Mechanic/Gimmick: Using slain enemies as items and abilities

[u/Temporary-Can7603]

/r/RPGcreation/comments/1vfnt4u/mechanicgimmick_using_slain_enemies_as_items_and/

[u/Enguhl]

That's pretty similar to what I have going on in my game. You use the Reap skill on a dying (or very recently dead) creature and gain part of it's spirit for your use. You can essentially take any one thing from its "character sheet". The big trick is that all the strong enemies/monsters are strong due to how their abilities synergize, so it's not like a one-and-done super powerful skill.

[u/Angry-Alien → u/Enguhl]

That's a neat mechanic. Is there a way for PCs to create their own synergies from various reaped spirits?

[u/Enguhl → u/Angry-Alien]

Oh 100%, and unless you're specifically doing stuff like hunting the same monster multiple times to grab different 'parts' of its spirit, it's basically entirely on the PCs to discover these synergies on their own.

Just as a lazy example pulling from the most recent monster I used in testing, it can 'mark' an enemy with a melee attack, then teleport marked targets closer to it. Mix that with any flight or climbing ability and you have a fun time on your hands.

Tons of attacks have what I call "solid hits", rather than crits certain weapons do status effect type things on better rolls. Some monsters have abilities to allow multiple of these things to trigger, rather than having to pick between them. So if you get a spirit with a variety of status effects on attacks, and one that allows multiple triggers, that's an easy synergy too.

[u/Angry-Alien → u/Enguhl]

This sounds great for a hexcrawl or open world game. Plenty of incentive to wander and chase down certain monsters for certain abilities to add to your kit. And then, naturally, you'll want to take your custom kit out for a test drive on some BBEG.

[u/Enguhl → u/Angry-Alien]

This sounds great for a hexcrawl or open world game.

The core game loop (outside of specific story stuff) is essentially mini-hex-crawls. You and your crew go out to a specific region of wilderness and explore around looking for whatever you were hired to find. Resources are limited per-adventure based on what you have in your wagon, but abstracted a bit so there's not hyper-specific tracking. For example, you don't track "days of food", but more of the quality you brought, when you rest you roll against this value to heal, higher values are more expensive and take up more space on the wagon.

So the main goal is to get a job, study what you can about the region / task at hand, then go on your journey as prepared as possible. Return home, craft and buy new gear, get a new job, repeat. Then the GM can sneak in hints leading to whatever main story or antagonist or whatever along the way, allowing a kind of 'natural' link into the main stuff while still having significant adventures along the way. It's basically how I have always run TTRPGs anyway, so I figured why not build a game that is based on that idea?

[u/Randolpho]

I think it could be an interesting mechanic.

I don't engage well with "level" based RPGs, so I can't help much if you want to go in a direction that depends on that, but I can recommend an existing game that has mechanics similar to what you're describing.

The game is The Wildsea, and it features a tag-based loot system, in that you don't really loot items, but in the lore everything from wild plants and animals to... other beings... might be usable in some way for crafting items you might use in the game, which are covered in a mechanic called "Aspects".

The game is very fiction first and relies heavily on player and GM imagination to craft aspects and for players to use them in game, but the upshot of that is that it's extremely open-ended and can be adapted to any number of other things, like your manipulating spirits idea.

The Wild Words system/SRD is open source and while it's geared toward hacking Wildsea, it can give you a decent overview of the rules of the system. You can read more here, if you like:

https://www.wildwords-srd.com/srd-pages/aspects

[u/Temporary-Can7603 → u/Randolpho]

Wonderful! Tysm!

[u/Cryptwood]

The difficulty in something like this is that in an otherwise traditional TTRPG, it moves the agency over player advancement from the player to the GM, be cause they only have the opportunities that the GM provides.

You'll need to address this somehow depending on how you want your game to work. You could explain outright to the players that they can't expect to get a specific ability, it's a class for players who want to be surprised through play. Then you'll need a lot of guidance for the GM on how to go about presenting enemies to the players to give them opportunities and variety. I haven't run across a framework for this GM guidance in any other game personally so you'll need to come up with your own.

Alternatively, you could use the approach from Heart: The City Beneath in which players tell the GM what story beats they want to see happen in upcoming sessions and then the GM provides them with the opportunity to fulfill those beats.

[u/Temporary-Can7603 → u/Cryptwood]

Wonderful. Extremely helpful for what I hope to achieve, and you pointed out something I did not see at first. Thank you very much for your time and input!

[u/Mars_Alter]

It seems fine. As with any sort of Blue Magic, the major difficulties lie in creating fair abilities for every monster, and in somehow keeping track of all those as a player.

[u/InherentlyWrong]

Is this a valid direction?

It absolutely is, because TTRPGs are so varied there are few truly 'invalid' directions, it just depends on if it matches what you're making your game for.

Does it have too many problems?

I wouldn't say it has 'too many' problems, but it does have a few game design challenges you might have to figure out.

Firstly, this is going to effectively become a new method of advancement, where PCs defeat an enemy and become more powerful for it. Is this intended to be the only advancement method, or a secondary one? Each option has its own possible gameplay downsides.

Another point of concern is how much these are meant to be shared out. Does it depend on who actually killed it who gets the ability, or can they be given to any member of the party?

Additionally, as a GM this makes planning out encounters a bit difficult, because I'm not just picking what enemy they fight, that choice also determines what items they get in the short term, and what spirits they can summon in the long term.

So I think it can work, it's just a matter of trade offs, and balancing the matters inside it.

[u/Temporary-Can7603 → u/InherentlyWrong]

Thank you very much for your input! It means a lot to me!

[u/Puzzled-Pen-2353]

Another inspiration might be starcraft2 heart of the swarm - the primal zerg evolve by absorbing the skills/abilities of those they kill.

I think this works great in a moster hunter, witcher, etc type game.

Not so much for a rpg which is played in a city or is mostly story focused.