I've been thinking up a system for RP for a while to fit this imagined Fybertech Universe that lives in my head. The system is roughly based off the 'strength -> intellegence -> agility - > strength' idea.
[Let us be explicitly clear here, this isn't linked to Gar's RP. We toyed with the idea of interrelating them, but it made people swear and beat eachother w/sticks. So I'm deciding to make sure this is very clearly separate.]
The 'paper rock scissors' there serves as a modifier to the standard 'GM rolls a dice to see if you beat a set value' system:
strength trying to hit agility would only get .5 the dice roll
strength attacking strength gets the dice value
strength beaing up on intellegence would get 1.5 the dice roll
Adds some strategy to who attacks what in the battle part, and who solves what kind of puzzles. (an agility character would get a bonus to a puzzle where you had to whack many switches in a small time frame or something)
My RP (as you can see) would be a bit less freeform than Gar's because I actually like spesific character buildings and such. This leads me to the fact that I really only want about six classes, one for each of the atributes, and one for each combination of two. The 'subtle undertone' part of this is I want a coherent picture of the world this RP is set in, including the characters played in it.
(This part is a bit open to suggestion, I'm thinking out loud here
It would go something like:
Strength -> Cyborg
Agility -> Detective
Intellegence -> Technologist
Strength/Agility -> Mercinary
Strength/Intellegence -> Mad Scientist
Agility/Intellegence -> Ninja? I dunno, this was the hardest to think up.)
The tradeoff in being a hybrid is that all the rolls you make, and all the rolls against you are always going to be just the value of the dice. You can't do super-damage, but you can't be super-damaged either.
Now I still think people should make up their own abilitees, with a max of say, 5 Power Points (PP) like in Gar's thing. The class just gives people and idea of what abilitees they should invent, and make the characters all fit in this sorta roboty, detectivey, supetechnology univese.
As a thought just brought up in #fybertech, There would be a Group XP instead of EXP for every person, that way a player who was busy for weeks at a time (like me!~) could just adjust his character sheet to the new group level and jump right back in.
NOW IS THE TIME FOR IDEAS AND THINGS~