Here's an ultra-lightweight roleplaying system I wrote for the games Yuro and I are in. Anyone who likes is welcome to use it!
FURSONA Rulesby Tachyon Feathertail (
http://feathertail.dreamwidth.org )
This document is licensed
CC-By-SA.
Hello! This document will explain how to roleplay using the FURSONA game rules. FURSONA stands for
Furry
Universal
Roleplaying
System,
Online
Network-
Augmented
In other words, it's a game that lets you roleplay as a furry character, and it's designed to be played online.
You can print out this document and share it with your friends. You can even make it into a book and charge money for it, or write your own additional rules document based on this one. If you do so, you must credit Tachyon Feathertail (aka Jared Spurbeck) as the original author, and acknowledge FURSONA as being an unregistered trademark belonging to him. You also must license your work using a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. This will allow other people to do all of these things with your creations, too. You can read a summary of this license at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.
Getting StartedTo play a game using these rules, you will need:
Friends
An Internet connection
Either you or one of your friends will take the role of the Game Master, or GM. This player is responsible for refereeing the rules, telling the overall story, and helping each player learn the game and develop his or her own character's story. The GM has the final say as to what happens in-game, and can even override the written rules as needed.
If you are playing the game offline, you may want a pencil and paper to write things down on, and a good-sized handful of 6-sided dice (the kind that come in most board games). You'll also want glass beads or poker chips, or some other kind of inedible token.
Using the diceIn games played using the FURSONA rules, you roll one or more 6-sided dice to see if your character succeeds at the action that she is attempting. The better your character is at doing it, the more dice you get to roll. If even one die lands on a 5 or a 6, this counts as a success.
The more successes your character gets, the better she does what she's trying to do. If you get even one success, though, you succeed. The only exceptions are if you're doing something especially hard, or if you're competing against another person's character. Then you need to roll more successes than he does.
Special rules come into play if you roll two or more dice at once. If at least two of the dice you're rolling come up "boxcars," or double 6's, those count as two successes and you get to reroll them, and keep any more successes you get. You can do this for as many pairs of double 6's as you get. But if at least two dice come up "snake eyes," or double 1's, that counts as a failure. It subtracts 1 from the number of successes you get.
To roll the dice, you can use one of the following online die-rollers:
http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/ (lets other people verify what you rolled)
http://www.penpaperpixel.org/tools/d20dicebag.htmSome forums or chat rooms may have die-rollers built in.
An extremely competent character can roll 8 or more dice all at once, so if you're playing this game offline you'll want to have a lot of dice on hand.
Creating a characterMost games played using the FURSONA rules will have their own, extra guidelines for character creation. The following, though, are the basics.
The first step is to decide on an idea for your character. What are his/her name and gender? What species is he or she? Do you have a picture of your character, or an idea of what he or she looks like? Write down whatever ideas you have.
The second step is to decide what your character's ability scores are. You have seven dice to put into
Physical,
Social, and
Mental ability.
You must put at least one die into each, and you can't put more than four dice into any of them.
Your character's Physical ability score is a measure of how strong, fast, and/or tough she is. Social dice make her more charismatic and confident, while Mental dice make her shrewd and intelligent.
Different characters are gifted in different ways. Yours might be stronger, or more agile, than another with the same number of dice in the Physical score. When describing your character's actions, emphasize her strengths; a character who's light on her feet might dodge under a swung 2x4 limbo-style, while a character who's strong and tough might catch it in her hands and break it in two.
The third step is to put dice into your character's skills. You have fifteen dice to put into them. Different games may have their own skills (or may remove some from the list), but at a minimum you can choose from
Acrobatics (balance beam, gymnastics, tumbling)
Armed Combat (swords, knives, axes, staves)
Athletics (climbing, running, swimming)
Computer Use (hacking, programming, researching)
Deceive (bluffing, fast talk, disguise)
Dodge (getting out of the way)
Knowledge (facts, trivia, things you remember reading)
Medicine (first aid, caring for sick or injured people)
Observe (noticing things, seeing through lies and disguises)
Persuade (getting others to see things your way, politely or otherwise)
Ranged Combat (handguns, longarms, bows and arrows)
Security (casing a building, searching for traps, lockpicking, pickpocketing)
Stealth (creeping silently, hiding yourself, hiding an object on your person)
Unarmed Combat (street brawling, martial arts, roughhousing)
Wilderness Lore ("human" survival skills; firemaking, purifying water, building shelter)
If magic (or other supernatural abilities) exist in the world that you're playing in, you have sixteen dice instead of fifteen, and can choose from an additional skill:
Insight (ability to sense which people and objects are magical)
If the character you're playing is a furry (anthropomorphic animal), you have sixteen dice instead of fifteen, and can choose from an additional skill:
Instinct (any and all skills related to being part-animal)
If you're playing a furry in a world where magic exists, you have seventeen dice to spend, total.
When rolling the dice, you'll add the number of dice you have in the skill that you're using to the number of dice in the ability score that's most relevant. For example, if you're swinging a sword at someone you'd use Armed Combat + Physical, whereas if you're trying to recall the history of a legendary blade you could use Armed Combat + Mental (or Knowledge + Mental).
The fourth step is to put dice into your backstories. A backstory is something that makes your character herself; some advantage or disadvantage that she has on account of being who she is. In essence, they let you bend the rules by pointing out that, because you are playing this kind of character, the rules should affect you differently.
You have five dice that you can put into backstories. Each backstory can have no more than four dice put into it, and you can take no more than four backstories total. Example backstories include
Executive Suite (your character has power or influence of some kind)
Lighter than Air (your character is hard to capture, contain, or kill)
Marked for Greatness (your character is the subject of a good prophecy)
The rules for individual game settings may include additional backstory examples, including ones themed to fit those settings.
At the start of each game session, you get a token to spend for each backstory you took, regardless of how many dice you put in it. During gameplay, you may spend a token to roll all of the dice for any one of your backstories, in one of three ways:
Power (add the successes you get to any one roll you just made)
Obstruct (your opponent must beat the number of successes you get)
Special (the number of successes you get determines how the game's plot changes)
For example, someone in the Executive Suite might add the dice in her backstory to a Persuade + Social roll she just made, to sweeten the deal with financial "incentives." Someone who's Lighter than Air might roll his dice to obstruct someone from attacking him, making her have to roll Athletics + Physical to catch him. And someone who's Marked for Greatness might roll his backstory dice when all seems lost, using each success to remind the GM and other players of his destiny.
The specific effects of rolling backstory dice are up to GM interpretation, especially for "special" rolls where they're used to influence the plot. A GM is free to suggest alternate uses, or to disallow a suggested use if it doesn't seem to make sense to her. She may also suggest that you take a different backstory, if one does not fit in the story she's telling, or give you ideas for specific backstories that seem to fit your character.
You may take up to five extra backstory dice by giving your character "negative" backstories. The rules for taking backstories (no more than four backstories total; no more than four dice in each) apply separately to negative backstories. The difference is that the negative ones work against your character. The GM gets a token for every negative backstory that every player character in the game has, and can trigger your negative backstories just like you can trigger your positive ones.
(Caution: The point of backstories is to make storytelling more fun, not to take "the best" ones or use them in the most game-breaking ways. As a rule of thumb, if it makes for a better story for everyone, it's a good use of a backstory; if it doesn't, then it's probably a waste.)
The next steps in character creation depend on what game you are playing. If you are playing Therian, for instance, you will need to choose what faction your character is a part of, and choose from other options which give small bonuses to your character. Talk to your GM to find out what sort of game you are playing in!
Playing the gameMost of the time, playing games based on FURSONA is like normal chatroom or messageboard RP. You all just say what your characters do. The biggest difference is that there's a Game Master, or GM, who controls all the characters the players aren't playing as, and says what happens in the world. The GM has the most responsibility for telling the story, and is the one who referees the game and says what dice you need to roll.
Whenever it'd make things dramatic, the GM can ask you or another player to roll dice to see if you can accomplish something. Usually, if you roll at least one success on your dice you succeed, and each extra success means another positive consequence of your action. Sometimes, though, you might need more than one success, if what you're trying to do is hard.
Either way, the GM says what happens next, whether you succeed or fail. You and the other players are encouraged to give him or her suggestions, though!
ConflictWhether it's in a footrace, a car chase or a gunfight, you're going to go up against someone at some point. Here's how it's done!
The first step is for the GM to say what kind of conflict it is. A footrace might use your Physical dice plus your Athletics dice. A gunfight might use Physical plus Ranged Combat.
The second step is to determine your starting stress tracks. These are used to determine who wins, sort of like HP meters in console RPGs. Each participant's stress track starts out with three points in it, plus one for every die he or she has in the ability score used for the conflict. If you have three dice in Physical, for instance, then you'd start with six points in your stress track in a footrace.
If one side has an advantage over another, the GM might give them extra points. For instance, if you have a six-second head start in the footrace you might get an extra point in your stress track. This doesn't mean that you get to roll extra dice; it doesn't make you faster or anything. It just means that your opponent has to do more work to catch up.
The third step is to determine your starting dice pools. These are the dice that you'll roll to diminish the other side's stress track. Each turn you both roll all the dice in your pools, and each success takes a point away from the other side.
Your starting dice pool is equal to the number of dice that you'd roll for this task normally, plus or minus any situational modifiers. These are up to the GM to determine. If you twisted your ankle earlier, for instance, you might roll only four dice instead of six in a conflict based on Physical plus Athletic dice. Or if it's foggy out, both sides might roll one fewer die in a gunfight, or might even have to roll Mental plus Observe to notice each other before firing.
The fourth step is the combat itself. You and the other side take turns rolling dice and subtracting successes from each other's stress tracks.
Feel free to try using tactics to gain an advantage! There aren't any hard and fast rules for how you might do that, so if you can think of something your character might do just say so, and let the GM figure out how it's done. In a swordfight, for instance, you might decide that you're only going to parry the other's blade, and that might take successes away from the number of successes that he or she rolls instead of from his or her stress track. Then you might decide that you want to leap to another platform to get away, and so you'd roll Physical plus Athletics, and your opponent might need to get the same number of successes to pursue (depending on what's in the way).
The last step happens when one side brings the other's stress track to zero. (If both are brought to zero at the same time, the one that's taken the most damage loses. If both are tied, it's up to the GM whether to do a tiebreaker roll or to say that both sides fail.)
At this point, the losing side has the option of triggering a backstory as a kind of last chance. However many successes they get on it become a new stress track, and the conflict resumes. (Extra damage beyond what was needed to diminish the first stress track does not carry over to the second.) It has to be a dramatically appropriate backstory, though, and you have to explain how it works. In a footrace, for instance, you could trigger a backstory about a strong relationship your character has with another, one who just happens to be in the stands watching. That might give you the strength to push ahead.
Each side only gets one last chance, and when those dice are up the conflict is over. The winning side gets to decide what happens to the losing side as a result, and if the GM is okay with the winning side's choice that's what happens. (The GM may have to reign in players who get carried away.)
The basic rules behind conflicts are pretty straightforward! That's because they're not intended to cover every situation, just to give guidelines for how powerful each side is and how much effort they have to expend in order to win. You're encouraged to roleplay your characters coming up with their own strategies, and to invent new "rules" for how to simulate each one. Just remember, the object is not to "win" ... it's to tell a story that's fun for everyone.
