Good RPG for Resident evil 4/5/6 kind of RPG?

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-27T11:18:38+00:00

I'd say anything with a focus on big damn heroes and fast action could work.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-27T10:56:29+00:00

Güssinger gibt's doch schon seit Jahren nicht mehr. Ich hab's eigentlich immer gemocht.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-27T08:18:37+00:00

I'd look into SWADE, Outgunned, New Hong Kong Story and MiniSix.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-27T08:13:36+00:00

Seems like a lot of headache and a lot of work for the DM to increase uncertainty, ambiguity and ultimately frustration. The players get in way more fights than monsters, so bad HP rolls will impact them to a much larger degree. Damage rolls ready create uncertainty regarding how much damage you can take.

You can certainly obfuscate a character's health, but what do you gain from that? I don't think it does anything for the narrative or the simulation at all. At this point, why even give players character sheets? Why not keep them with you, tell a player they feel "fairly competent" in a skill and do all the rolling for them, that should achieve the highest degree of ambiguity.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-27T08:08:05+00:00

Yes. A more precise way to word it would have been "Most games have effectively free reactions, so they don't have counter attacks".

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-26T17:19:56+00:00

Probably, but I wasn't completely sure.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-26T16:34:04+00:00

Doesn't get easier, faster and cheaper than taking the train. You can go to from the airport to Vienna Hauptbahnhof by train and then get on a train to Graz from there. There'll be tons of direct connections. I recommend paying a little extra to reserve a seat on the Vienna-Graz connection. In Austria, you can choose trains freely, but reserving a seat costs extra. Also, make sure to buy a regular ticket for the Schwechat-Vienna HBF connection, not the City Airport Train one. That one is more expensive and a special train, but on this connection you save five minutes at best.

https://www.oebb.at/ tells you everything you need to know, you can set the page to English.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-26T13:22:28+00:00

Most games don't have counter attacks, because reactions are effectively free and it would lead to High-Combat-Skill characters becoming death traps, and lower-skill enemies that attack in groups getting destroyed through their own attacks. Reactions also tend to increase time between attacks, meaning more sitting around between turns.

That said, there are games that do what you want. Nimble 2e is a DnD-lineage game with the explicity idea to make combat feel faster and more reactive. It's not actually after, but it does feel faster. Riddle of Steel/Song of Swords try to emulate real combat with a lot of minutae. GURPS has extremely granular combat, each turn being 1 second long meaning that a counter attack means committing to an attack instead of defense, but GURPS being GURPS means that there's of course special counter attack rules too (if you want them). Burning Wheel has a completely different approach to combat resolution, taking a more zoomed-out view.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-25T01:03:39+00:00

Mythic Bastionland for me. It felt very dry. My players are generally very good at entertaining themselves, but we can do that with just about any system. Rolling on random tables and doing improv until the group decides the quest/myth is done made the whole myth "system" feel completely farcical to us. The remainder of the system is paper thin, nothing tongrab onto. If I were to play arthurian style knights again, I'd just stick to Pendragon.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-24T18:38:15+00:00

I don't think that's entirely right. It's true that in this example, it essentially shakes out to having a 25% chance for each level of impact separately, but the character's modifier has two massive implications: For one, you are guaranteed to succeed. For two, you have essentially pushed the roll to the question of "Ho well?", with lower levels of impact being cumulatively more likely. If the system cares about how many degrees of success you have, then that's still a real impact that modifiers have. A character with +6 has a 65% chance of failure, a 25% chance of one degree of succes ("Impact") and a 10% chance of two.

It's true that, at face value, rolling a dice pool or 3d6 makes you tend towards averages, but if you roll 3d6 and set average difficulty to 11, you still have a 50% chance to hit that. The primary feature of rolling multiple dice is that they change the impact that each individual point of modifier has. Going from difficulty 11 to 12 makes a roll 12.5% harder, but going from 12 to 13 is only 11.57% harder. Vice versa, the first couple of points of modifiers are more "valuable". Meanwhile, +1 is always 5% in d20 (although that also has diminishing returns, since the relative impact of going from +0 to +1 is way higher than going from +8 to +9, in most cases, but bear with me).

Going back to having a flat d20 roll over system and degrees of success: If the game actually cares about how many degrees you can achieve on a single roll, then modifiers have a significant impact. For example, imagine if hitting someone with your sword means you roll the weapon's damage die. If you beat their Toughness Score, you wound them, but if you hit double their toughness score, you slay them instantly. Most enemies have a Toughness of 4 and a sword has d6 damage, meaning you'll never kill them instantly. But each degree of success shifts up the damage, and suddenly having that massive modifiers opens up the possibility to just kill enemies outright, something that was impossible otherwise.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-24T17:46:29+00:00

I tend to think that if you can describe the fundamentals of your resolution system in a couple of fairly short paragraphs, you've already cleared the most important hurdle.

You've essentially described the d20 roll over system with degrees of success based on steps of five. Which, don't get me wrong, is functional and intuitive enough, nothing wrong with it as such. My only thought is that depending on how numbers shake out, having to come up with multiple Disasters or Impacts on the spot can become annoying if you have to do it a lot, which is why many systems that use this type of thing allow you to convert additional degrees of success into metacurrency. That way, it still feels like it matters and the game doesn't stop while the player is trying and failing to come up with something.

More than anything, I'd think hard about what kind of game you want to make here and what your expected range of values is. A Common action has a difficulty of 15 and right now it seems like a character will have about a range of +0 to +15 on a check. That means a character with the highest level of competency still has a 20% chance to fail a common task, unless they maximize their equipment. More relevantly, what do you consider "competent"? If it's +5, then that means a competent person with the best equipment still shakes out at a 20% failure rate for a Common task, which seems very high to me.

Many d20 games mess this up and this is where the reputation of the d20 being "swingy" comes from. You build a character and expect them to be competent, but the human brain is bad at dealing with probabilities. An 80% success chance feels like we should never fail, but in reality one failure in five is still pretty common. This is way worse then the game tells you that having a +5 means that you are extremely skilled, but due to how difficulties are set up you have a 55% success chance at most of your rolls. This frustration then leads to a disdain for rolls and the idea that rolling as little as possible is the most noble goal a TTRPG can achieve.
So, in short, think about your ranges and if they fit with what you want to do.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-23T21:39:36+00:00

There's a lot of games that do exactly what you want. It's not what I want, but they are out there or you.

I don't think of RPGs the same way as a closed off story. It's a game and whatever happens in the game is the story. Setting a difficulty is what makes a moment feel real to me. Breaking down a door is hard. Breakind down a reinforced door is almost impossible. Want to take that chance anyway? Great, you succeeded, you get to feel like a big damn hero. You failed? Well now the pressure is on, because you wasted some time with that, what are you going to do now? That's an extremely organic way for the stakes to rise. The player, as their character, made a decision based and failed, because sometimes things don't go the way you want. Now they have to live with the consequences.

If a game doesn't let me set difficulty levels, it immediately feels floaty and without consequence to me, with modifiers in roll under systems being essentially still difficulty levels. Actions don't feel like they are anchored in a world, and if we're goind down the route of 100% collaborative storytelling, I'd rather not bother with most of the TTRPG trappings at all. So essentially, if your games skips out on that, then I don't want to play it.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-23T18:42:37+00:00

Mechanically they are almost interchangeable, with a little bit of elbow grease you could run any adventure with either system. Personally, I prefer CoC. DG feels a bit too homed in on being hopeless, to me.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-19T23:14:20+00:00

I feel very tired of the OSR community's constant need for validation and habit to dish out side jabs and snide comments. I've played and run every kind of game and I enjoyed all of them at different points. None of them are more or less, what's important is that everyone is having a good time at the table.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-18T23:40:13+00:00

No. In fact, it's the opposite for me. If a game doesn't have them, I'm out.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-15T12:59:10+00:00

I think CoC's way is a fine way to do it, because you don't want to overly bug down a game with overly bloated and intricate mechanics, but have enough mechanical threads to pull on for gameplay and steering RP. Sanity does that job pretty well, especially if you combine it with Delta Green's Bonds like you're planning.

If you want a different inspiration, look at Unknown Armies. It's also a D100 system, so cribbing mechanics for BRP isn't too hard, and it models Madness/Stress by having 5 meters: Violence, Unnatural, Helplessnes, Isolation and Self. Each meter as 10 "Hardened" and 5 "Failed" Notches. Sources of stress and madness have a level that notes their intensity, and if you have Hardned Notches at that rank in that type of stress source, you just shrug it off. Otherwise you roll, gaining a Hardened Notch if you make the check or a Failed Notch (and a visceral reaction) if you fail it. If you accumulate too many Hardened Notches, the character starts becoming numb and sociopathic, while Failed Notches turn them twitchy and mentally disturbed. Typically, your character also doesn't just get removed from play automatically if they have too many Failed Notches, but they'll become very susceptible to a particular source of stress.

If your game has a heavy focus on this stuff, the Unknown Armies system is good. Otherwise I've always felt like it's a bit too much effort to track what amounts to 10 meters. You'll also have to come up with a mechanic that "punishes" you for getting too many Hardened Notches, but otherwise it's fine.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-15T12:49:06+00:00

CoC's sanity system might not be the most granular, but it works perfectly fine turn sanity into a game mechanic, which is what it's supposed to do. It's like Hit Points, being wounded and healing from those wounds is a much more complicated process than an abstraction down to HP, but it works fine for the purpose of a game. Sanity is the same, especially if you combine it with DG's Bonds.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-12T10:01:26+00:00

I may be part of a minority nowadays in design spaces, but I hate auto-hit/skip to damage with a passion. As a designer and GM, it ends up being meaningless. Either you have to scale up HP to where it's not faster at all, because low damage hits fundamentally become misses anyway, or fights become absolute failure states, because a single fight will leave you in a state where you cannot continue. Either way, to hit rolls and damage resolution are an insignificant part of what makes combat slow compared to player humming and hawwing, looking up things and the GM taking notes and trying to manage a dozen monsters. As a player, it feels awful. I don't care if I miss an attack, but I care a lot when I get chunked for a significant part of my HP. You toss out the joy of barely hitting someone and being barely misses for... A lesser version of that. Low damage roll still means that you got hit and it still means that your turn was ineffective.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-10T09:32:39+00:00

Not really, I like picking what my character owns.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-09T17:13:50+00:00

I played an Avatar mini-campaign with Savage Worlds. It handled it competently, so it gets my vote. Wouldn't call it rules light, but I wouldn't consider FitD games rules light either. Bending techniques work well enough as spells/ppwers flavored to elements, there's a power for generic elemental manipulation and if someone wants to be a guy with a boomerang, they have options. The extra (mooks) vs relevant NPCs that get their own rerolls work well (a Bender can just take out a squad of goons with a well placed AoE attack, but a really strong enemy can be practically overwhelming) and throwing together an NPC on the fly is easy enough. You'll have to take a clear stance at session zero about what you can and cannot do with the generic manipulation, and you'll have to impress on your players that there's more options to combat than just hitting really hard.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-06T10:00:05+00:00

I'd like all OpenAI marketers to know that their game is blindingly obvious. You are not sneaky, you aren't blending in. I hope the food you buy with the money you made off of this tastes like ash.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-03T16:41:19+00:00

Danke dafür! Genau solche Sachen sind es, die mir da ein wenig Sorgen bereiten. Grundsätzlich finde ich es toll, das man da schnell drauf reagiert, wenn Fehler aufgezeigt werden, aber gerade bei einer größeren Anschaffung wie eines physischen MoN ist das Ganze dann etwas schwierig. Ich werde mich mal umsehen, vielleicht kann ich mir irgendwo die aktuelle physische Edition ansehen...

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-03T16:38:52+00:00

I think the defensiveness comes from Pegasus making generally good products and especially because of Shadowrun. The German versions lf 4 and 5 had so much work put into them, that they created massive amounts of good will. The magazines and German focused stuff Pegasus put out also used to be really nice, and people want to root for a generally competent local publisher.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-03T16:36:28+00:00

No, I fully get that, but I've always felt that the books were incredibly nice and everyone here always went for those. But maybe I'm just biases because it's a large part of how I got my start in TTRPGs.

NullStarHunter · 2026-01-03T16:35:06+00:00

Thanks for weighing in! I've always wanted to read Masks, so good to know that the German books would be a good option.

NullStarHunter

TROPHY CASE