make something that appeals to an entire group of players, you're gonna want to put in, well, everything:

- Stuff written in ancient languages that lets the reader automatically solve puzzles without Disable Device checks (for the Linguist people)
- Locks and disarmable traps (for the Disable Device people)
- The Holy Trinity of Movement: Climb, Jump, and Balance (for the acrobatic people)
- Some enemies, both mystical and mundane (to break the tension of puzzles
- Areas of overpowering enemies, or optionally areas where too much noise will cause the floor to collapse, or where breaking the path of the light will trigger spear traps (for the Hide and Move Silently people)

And the kicker: because this isn't a video-game, you're going to need to give the players at least 2 viable ways to get through these areas. The primary way is the cool skilled way (weakening the blade trap and extending the ramp in the puzzle above), but if the player doesn't succeed or somehow botches the check (breaks the ramp, ruins the mechanism), they can still survive that trap -- at least, the guy with Evasion and Uncanny Dodge can survive it, and then he can automatically disarm the trap with a simple lever beyond the trap, which lets all the people who don't have Evasion still survive that trap.

Okay, that was a whole lot of rambling, but hopefully it helps. Good luck!

 

[klofft]

Man, that was awesome! Thanks for that! Unfortunately, I got exhausted just reading it, much less thinking about how to duplicate it with any regularity in-game. But there's no doubt that you answered my concern!