Recently I have been captivated with Mass Effect II. The world is rich and vibrant, the alien races familiar but different in their own way, and the whole storyline has fantastic set-up. So how can one run a game of Mass Effect using the Dragon Age RPG rules? Here’s what I get when I put my grey matter to some work.
Skills and Attributes
Mass Effect has a rather lightweight character development system – it’s more of action games than dice-rolling! (Heh, it is a action game, more accurately put!). The idea is to keep the system light, so the characters are going to be light too. There is only skill focuses, no attributes. All rolls made for mundane skills (persuasion, sneaking and etc.) are made a +0.
Specialized skills are made at base modifier of -4 and is always a failure if any of the dice rolled is a 1.
Getting Focus
Getting a skill focus at a relevant task allows you to make the check at +2, instead of the base modifier. Characters can gain multiple focuses in the same skill, each time bumping the bonus up by +1. Drawing inspiration from the list, the skills available are: AI Hacking (as opposed to normal Hacking), Assault Rifles, Biotics, Bypass, First Aid, Demolitions, Engineering, Computer Use, Heavy Pistol, Heavy Weapon, Intimidate, Persuade, Submachine Guns and Sniper Rifles and Tech. There should be other skills which are conventional – Navigation, Squad Tactics and so on.
Powers
Should powers, such as Overload, Combat Drone and so on be skills? Since Dragon Age has spells, to keep to the fidelity of the system, those in-game powers should be spell-like too, but instead of having many of them, they each have their own levels and can be evolved. The amount of powers available ideally should be scaled by the character’s Tech and Biotic skills.
There is need for a character creation system too. Maybe next time!
Combat
Combats in Mass Effect 2 is dynamic, with different weapons having different rate of fire, spread and range. It’s not a good idea to roll multiple dice for rifles and submachine guns. So the idea is: roll multiple dice for the quick firing weapons and take the top three best. But, but for each 1 rolled on the dice, the dice with the highest value is discarded.
Example: The Vindicator Assault Rifle allows attacking players to roll 5d6 in combat. On a roll of 3,4,5,5,6, the player takes the three highest roll (5 + 5 + 6) and comes up with 16. If he has rolled 1,3,4,5,6, he needs to remove the 1 and 6, leaving him with 3+4+5, or 12.
Hopefully this is a nice framework to develop the idea into!
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March 29th, 2010 at 11:32 am
I’m inclined to go with a moderate level of crunch for my own Mass Effect RPG project, because of my intentions with the combat system. It seems to me that the best translation of ME2′s power-cetric combat would be to have most of the player’s actions be chosen from sets of personal abilities that all follow the same core rules (similar to 4th Edition’s powers). In my case, the central character creation decision would be how to allocate a reserve of points into four categories: General (Skills and Attributes), Training (i.e. of the military bent), Biotics and Tech. The resulting scores play a similar role to choice of class in other rpgs; they primarily determine what kinds of defenses you have (how strong your barrier/shield/armor/health is) and what kinds of talents you can take (which in turn mostly provide or upgrade combat powers).
Your core mechanic actually helps solve one dilemma I’ve had. I knew I wanted some defenses to be strong against high-powered shots while others are instead strongest against higher volumes of shots. Weapons that roll X dice and then take the best Y results provide an elegant way to do this- Automatic weapons roll larger numbers of smaller dice. Shields force you to discard your top _ rolls, whereas armor is like DR that applies to each die separately (and neither case can reduce the effective result below 1).
December 17th, 2010 at 11:59 pm
Many good ideas here. I do like the overall Mass Effect computer game, but there are some aspects that are a bit “off” for the sake of gameplay. In my idea of the pencil and paper Mass Effect game, shields are a defense that needs the be “battered down” before one can get past them. This “batter down” technique doesn’t hold for armor, however. A well placed shot will punch a hole in it and damage the goods inside without having to shoot every scrap of armor off the target in question. You really don’t notice it in the software game because, let’s face it: It’s not something you have to think about so much. Not to bash the game itself, but there were obvious limitations set upon programmers when the game concept for Mass Effect came about. For a Pencil and Paper RPG’r, you really don’t have to deal with all the constraints the programmers had to deal with, but you DO have to deal with things that become more apparent because the mechanics are suddenly visible. I can just hear some game nerd screaming “What do you mean his medium armor took all three shots from my assault rifle at point blank range?”
The devil is always in the details… LOL.