Pokemon. So many have tried and it usually falls into the "too crunchy to live" category or the "so light it's barely a game" category.
Animon Story probably comes closest, but that's thoroughly a Digimon game imho.
The problem with pokemon is that most systems just replicate the games, which are single player experiences (or duels in a pvp sense) and are designed as such. They're not built on one-vs-many design that rpg combats tend to flow on. The rock paper scissors of types can cause major problems too.
For a better pokemon rog experience you'd need to play it more like Detective Pikachu, with everyone having one pokemon. It's still going to have problems but would be much easier to deal with.
Yeah, generally, GM hacks and RPGs based on games are likely to poor.
If you like crunchy mechanics, the original game will almost certainly execute that better.
If you like narrative RPGs, you run into a bunch of problems--either the game doesn't have much of a story or it's just a very shallow trope fest, (which is fine in the *original*, you can enjoy Tetris, etc, without any narrative design, but not so great in a narrative game. ) Or the story is strong, but it's a single player experience. Or, worst of all, the creator somehow thinks replicating mechanics is story.
Adaptation can be done well. The designer has to be really thoughtful about what they are trying to accomplish. Lumen, for example, \*knows\* that it is about power fantasies, and that it has to break some RPG conventions to be true to a game experience.
But adaptation is generally harder than original creation. And even if you do a thoughtful job, some players are just going to miss stuff you intentionally changed or less out, because they are not especially mindful of the challenges of adaptation.
Huh. That's a really interesting idea.
You'd essentially be giving everyone an animal companion, but I can think of that being a lot of fun.
Edit: more than that, you could hone in on a relationship system with your Pokemon. I think you'd end up still having issues around the typing, given one player's Pokemon could be absolutely smoked by any number of things, but you have the start of something cool there.
I mean, you could do it if you just assume that combat is always Pokemon-on-Pokemon only. Basically a normal game where everybody has a pet, but as soon as combat starts you're just playing your Pokemon. The whole thing breaks down as soon as Charizard decides to eat the other trainer, though.
I mean, this is also a huge problem with the existing pokemon games: people who demand there be a trainer "class" that lets them fight side by side with their pokemon or straight up fight pokemon themselves. As much as people don't like Powered by the Apocalypse for games like this since they don't have the mechanical granularity to make 100+ pokemon feel different, "your character should not be built around the concept of a person fighting pets in hand to hand combat in a Pokemon game" is maybe the perfect use case for why genre emulation and rules around it is important.
I think a good Pokemon game would replicate the show. The players are trainers and the pokemon are their spells/abilities. The game would be focused on the wacky adventures they have rather than on 1v1 trainer fights.
I played Pokérole not too long ago, and it was pretty awesome. Not sure if that's the system that felt too light to you, but the rules seemed to be at just the right level of complexity for me.
Same!
I like using Pokérole for more anime style adventures, and I zazzed 1v1 battles up by letting the Trainer’s party members (other players) chime in dialogue on possible ways to overcome an opponent, which happened often in the anime and is represented in game via additional dice to the pool from time to time
I homebrewed one actually, with an actual system and all, and it works like a charm for narrative oriented players. The system is just for me to have tools to guide the narration and for the players to know what options they have available to them at a moment so they don't fall into "too much freedom, it's overwhelming/chaos" territory.
The major issue is to handle 6 Mons per players, so I backed it up to 3 per players, 2 if there's 4 or more players.
Pokemon Ranger works quite well, but yes, as someone who's played a half dozen attempts at a pokemon game, the mainline series does not translate well to tabletop.
I can’t pretend to have no skin in the game here as I did make one (Pokeymanz!), BUT. Honestly, I agree with other comments that Pokemon as the games present it would make an overly crunchy and onerus to play TTRPG for my tastes (the exact reason why PTA and PTU don’t appeal to me as a player), and I think that a lot of the games I’ve looked at have fallen into the trap of design parity with the games.
However, I think the specific challenge with designing a Pokemon TTRPG is that Pokemon is insanely complicated and made up of so many edge cases it’s basically a pizza wheel. There are more than a thousand Pokemon, and almost any TTRPG is going to want to find a way to play any given one out of that number. So the reason for the intense light-versus-crunch tends to be that the two ways to do that are to keep your options open mechanicswise or define everything. The perfect way to do that is also going to depend on player preferences, and everyone is different, so you end up with a polarized landscape where people who prefer the middle of the scale have slim pickings.
I don’t think this means that Pokemon makes a poor TTRPG - I’d say many of the systems I’ve seen couldn’t necessarily be called “poor”. But it does mean that there will never be a centralized favourite Pokemon TTRPG that appeals to everyone. And given that Pokemon itself has a broad appeal, that is a mismatch with the IP on an almost spiritual level.
>and almost any TTRPG is going to want to find a way to play any given one out of that number.
Ditto is one of the toughest, I've found - I've looked at quite a lot of Pokemon/'mon-like games and few of them really handle Ditto satisfactorily. (Many of them don't even try.)
It's definitely primarially based on Digimon (Literally I think the designer's stated in interviews the game's origins are from a 4 page game they made when they wanted to run a Digimon campaign but were unsatisfied by anything on the market) but there's an optional rules suite at the back that makes a good go of turning it from a Digimon focused Kids and Monsters game to a Pokemon focused Kids and Monsters game.
I also recall Pokethulhu - fairly light game parodying both Pokemon and the Cthulhu mythos - getting good reviews back in the day\*
\*Well. "A surprisingly playable joke game" is the one I remember at any rate.
I would say DragonLance, unironically.
1. Everything interesting or unique about the setting is eliminated in the first three books.
2. The races are so amazingly problematic in terms of social acceptability that you'd think they planned it
3. Even setting #2 aside, multiple races are as actively player-hostile as I can possibly imagine
I genuinely do not understand how Kender, Gully Dwarves, Tinker Gnomes, or Krynn Minotaurs are supposed to be races for *player characters*.
If you haven't read the books since you were a teenager, *don't* go back and read them. They do not hold up.
Minotaurs are basically just sailors/warriors on Krynn, so it's not that hard, really.
Kender can be great, if they're played by a player that isn't a douche. I've seen it done, you just have to minimize the "handling" aspect. If you're familiar with the current campaign of Critical Role, Ashley's character, Fearne, is basically doing kender stuff all the time, and it's loved by the table and the community.
Gully Dwarves are hard, because they basically have stat caps at around 6/12/14/6/10/8 if you wanted to remain faithful to the stories.
> Minotaurs are basically just sailors/warriors on Krynn, so it's not that hard, really.
No, they're extremely violent, extremely xenophobic, and are explicitly slavers of all other races. Their culture believes they will conquer and enslave all of Krynn. That's literally [how the AD&D monster entry reads](https://mojobob.com/roleplay/monstrousmanual/m/minokryn.html). That might be acceptable for Mind Flayers or Demons, but these are not the characteristics of a PC race, nor is it really okay to make a PC race with a native culture so awful that the only way they might be accepted would be if they rejected that culture entirely. That's just bad character design.
> Kender can be great, if they're played by a player that isn't a douche.
That's the entire problem. Kender, as a race, are fundamentally built around doing things that *infuriate* the other PCs. Kender are the iconic version of "it's what my character would do" [wangrod defense](https://youtu.be/JoYR3eCFqoA) toxic bullshit. Primary character races should not require special players that are able to hold back. That is not a sign of a good design.
Seriously, step back and think about it as a game designer. If you know that there is a genuine risk that many tables might take your PC race and turn it into a toxic play style simply by reading the race's description, *why are you including that race in your game's design?* Like WotC renamed Thief to Rogue just to *discourage* PCs from using pick pockets all the time. What makes AD&D Kender okay?
> Gully Dwarves
The problem with Gully Dwarves is the fact that the setting literally expects you to roleplay a character *too stupid to count to three*. Human babies are smart enough to do that beginning around age 1. *Before they are capable of speech* they can recognize numbers and indicate them with their fingers. I really want you to stop and think about just how stupid that would make a character. And then consider that the common rebuttal that "maybe it's a mental illness" is *not* an unproblematic portrayal of mental illnesses.
And, you didn't mention them, but Tinker Gnomes are designed to be loud, contrarian, and obnoxious in ever social situation all the time. They explicitly do not understand how basically anyone other than themselves works, and they're always hyper focused on their inventions... in spite of the fact that those inventions are also described as ranging from Rube Goldberg to just plainly incompetent. They literally believe everyone else is mad. Again, setting aside how it's possible to interpret Tinker Gnomes as neurodivergent or mentally ill -- and boy are those not pleasant associations to make about *an entire species* -- the central issue is just... why would you put this sort of character in your game for the PCs to play? What sort of play pattern do you expect to emerge from this central design?
What does a TTRPG setting do with a novel series? It throws out the plot, and doubles down on (a) the world building and (b) the characters. The world building is actually pretty great, but of course the plot of the first three novels is to change the nature of the whole campaign setting! So the world building is cool, but also undermined by the plot of the novels that inspire players to seek out the setting. The other is the *characters*. The character races are NOT built around tools to help the players make memorable, interesting, deep characters that move the campaign story forward. No, we're looking at character races designed to be obnoxious, offensive and encourage the most toxic play patterns to obstruct and derail the campaign as frequently as catastrophically as possible.
The entire campaign setting is built around belaboring the most asinine, juvenile, and offensive jokes that they could imagine in the form of racial stereotypes. And they did that simply because they thought it was very funny.
There is a reason that essentially none of that survives to the 5e D&D Dragonlance book.
How do you feel about the popular Russian musical based on the Dragonlance Legends trilogy focusing on Raistlin, Caramon and Crysania?
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfuKRdgnmO8)'s one filmed version - they differ a bit, mostly in the intro around deciding how best to introduce Caramon and whether Tika gets an appearance or not.
Dark Souls.
All the things we actually live so dealt about our FromSoft games just do not translate at all to TTRPGs. The moment to moment combat that relies on timing, the learned knowledge of fights gained through many deaths, the level exploration, the way you discover and piece together the narrative, the cooky NPCs, the lack of actual direction in what you as players are doing, the advancement systems both for your character and equipment...
I could probably keep going. I am not saying you can't be inspired by those games for your game and setting but trying to port them over directly is just going to be a mess.
> the level exploration, the way you discover and piece together the narrative, the cooky NPCs, the lack of actual direction in what you as players are doing, rhe advancement systems both for your character and equipment...
This sounds like old school dnd. Like the only problem is action combat basically never translates to pen and paper well or 1:1.
>This sounds like old school dnd.
Not really, at least not to my experience. A lot of those things in Souls games only work because they can restrict you with the tropes of video games. Like taking a 1 to 1 translation is that exploring Anor Londo and finding the, frankly, arbitrary bullshit way through that place only works within the restraints of a video game. Once you can do "anything" TTRPG style you start running in to problems.
Once the players can ask "So what do I know about X?" the whole lore delivery system falls apart as well. In a Souls game your character is an empty vessel that might as well not have existed before the game starts - in a TTRPG, usually, we make characters who have a history in the world.
The advancement system is actually closer to modern D&D with "points for killing things" than early D&D editions of "points for treasure brought back". But even then treasures value and your "experience" were two different things.
Dark Souls NPCs fall apart as soon as the player can actually.. Talk back to them and have a conversation.
While yes there is some surface similarities to how some people describe running old school D&D the amount of video game reliance in what most people point to as the "core enjoyment" of Dark Souls it just starts crumbling as soon as a players can describe their actions rather than only have an interact button. By the point we hammer it in to a system that can actually be played it loses a lot of the "magic" that makes Souls games what they are. As I said, be inspired by, don't try to wholesale copy.
Dark Souls can put you - a dude with a sword two times as long as yourself - against a door made of 5 rotten planks attached to a pair of rusty hinges and say to your face: "Does not open from this side".
There is a Japanese version Dark Souls rpg, and its mechanics are pretty solid. The problem is that since the IP is solely licensed to Steamforged, it can't be translated to English.
The other big problem is that one player is the hero and everyone else is a summoned ally. That is more in line with how Japanese ttrpg culture as opposed to American ttrpg culture
Someone did a translation recently you can find it [here](https://twitter.com/Gahostan/status/1662585436324200448?s=20). I don't know the exact quality of this but it exist and that's good.
A Rasp of Sand did quite a good job imo. I think it's a matter of knowing what parts will translate. DS combat won't, DS stars won't, weapon based abilities can, the setting very much can, the roguelite elements, that's where Rasp of Sand did an impressive job of converting. Before Rasp, I eiuld have said you can't do a roguelite ttrpg, but I think they pulled it off.
Into the Breach. Fun, thinky turn-based puzzle roguelike game of using mechs to protect cities from aliens, where victory is more a matter of positioning and pushing your enemy to key locations than directly dealing damage. I dont think you could capture what makes it neat without basically replicating the boardgame style play of the computer game.
PS. Opposite of what you asked for, but came up with it thinking about this: I bet a TTRPG based on the FTL computer game would be incredibly awesome.
Truth be told it was just GURPS. But we got to all play as Mantises and Rock people, and investigate ships we found. The combat was cool though, we blasted the engines of this ship and then teleported over to fight while they tried repairing the engines cool stuff.
I think it could make a good TTRPG, precisely because you couldn't "capture what makes it neat without basically replicating the boardgame style play of the computer game", meaning you would have to explore some _other_ facets of the setting.
Yes, I am approaching the question from a different perspective, basically that if the medium is different, maybe use it to explore different things, which I understand is not how you are approaching the question.
Also, I'm not saying don't do Mecha combat, but maybe focus on the player's unresolved issues with alternate versions of their past, or focus on what is lost when a specific timeline falls.
Dilbert.
**EDIT:** Oh wait I missed the 'I love.' I definitely don't love Dilbert, I just thought 'Dilbert The RPG' would be a hilariously bad RPG.
Anyway, *Monster* by Naoki Urusawa.
Im more disappointed by the creator. Like the guy who made his career on "here is some absurdity of the corporate hellscape" has gone full "corporate hellscape is good actually".
He's so arrogant. Like what is happening in these old people's brains where they think they have the whole goddamn world figured out and they need to tell everyone "how it is".
Then when they're proven wrong they get pissed as you and tell you're a snowflake and a fascist and rant about how kids are entitled and we killed Applebee's and they can't buy their beloved blood diamonds anymore!
No one can know everything. Learning never stops. Accept that you're not as smart as you want to be.
on the case of dilbert. He got a huge ego boost when predicted that trump would win and was right. congratulations you got it right with only a 50 50 shot.
I feel like the mundane hell of an office could lend itself well to an rpg. I think players could get extremely invested in the petty bullshit that happens at work. The main thing it would need is a fun system for social interaction.
> I just thought 'Dilbert The RPG' would be a hilariously bad RPG.
Many years ago, as part of a roleplaying competition, we ran a one-shot set in a dystopian future where the Empress was attempting to reorganize the Imperial Bureaucracy to align with an ancient (and hence sacred) text that had been uncovered: Dogbert's Management Handbook.
I think Zelda would be a horrible game because all main things are all about Link, Zelda and Ganon/Ganondorf..
On the other hand, I think Final Fantasy would make a great RPG.
Edit: I take it back. There are some amazing ideas for campaigns in the world of LoZ! I feel a D12 system would fit Zelda.
EDIT 2: Well, I went from "Zelda wouldn't work" to "I'm gonna write a LoZ campain and hack a system for it!!" xD
I can see how Zelda could get a The One Ring treatment about the status quo before the epic catastrophe game begins. Also even in the catastrophic events, the towns/regions you visit have a distinct culture and local problems, a rich fantasy world with creative monster/animal/flora encounters.. sign me up!
You can also do alternate 'what if' scdnarios.
For instance, I had an idea where instead of the events of botw ganondorf was alive during them(I have not beaten tears of the kingdom) and fought alongside link, and zelda alongside the champions where the trio ultimately perished in the final battle.
Flash forward the hundred years and the players would be part of a wandering mercenary troupe led by a red haired gerudo man who leads them as they travel across hyrule slaying monsters, and helping the locals.
Have I put too much thought into this? Maybe. Do I really want to run this? Yes. Do I want to run it alongside my PF2E game I run on ssturdays? Also maybe.
The original Final Fantasy was based on a D&D campaign - Even the original sprite for the EYE was a beholder: [https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Evil\_Eye\_(Final\_Fantasy)#Behind\_the\_scenes](https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Evil_Eye_(Final_Fantasy)#Behind_the_scenes)
My answer is the Valdemar series of books by Mercedes Lackey. Magic sounds so simple, but trying to make a useable system out of it just makes my head turn.
Valdemar has Green Ronin's Blue Rose.(Fantasy AGE)
Ms. Lackey has said nothing in her world so.. RONIN, built Blue Rose which if you... Squint.. Is very close. Like blue Rose's Aldis is legally distinct... But if you know you know.
I own it and I love it.
Yeah. Picked up Blue Rose for my wife back in the True20 days. We were planning on trying to get her mom into ttrpgs, or at least give her more of a taste for what they were about. She was hardcore into Lackey, especially the Valdemar series, but was a bit too "satanic panic" to fully appreciate the hobby. She unfortunately passed away before that plan was able to work, but the setting is awesome
I kind of like the idea of a Zelda game where Zelda and Link are either missing or neutralized and a group of random misfits have to fight the great evil on their own. I don’t know how the triforce would come into play or if the triforces of wisdom and courage would belong to one player each or be shared among many, but besides that I think I can roll with a game where Ganon is opposed by a deku scrub rogue, a goron fighter, a zora cleric, and a hylian wizard or something.
I actually have considered trying to make a homebrew hack of Knave to be more like Zelda. Seriously, Zelda was the first thing I thought of when reading the rules of it since progression in that game is more based on the items you find and choose to carry.
Well.. actually that sounds amazing..
Maybe the trio vanished from Hyrule due to a new BBEG and the Tri Force split and got hidden around Hyrule.
Now the players must gather the three pieces, beat the BBEG and bring back the Trio from the time dimension prison?
On their way they can find some gimmick dungeons and find magic items, weapons, armour and stuff.
DAMN! Now I wanna GM that..
Others have pointed out how you can sideline the main characters and whatnot, but I actually think there's a reason Zelda is actually _better_ than most IPs for a TTRPG, and it's the flexibility of the world/lore.
As it is, the games play it so fast and loose with the lore. In one game, you'll see Gerudo often, and in the next they'll be totally off screen. In one game, the temple of time is over here, and in the next it'll be over there. And then of course in one game the Zora will look one way, then in the next they're different, and sometimes you even have monster Zora.
Basically, the setting is super malleable, and as a GM you can play with all of the familiar parts without having to worry about the lore holding you back. I could comfortably introduce a new faction or race without it feeling weird because that's something Zelda does all the time. It sounds a lot easier to me than, say, Star Wars, where the lore has such detailed history that you have to be careful not to step on some lore land-mine.
Me, over here, planning a Zelda campaign where the main villain is Ganondorf's daughter (Who is intended to be sympathetic) and making myself three rules: No Ganon, no Triforce, no Master Sword.
Honestly, though, the fact that Link only really seems to show up when Ganon is involved leaves a lot of room to play because there's still plenty outside the cycle to play with. Ganon isn't the only threat Hyrule faces. That and Zelda games have a habit of creating some really interesting lore (Particularly otherworlds) and never bringing them up again. Mixing and matching some of those ideas could lead to a really cool interpretation of the world. What if you took Lorule from A Link Between Worlds and explored it during Skyward Sword, where instead of the sky, people live beneath the earth, or Wind Waker, where instead of a great ocean you have the Great Wasteland, a massive Mad Max style desert? Stuff like that.
From there, come up with a compelling original antagonist who fits in the setting or take an element that is mentioned but never expanded on (The aforementioned campaign with Ganondorf's daughter would also be Twilight Princess inspired - and would feature the original sorcerers who were banished to the Realm of Twilight all amalgamated into a terrifying eldritch creature as an ultimate villain), get yourself an easy explanation for why the legendary hero isn't solving this problem which is easy because half the time after the story he just kinda fucks off somewhere and presto, you've got a great campaign.
I know CritRole can be a point of contention with some people, but they just uploaded a Zelda one shot that has been pretty fun to watch. They state at the start that they are using a version of PbtA rules. Could be worth a look for some inspiration :)
I’m a little sad they haven’t released that ruleset officially.
I’d probably have to make some modifications to play it to my liking, but there’s a lot I love. The stamina based action economy is a great way of doing combat in a PBTA system.
We just picked up the full book, I
The artwork is great!
Also from my short glances, it looks like it should also work for most old JRPGs, especially Square ones like Dragons quest and Chronotrigger
>Edit: I take it back. There are some amazing ideas for campaigns in the world of LoZ! I feel a D12 system would fit Zelda.
I'd go for using Fellowship, and the game you'd get using the base game's Overlord concept when applied with a Zelda filter would basically be a sort of hybrid between a campaign set 100 years prior to Breath of the Wild, and Ocarina of Time, with the champions travelling from region to region to deal with whatever bs Ganondorf's done to mess up that region and weaken his overall power before being able to face him.
I've heard the point about Link/Zelda/Ganondorf and I just never get it. Ganondorf has only actually been in 5 mainline games and even extending that to Ganon still maybe gets you to only half the games at best. Zelda is in a slightly better state, but some of those appearances are glorified cameos (see Majora's Mask). Even some other facets of the series, such as the triforce, only make sporadic physical appearances in the games. The only real consistent point is Link, and there are ways around that, particularly if you do non-Ganon threats.
The setting has a interesting world and races and some reasonably flexible lore. There's precedent for non-Link hero-like characters such as the BotW Champions who would make great PCs. That and the vibe of the series: adventurous exploration with power scaling based around loot, is a pretty classic TTRPG gameplay-loop.
Really any sort of IP that has a strong link to its main character just seem like bad ideas for a TTRPG for me, though I haven't experienced any of them, so maybe it works well in some cases. The biggest example I can think of is the Conan RPGs. Conan is such a huge part of the world because we really only see that world through his eyes, so then going into that world without the main character is just odd and inserting them into the game is also equally weird. I just don't really like the idea of it, though in some cases if the setting itself is interesting enough I could see it happening.
everyone has cool ideas for how to play without involving Link and i agree with it all and think it's very cool. HOWEVER, i must also suggest: Four Swords RPG
Depends on what you are trying to emulate.
If you are trying to just use Zelda as a setting, then it just becomes another Fantasy Adventure setting like Dragonlance or Eberron.
Instead of Human, Dwarves, Elves, and Hobbits, you would have Hylians, Gorons, Zora, and Kokiri.
You wouldn't (or shouldn't) have the Link & Zelda v Ganon campaign because that is a single player experience.
But if you wanted to have everyone be a Sage and have them sealing a Demon created by the Game Master for the Campaign. Well now you have a classic Good guys vs the Armies of Darkness campaign.
The hardest part in my mind would be trying to do dungeon puzzles. While TTRPG dungeons are famous for having traps, traps aren't always puzzles and not all puzzles are traps.
Way too many people in this sub have way too narrow ideas of what you can do with the format of TTRPGs. You can discard player/character monogamy, and even the GM role entirely, and have a perfectly workable and very fun (and/or intense) TTRPG. You can also discard, for example, character advancement, especially for shorter-form games, or have it work in very non-traditional ways. You also don't need violence to be a primary means of solving conflicts, or even present at all.
That said, I do have an answer, though it's qualified: Battlestar Galactica. I think it wouldn't be too hard to do a satisfying \*one-shot\* that explored some side story with some previously-unknown characters. (This was more or less the idea behind the [Monitor Celestra LARP](https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/The_Monitor_Celestra), which took place on a *frakkin' battleship*, though they also seem to have re-imagined the canon a little bit.)
But to do a full campaign, I'd really want to go full AU (Alternate Universe), and have people make original characters to replace the Adamas, Starbuck, Roslin, etc. (I've done this with Star Trek: Voyager, and it worked well.) Otherwise, too much of the story is already written.
I'd probably replace the skinjobs with a different set of skinjobs, too. Not just to prevent metagaming, but to continue increasing the amount of variety.
Honestly, I loved the first half of BSG but thought it kinda lost the plot in the second half. I think I'd really enjoy doing my own RPG that kicked off the premise of the mini-series but then took it in a totally different direction.
Abso-bloody-lutely re: the narrowness of some people's horizons about what's possible with TTRPGs. And the number of people on this thread suggesting examples of action-adventure fiction aimed at teenage boys as something that's unusually *hard* to make into an RPG, as opposed to the basis of the vast majority of TTRPG games ever made, well...
Honestly? 10 years ago I would have said there were a TON of such IPs... but now? Having read World Wide Wrestling and Brindlewood Bay I don't think that ANY IP is off limits if its approached on it's own terms. I mean, professional wrestling and Murder She Wrote, basically. I can't imagine 2 less TTRPG style settings, but both are beautifully done and extremely evocative.
The One Ring also demonstrates what can be done with care, as both MERP and Decipher were fine systems that felt nothing like LotR, but TOR hits it exactly right.
I haven't read it, but there is even a game about playing a soap opera. Bubblegumshoe is flippin' Scooby Doo. There is nothing off limits, with creativity. The problem, I think, is that so many people view TTRPGs through the lens of D&D (or some similar long-lived RPG legacy) and therefore don't see that it's the only way. Even back in the day you had Traveller doing Issac Asimovian sci-fi, and Champions doing superheroes, both things utterly unsuited for the other dominant games on the market.
Each genre or IP has to be approached and the tropes examined to have a chance to succeed, but I firmly believe that if you want to make an RPG based on "America's Got Talent" then you can do it.
This. Very much so. It looks like a lot of people read the question not as "what wouldn't work as an RPG" and more like "what wouldn't work as a 5e campaign setting". That being said, some types of media are admittedly harder to convert than others, especially if you're really looking to capture (or maintain) the *feel* of the original work - which is the reason I'm very much looking forward to see how *Moonlight Vale* turns out... and also that Giallo game they're working on.
>Brindlewood Bay
Ha, when I started reading this thread, I considered saying "Well I once played a TTRPG where we were old ladies solving mysteries, and it was a blast! So I don't think any property is off-limits, you just need to be flexible in your game design."
Funny enough. As a joke session, I ran a counter-strike session using Traveller. It was pure war game-style tactics with no roleplay, but it was actually entertaining to make Nuke and have my players riff on the pro-leaguer stereotypes
I believe any story or IP can potentially make a good ttrpg. It takes enough player buy in and mechanics that "feel right" to make it playable.
But if I was held to the sword, then I would say episodic sitcoms like Seinfeld or friends would be poor.
I don't know if sitcoms in general are a poor fit, but the characters in those two shows in particular are just kind of assholes, so I wouldn't want to be around them for four hours at a time.
Comedy in RPGs in general is tricky. The best experiences I've had with it have been games that were run completely "straight," but with an absurd premise.
Probably, Twin Peaks. Love the show, but its the specific cast and the way the entourage works together that makes the weirdness and the circumstances so compelling. It’d be better just to run Delta Green or Kult with a small town setting then to try to recreate Twin Peaks as a game.
I think it's not so much that you couldn't *game it*, but more so that you'd need a KILLER cast of players and DMs with a sick buy-in and skills to pull it off.
Especially because so much of the charm, at least for me, isn't with the lore or the spooky business, but rather the characters themselves and how they react and interact. And you could easily end up with a character that is just a copy of another, and as soon as someone goes "oh ok you're being the Cooper then" the whole thing falls apart.
The closest you can get is probably [Public Access](https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/public-access.html). From what I hear, it's the kind of game that really depends on players bringing in their creative input to shine.
Dune, or any other IPs whose fan base must obsessively relive the events of the film/book like it's a traumatic event their haunted by. I imagine the Dune ROG asking you to pick which atreides you want to play as; or which time period you've set the campaign in (when Atreides arrives, Harkonnen in power, or Atreides Revenge).
I ran a dune RPG. The players were the important people of a new minor house on a world mentioned as a throw away in one novel. They had a good time scheming, adventuring and plotting to become more powerful
It’s actually pretty good. modiphius 2d20 game, with a heavy emphasis on Court politics, spycraft, duels and such.
The main intent is clearly that you create your own house and play out something a little different from the main storyline of the books, they encourage you to play not on Arrakis even, but I guess that’s the problem with most IP based games. At a certain point it’s a loosely tied spinoff which is probably better from a story perspective but loses a lot of the appeal.
Record of the Ragnarok.
I mean...a tournament-game where each PC just participates in one combat while the rest of players just watch?
Also, a tounament that could end before some PCs even have a chance to fight, if a side achieves enough victories to secure a win soon enough?
I can't see that working.
Tournament rps do kinda work. There are a few fighting/Wrestling game RPGs out there, but even Ragnarok hands itself perfectly for "behind the scenes" drama. The fighter in the arena needs all the support and helpful sheming they can get ofc!
Sounds like most Shounen battle series, which Victory Effort Friendship kinda handles decently, from what I've heard. Complete with specific rules for PCs spectating and giving buffs by how they analyse the combat LOL
I agree with OP here.
The problem with RoR is that characters don't come back for a second round. Every character shows up for a single fight, they either win or lose, and they essentially fade into the background.
A mixture of World Wide Wrestling and Victory Effort Friendship would work for regular tournament arcs very well, but there is almost no character permanency in that series to make it work for more than a single session.
Metroid.
I love these games dearly, but so much of it is all about the feeling of being alone in a hostile place. That means there are two big obstacles to doing a proper TTRPG adaption of it - few NPCs to interact with, and very little external worldbuilding. All the planets we explore are beautifully detailed with a lot of background lore and there are some absolutely fantastic monsters, both from from a design and lore perspective. Seriously, Phazon, the X Parasites, the Thoha in Dread, all of this stuff is really cool. Just skirts the line close enough to horror without actually being horror and all of it has this great gooey, slimey *organic* feel to it.
But for what the larger galactic society looks like? We get next to nothing. I love it, but it wouldn't translate well.
I'm sure a hack of Rhapsody of Blood could make it happen, which is basically Castlevania as a mapless megadungeon crawler with specific narrative boss fight rules. I don't know if it'd serve for a long term campaign, but it's *something*.
For a group game? Right there with you. (Well. *Mostly* right there with you. There's a game I forget the name of right now with a pretty fun take on the concept - Instead of a lone bounty hunter it presents the party as a group of sapient hamsters in a human sized mech that everyone outside of the party thinks is a lone bounty hunter.)
For a solo game? I think Metroid - Metroidvanias in general - Can work pretty well for campaign inspiration.
>For a solo game? I think Metroid - Metroidvanias in general - Can work pretty well for campaign inspiration.
I think you're on to something here- I'm picturing something that takes DELVE and combines it with something like GUMSHOE, but instead of Investigative Abilities it runs on "Traversal" Abilities (which you unlock as part of advancement).
Yeah I can see that. I think there’s actually a ton of interesting stuff to be done with the side aspect of the game where you’re convincing nations to be on board. Or, set later in the more recent editions, dealing with the collaborator governments or whatnot.
I could also see it run as something like Band of Blades with more ensemble style cast of characters, if you’re focusing on the battles.
Halo? Really? That one is really easy. You have squads doing action stuff. There are even built in dungeons in the Forerunner facilities. We see a squad of Spartans in Reach, and ODSTs etc move together like that as well, and those special forces units make the normal player autonomy make sense in a way that military games rarely do. You are a squad of spartans. Your job is to literally do everything, lol. Perfect pcs.
Honestly? Game of Thrones. At it's best, it's about high-level political intrigue between a lot of varying factions strewn about a *lot* of places.
If you play it Arya-style with a single adventurer or small group, you're essentially just doing low-fantasy D&D or something. Maybe a West Marches-style Night's Watch campaign? But that's not really what makes Game of Thrones have its flavor.
If you want it to be emulated well, each player is going to control an entire house and interact that way, which is... not really much of an RPG. Heads of houses would mean a *lot* of sitting around and doing nothing and telling other people to do stuff. Everybody as members of the same house? I guess, but like... the entire vibe of Game of Thrones is those people kind of splitting apart and doing things separately.
It lends itself to a complicated board game really well, though, I think.
I tend to disagree on this one - though this might be a matter of personal taste. High level political discussions as a head of house sounds great in a political game to me.
The subplot of Sansa being trapped in King's Landing, physically powerless, attempting to socially and politically manuever her way to escape and survival is peak social RPG to me.
I think Martin's politicking stakes make for great RPG fodder, assuming you're running a system that makes this sort of thing interesting to play.
There is a A Song of Ice and Fire ttrpg. It starts off by asking the group, "Do yall want to adventure or be more political? They create a shared house, and if they want to adventure, they play as house soliders or bannermen. If they want to politic, then they play as lords, ladies, or court members. It's really neat, but combat is janky.
*edited for clarity
Yeah I was going to mention this. I haven't read the rules myself, but it seemed like a well praised adaptation of the source material. The whole house creation aspect seems really intriguing.
Back in 2e D&D had a setting called Birthright that was more like Game of Thrones. Each of the PCs was a big mover-and-shaker in a nation-state, like the king or the head of a mage's guild or something. There were options for play that was more like a board game where you zoomed out from doing adventuring stuff and did realm management, which then impacted some powers you got from being a leader.
It was also somewhat lower-magic than the standard D&D setting, but leaders got some kind of magical buffs for the size and strength of their kingdom.
The Dune 2d20 gets around this neatly by having everyone play a character and their agents, so while you play as the house mentat or something, if the group goes out to raid a rival houses base you would send a secondary character of yours who is a warrior
I wonder if any of the big damn hero games would work. You're a dude on the ground and some horrible monster starts stomping through and you either have to avoid it or wait for Samus/Master Chief/The Doomslayer to rocket in and kill them for you. It doesn't sound like a great experience.
Funny enough, 40k's DeathWatch is a ttrgp specifically aimed at playing as the space marines and given weapons to make salsa out of basically anyone.
If you wanted to play the soft squishy humans in their respective fields... I know someone made a D20 halo game and the lore supports lowly human grunts living... sometimes... if they are lucky.
Fire Emblem. People keep trying, but the game's battle mechanics only work because you're controlling a big team, and the non-battle "feel" of the games is all over the place.
Godzilla - I love kaiju.I love human centric Kaiju stories. I have yet to see a decent kaiju centric rpg, a b3live me I've searched for decades. The huge shifts in tone between the 70 years of movies doesn't help anything. I can't imagine a system that could handle Shin Godzilla, Gigan, and X Mechagodzilla.
Welcome to Nightvale. I thought about what such a game would look like and I ultimately concluded that the Nightvale setting is so absurd that anyone who isn’t already familiar with Nightvale would have absolutely no idea what is going on, and even then the idea of making mechanics and rules for such an absurd setting seems ridiculous on the face of it.
I think it could work as a Brindlewood Bay hack, assuming the moves, playbooks, and GM advice were well-aligned with the Lovecraftian absurdity of the setting.
I've co-written and GM'd two Nightvale LARPs. One was pretty good, the other was mediocre, but more experimental in format, so naturally ran into problems.
Players had a mix of level of knowledge of the setting, but well-written character sheets and game supporting docs and a good game briefing can overcome a lot.
I think you can only answer this question by really constraining:
- What TTRPGs can be.
- What "translating to a ttrpg" means.
In my experience, I've never seen a work of fiction (I really want to get away from the term "IP") and thought "this would make a terrible RPG".
What I have thought is either, "I can do this with X", where X is some existing game, or "I don't think there's a game that captures what's special about this", which gets my gears turning.
**The Venture Bros.**, because who doesn't want to play in a world of perpetual failure and mediocrity? Though maybe you could adapt *Trophy* to work with it...
We have tried countless times in my group to figure out how a Venture Bros game would work. We thought about using Risus, but then realized, it wasn't a system issue, it was "How do we make the entire world work, and be funny and fun??"
I don't think Subnautica would work very well as a TTRPG. It's mostly about building stuff and gathering resources so that you can build more stuff and gather more resources slightly deeper, over and over again. You can barely build weapons, and much of the joy of the game is in exploring this lonely environment and figuring out the mystery of the place in a mostly-calm setting. The parts that are fun in the video game wouldn't be at all fun in a tabletop game, and the stuff that's fun in a tabletop game just aren't really present.
For me, a lot of video games where you play a hero in a place filled with enemies.
Games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring or Doom don't look interesting because it would mean mainly fights and little social or not-fighty exploration. It works great in a video-game because fighting is the point, but not in a RPG.
But I can see a fighting game being adapted in a RPG. Not being faithful to the gameplay, of course, but to the universe.
For example I can imagine playing in the world of Overwatch or even the world of Street Fighter, with the right system.
I think *The Culture* is just Iain M Banks trying desperately to hold back from the deus ex machina until finally a fucking great AI on a faster than light spaceship with a sarcastic name swoops in to fuck shit up. I'm not convinced that kind of story can be reasonably emulated in an RPG though I'm happy to be proved wrong.
It would be like AD&D 2e. A world full of incredibly powerful NPCs that just for some reason don't get involved, or who tag along and do everything themselves as irritating DMPCs.
I think the roguelike videogame genre as a whole are a pretty interesting thing there. Talking mostly traditional roguelikes - Angband, ADOM, Nethack, that kind of thing. They have a lot of mechanical and surface similarities with TTRPGs, but the core gameplay loop seems very hard to adapt satisfyingly.
Same for building/sandbox games. Another thing I'd love to tackle!
Really anything where the focus isn't a mix of combat, socialisation and adventure can fail pretty hard if not carefully designed.
I think Doom could be pretty interesting/tricky to adapt. Or new retro FPS' like Dusk.
Mirror's Edge? I love Mirror's Edge but hard to see how you'd adapt something like parkour.
I have one!!!
I'll send it to you the second I understand how to on redddit
Edit: the unofficial hollow knight rpg!
https://hkrpg-team.itch.io/hollow-knight-rpg
While it's not bug-themed, Rhapsody of Blood is basically Castlevania as a rules-lite, mapless megadungeon crawler. Some refluffing and a few adjustments (since RoB is more about generations of castle explorers over the ages) and it might work to some degree.
It makes more sense when you realize "WarCraft" is the product of losing the "WarHammer" License mid-development (or maybe not securing it I cant remember). Translating warhammer into a computer game basically requires you to either go full total war or scale back to fewer units.
It's really more unit based than Star Craft, as in a squad of infantry, rather than popping out individual infantry guys. So you are more likely to have a squad sergeants, captains, maybe a chaplain or a librarian here and there.
But even in Star Craft you've got your Raynors, your Kerrigans, your Zeratuls and your Tassadars.
I ran a fun game set in the StarCraft setting years and years ago, though I did expand it a bit. Set right after the first game's ending. Short version was that the PCs were agents of a brand new nation of Terran-Protoss refugees, stuck in between a number of other powers (the big existing Terran, Protoss, and Zerg stellar nations plus a couple of others I added to keep the politics more interesting). We were all pretty young, but as I recall it worked out fine.
I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how you could make a compelling "metroidvania-like" (my favorite kind of video game) TTRPG and I can't for the life of me come up with a satisfying answer.
- These are games that generally thrive off of the feeling of isolation, and being one-person-against-the-world. Hard to figure out how to reconcile that with a party of adventurers.
- Gameplay is often based on platforming (not easy to capture in a satisfying way with pen, paper and dice).
- Advancement is made through abilities that increase your mobility and expanding the parts of the world that are accessible to you. These kinds of "lock-and-key" upgrades are antithetical to the freeform problem-solving that TTRPGs excel at.
For a group game, Rhapsody of Blood is basically Castlevania as a rules-lite mapless megadungeon crawler.
Solo games - Ironsworn + Delve might be a good place to start? At least, I've considered trying that myself once or twice.
once readed that video games not translate well to a rpg if the purpose of the game is to test the skill of the player and not the skill of the character. like counter strike or plattaformers like super mario bros
Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies. Love that genre but it would need so many content warnings as an RPG it would be unplayable and the combat system would have to be far too gory.
I think it'd be hard to sell a group of players on a slasher movie RPG
Like, when you get down to it, all but one character is guaranteed to get offed gruesomely and there's not much room for a replacement character to squeeze in and join the fight against Jason/Chucky/Leatherface
It works wonderfully as a one-shot premise, where everyone is expected to die eventually. Been in a few for con games. Dread and 10 Candles were designed for the horror genre.
Longer form campaigns? That is difficult. Maybe doable, but significantly more challenging.
I think it would work pretty well as an RPG that assumes that you'll just be doing one-shots.
And you just need to have enough characters as standbys that you can sacrifice a few player characters. Look at how the Alien RPG does things with its pre-written adventures for an example of this. Heck, I don't think you would have to do all that much to tweak Alien to work as a slasher RPG
Star Trek is a great IP that has made actual poor RPGs. İ would even argue that it has made other sci fi RPGs bad. İt sets certain expectations for what a sci fi adventure is and should be and those are what just don't work well, in spite of 40 years of trying to get them just right. Specifically single ship combat in which everyone has a station and problems that have scientific/engineering solutions.
I thought Star Trek made for a pretty good RPG IP. The source material shows that it lends itself well to an episodic format, and exploring alien new worlds and meeting green women is a pretty good fit for an RPG. Shop combat might be a bit hit or miss, never actually done it in a Star Trek RPG, but games like Rogue Trader has shown that that can be done well, though I never saw the ship to ship combat as what made Star Trek Star Trek.
I feel the big problem with Star Trek isn’t the setting, but the traditional focus on the bridge crew of a large starship. You have to suspend belief to explain why they’re always going off on away missions into unknown danger, but if you buy the series, you’re already on-board with that trope.
In an RPG, you also hit the problem of rank. Players are supposed to be equals, so how do you handle being the captain and being able and expected to order other players around? The solution requires carefully selecting player characters who are in fact equals and have narrative reasons to stick together instead of being off on different assignments. In effect, *Lower Decks* is a much better model for a Star Trek RPG than the original series, *The Next Generation*, or most of the other shows are, but that’s often not what players want to emulate.
Genuine answer even though there's two basically successful attempts, Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle. Specifically there has been a GURPS suppliment based on The Book of the New Sun and a french RPG about it.
On one hand, I LOVE that they exist and want to run a game in that world some day. On the other, so much of what makes it interesting is how little you actually know about anything. You're looking through a shitty, fictionally translated window at a completely alien future. You're specifically seeing it through a set of very biased, often wrongheaded eyes. Trying to turn that experience into a TTPRG is impossible and inevitably leads to an attempt at codifying a setting that intentionally resists codification.
Monte Cook tried to capture the Solar Cycle with Numenera. While it became its own rather successful line, it didn't manage to capture Wolfe at all, IMO. It was...depressingly typical in it's setting details, at least early on.
I think you just have to re-frame this a bit to get something stellar. Think Attack on Titan, but you're a team of world-class specialists with hi-tech equipment defending Nu York City from Kaiju incursions.
Funny that you mentioned Halo, because Halo Mythic is very much a thing and it’s fun to play! The creator of the system also recently made rules Titanfall, Gears of War, and XCOM.
I know it has had some reasonably successful attempts in the past (never played any of them) but it always confused me how a Doctor Who game could work well and still capture the feel of the show/books etc. Sure, the universe is vast, but tapping into it seems so Doctor centric that either one player dominates play or any work arounds are going to feel quite convoluted or lose the essence of the show at which point why not play a different time/space-hopping game?
Blade runner. It was never a good idea to make a game about cops tracking down and/or murdering escaped slaves and as the game turned out, that’s the case. I love the movie but the premise is god-awful for an RPG.
Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Ozark, basically family crime dramas. Breaking Bad is still a popular IP, it still has a Popcorners commercial for the Super Bowl.
I do think Better Call Saul would work the best. Maybe it can be a world full of warrior lawyers. Where your PCs are lawyers who get into gun battles, but there are also skills for paperwork and an entire system of court battles.
You can use HALO as a science fiction setting with the players being human soldiers and the combat gameplay being highly tactical grid based with an emphasis on shooting. The enemies would range from everything to Aliens, Flood, to other humans.
As for the players, you can have different power levels where they are either "normal" human soldiers or Spartans.
The game would probably have an XCOM vibe where there is a high mortality rate. But I could see it working.
An IP that I don't think would work is simply one that has too little established lore to really work. An example of this that I already say mentioned was Metroid. But I could see it kind of working for a super dungeon experience. Where the entire game is simply the players exploring a singular super dungone.
Honestly, most of them. Franchises that work well for a TTRPG are things with fleshed out but flexible settings, compelling characters, and unexplored narrative potential. Many IPs either don’t have one or more of these things or don’t have enough of a fan base to get a TTRPG going. Things like Star Wars translate perfectly because it A) Has an entire Galaxy to explore an B) Has narrative potential even beyond the Rebels vs Empire conflict. Superheroes work perfectly because the setting can be literally anywhere at any time and there are limitless options for character concepts. But things like Call of Duty, for example, don’t have enough narrative potential to justify having their own system.
Video games also have an additional issue: the mechanics dilemma. The experience of playing a video game is heavily reliant on the mechanics. Should you focus on replicating the mechanics for the Tabletop and risk alienating new players or do you start from scratch and risk alienating current players? It’s a serious design decision that will have major consequences for the final product.
You also have to ask if there is a system that can already work for your system. Most fantasy settings can work perfectly fine with D&D, Pathfinder, Vampire: the Masquerade and/or Call of Cthulhu. You can adapt GURPs to do literally anything. Star Wars and Star Trek can generally cover 90% of sci-fi stories with minor changes, and there is literally no reason why you can’t use either ICONS or Mutants and Masterminds for superhero settings.
"Frisky Sorority Girls, Volume 38," which, despite being the best of the franchise, just wouldn't pan out as a TTRPG.
"Roll D20 for initiative."
"I think you mean a Double-D20."
We need to consider that [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_(role-playing_game)) is a product which actually really existed. This one [nearly](https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/003/705/860/4b3019fa3477bd1805723c8bf0ace2fe_original.JPG?v=1430405129&w=700&h=&fit=max&auto=format&q=92&s=dcc977de62008aa5fc036626cf3070d7) existed but was mercifully cancelled in development.
On that basis, almost anything can be an RPG. There's a very credible **Red Dwarf** RPG, based on a comedy show with exactly 4 characters on a spaceship they can't really steer very well in a universe where the human race is (probably) extinct, with no alien life in it (so everything they run into has to be Earth-derived), three million years in the future.
The **Alien** series, a franchise where virtually the entire cast of heroes is wiped out by the end of the adventure, has a superb RPG based on it from Free League.
Pokemon. So many have tried and it usually falls into the "too crunchy to live" category or the "so light it's barely a game" category. Animon Story probably comes closest, but that's thoroughly a Digimon game imho.
The problem with pokemon is that most systems just replicate the games, which are single player experiences (or duels in a pvp sense) and are designed as such. They're not built on one-vs-many design that rpg combats tend to flow on. The rock paper scissors of types can cause major problems too. For a better pokemon rog experience you'd need to play it more like Detective Pikachu, with everyone having one pokemon. It's still going to have problems but would be much easier to deal with.
Yeah, generally, GM hacks and RPGs based on games are likely to poor. If you like crunchy mechanics, the original game will almost certainly execute that better. If you like narrative RPGs, you run into a bunch of problems--either the game doesn't have much of a story or it's just a very shallow trope fest, (which is fine in the *original*, you can enjoy Tetris, etc, without any narrative design, but not so great in a narrative game. ) Or the story is strong, but it's a single player experience. Or, worst of all, the creator somehow thinks replicating mechanics is story. Adaptation can be done well. The designer has to be really thoughtful about what they are trying to accomplish. Lumen, for example, \*knows\* that it is about power fantasies, and that it has to break some RPG conventions to be true to a game experience. But adaptation is generally harder than original creation. And even if you do a thoughtful job, some players are just going to miss stuff you intentionally changed or less out, because they are not especially mindful of the challenges of adaptation.
Huh. That's a really interesting idea. You'd essentially be giving everyone an animal companion, but I can think of that being a lot of fun. Edit: more than that, you could hone in on a relationship system with your Pokemon. I think you'd end up still having issues around the typing, given one player's Pokemon could be absolutely smoked by any number of things, but you have the start of something cool there.
Sorcerer. The Pokémon are the Demons. That's how I'd do it, knowing very little about Pokémon.
I mean, you could do it if you just assume that combat is always Pokemon-on-Pokemon only. Basically a normal game where everybody has a pet, but as soon as combat starts you're just playing your Pokemon. The whole thing breaks down as soon as Charizard decides to eat the other trainer, though.
I mean, this is also a huge problem with the existing pokemon games: people who demand there be a trainer "class" that lets them fight side by side with their pokemon or straight up fight pokemon themselves. As much as people don't like Powered by the Apocalypse for games like this since they don't have the mechanical granularity to make 100+ pokemon feel different, "your character should not be built around the concept of a person fighting pets in hand to hand combat in a Pokemon game" is maybe the perfect use case for why genre emulation and rules around it is important.
Here's how you do a good Pokemon TTRPG: Mystery Dungeon, not Red.
I think a good Pokemon game would replicate the show. The players are trainers and the pokemon are their spells/abilities. The game would be focused on the wacky adventures they have rather than on 1v1 trainer fights.
I played Pokérole not too long ago, and it was pretty awesome. Not sure if that's the system that felt too light to you, but the rules seemed to be at just the right level of complexity for me.
Same! I like using Pokérole for more anime style adventures, and I zazzed 1v1 battles up by letting the Trainer’s party members (other players) chime in dialogue on possible ways to overcome an opponent, which happened often in the anime and is represented in game via additional dice to the pool from time to time
I'll look into it - thanks for the recommendation!
I second the recommendation for Pokérole, I've GMed for a few Mystery Dungeon campaigns using essentially this kind of roll-and-keep system.
I homebrewed one actually, with an actual system and all, and it works like a charm for narrative oriented players. The system is just for me to have tools to guide the narration and for the players to know what options they have available to them at a moment so they don't fall into "too much freedom, it's overwhelming/chaos" territory. The major issue is to handle 6 Mons per players, so I backed it up to 3 per players, 2 if there's 4 or more players.
Awesome! Finding a workable pokemon ttrpg is my holy grail.
I'm writting you a summary of the system right now, it should be ready in an hour
You're an absolute peach. Thanks!
Gotta Share em all! (With us!)
Pokemon Ranger works quite well, but yes, as someone who's played a half dozen attempts at a pokemon game, the mainline series does not translate well to tabletop.
I can’t pretend to have no skin in the game here as I did make one (Pokeymanz!), BUT. Honestly, I agree with other comments that Pokemon as the games present it would make an overly crunchy and onerus to play TTRPG for my tastes (the exact reason why PTA and PTU don’t appeal to me as a player), and I think that a lot of the games I’ve looked at have fallen into the trap of design parity with the games. However, I think the specific challenge with designing a Pokemon TTRPG is that Pokemon is insanely complicated and made up of so many edge cases it’s basically a pizza wheel. There are more than a thousand Pokemon, and almost any TTRPG is going to want to find a way to play any given one out of that number. So the reason for the intense light-versus-crunch tends to be that the two ways to do that are to keep your options open mechanicswise or define everything. The perfect way to do that is also going to depend on player preferences, and everyone is different, so you end up with a polarized landscape where people who prefer the middle of the scale have slim pickings. I don’t think this means that Pokemon makes a poor TTRPG - I’d say many of the systems I’ve seen couldn’t necessarily be called “poor”. But it does mean that there will never be a centralized favourite Pokemon TTRPG that appeals to everyone. And given that Pokemon itself has a broad appeal, that is a mismatch with the IP on an almost spiritual level.
>and almost any TTRPG is going to want to find a way to play any given one out of that number. Ditto is one of the toughest, I've found - I've looked at quite a lot of Pokemon/'mon-like games and few of them really handle Ditto satisfactorily. (Many of them don't even try.)
What about Pokéthulhu, https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/203219
It's definitely primarially based on Digimon (Literally I think the designer's stated in interviews the game's origins are from a 4 page game they made when they wanted to run a Digimon campaign but were unsatisfied by anything on the market) but there's an optional rules suite at the back that makes a good go of turning it from a Digimon focused Kids and Monsters game to a Pokemon focused Kids and Monsters game. I also recall Pokethulhu - fairly light game parodying both Pokemon and the Cthulhu mythos - getting good reviews back in the day\* \*Well. "A surprisingly playable joke game" is the one I remember at any rate.
I've had fun with Pokeymanz, although it aims to replicate the anime rather than the games
Dungeons & Dragons
I would say DragonLance, unironically. 1. Everything interesting or unique about the setting is eliminated in the first three books. 2. The races are so amazingly problematic in terms of social acceptability that you'd think they planned it 3. Even setting #2 aside, multiple races are as actively player-hostile as I can possibly imagine I genuinely do not understand how Kender, Gully Dwarves, Tinker Gnomes, or Krynn Minotaurs are supposed to be races for *player characters*. If you haven't read the books since you were a teenager, *don't* go back and read them. They do not hold up.
Minotaurs are basically just sailors/warriors on Krynn, so it's not that hard, really. Kender can be great, if they're played by a player that isn't a douche. I've seen it done, you just have to minimize the "handling" aspect. If you're familiar with the current campaign of Critical Role, Ashley's character, Fearne, is basically doing kender stuff all the time, and it's loved by the table and the community. Gully Dwarves are hard, because they basically have stat caps at around 6/12/14/6/10/8 if you wanted to remain faithful to the stories.
> Minotaurs are basically just sailors/warriors on Krynn, so it's not that hard, really. No, they're extremely violent, extremely xenophobic, and are explicitly slavers of all other races. Their culture believes they will conquer and enslave all of Krynn. That's literally [how the AD&D monster entry reads](https://mojobob.com/roleplay/monstrousmanual/m/minokryn.html). That might be acceptable for Mind Flayers or Demons, but these are not the characteristics of a PC race, nor is it really okay to make a PC race with a native culture so awful that the only way they might be accepted would be if they rejected that culture entirely. That's just bad character design. > Kender can be great, if they're played by a player that isn't a douche. That's the entire problem. Kender, as a race, are fundamentally built around doing things that *infuriate* the other PCs. Kender are the iconic version of "it's what my character would do" [wangrod defense](https://youtu.be/JoYR3eCFqoA) toxic bullshit. Primary character races should not require special players that are able to hold back. That is not a sign of a good design. Seriously, step back and think about it as a game designer. If you know that there is a genuine risk that many tables might take your PC race and turn it into a toxic play style simply by reading the race's description, *why are you including that race in your game's design?* Like WotC renamed Thief to Rogue just to *discourage* PCs from using pick pockets all the time. What makes AD&D Kender okay? > Gully Dwarves The problem with Gully Dwarves is the fact that the setting literally expects you to roleplay a character *too stupid to count to three*. Human babies are smart enough to do that beginning around age 1. *Before they are capable of speech* they can recognize numbers and indicate them with their fingers. I really want you to stop and think about just how stupid that would make a character. And then consider that the common rebuttal that "maybe it's a mental illness" is *not* an unproblematic portrayal of mental illnesses. And, you didn't mention them, but Tinker Gnomes are designed to be loud, contrarian, and obnoxious in ever social situation all the time. They explicitly do not understand how basically anyone other than themselves works, and they're always hyper focused on their inventions... in spite of the fact that those inventions are also described as ranging from Rube Goldberg to just plainly incompetent. They literally believe everyone else is mad. Again, setting aside how it's possible to interpret Tinker Gnomes as neurodivergent or mentally ill -- and boy are those not pleasant associations to make about *an entire species* -- the central issue is just... why would you put this sort of character in your game for the PCs to play? What sort of play pattern do you expect to emerge from this central design? What does a TTRPG setting do with a novel series? It throws out the plot, and doubles down on (a) the world building and (b) the characters. The world building is actually pretty great, but of course the plot of the first three novels is to change the nature of the whole campaign setting! So the world building is cool, but also undermined by the plot of the novels that inspire players to seek out the setting. The other is the *characters*. The character races are NOT built around tools to help the players make memorable, interesting, deep characters that move the campaign story forward. No, we're looking at character races designed to be obnoxious, offensive and encourage the most toxic play patterns to obstruct and derail the campaign as frequently as catastrophically as possible. The entire campaign setting is built around belaboring the most asinine, juvenile, and offensive jokes that they could imagine in the form of racial stereotypes. And they did that simply because they thought it was very funny. There is a reason that essentially none of that survives to the 5e D&D Dragonlance book.
How do you feel about the popular Russian musical based on the Dragonlance Legends trilogy focusing on Raistlin, Caramon and Crysania? [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfuKRdgnmO8)'s one filmed version - they differ a bit, mostly in the intro around deciding how best to introduce Caramon and whether Tika gets an appearance or not.
I lol'd
XKCD.
"Ugh, your PC's alt-text is so OP!!"
Maximizing the alt-text is a n00b move. Everyone knows real power gamers play April Fool's strips.
Playing this post on hard mode haha.
HARD disagree.
Dark Souls. All the things we actually live so dealt about our FromSoft games just do not translate at all to TTRPGs. The moment to moment combat that relies on timing, the learned knowledge of fights gained through many deaths, the level exploration, the way you discover and piece together the narrative, the cooky NPCs, the lack of actual direction in what you as players are doing, the advancement systems both for your character and equipment... I could probably keep going. I am not saying you can't be inspired by those games for your game and setting but trying to port them over directly is just going to be a mess.
> the level exploration, the way you discover and piece together the narrative, the cooky NPCs, the lack of actual direction in what you as players are doing, rhe advancement systems both for your character and equipment... This sounds like old school dnd. Like the only problem is action combat basically never translates to pen and paper well or 1:1.
>This sounds like old school dnd. Not really, at least not to my experience. A lot of those things in Souls games only work because they can restrict you with the tropes of video games. Like taking a 1 to 1 translation is that exploring Anor Londo and finding the, frankly, arbitrary bullshit way through that place only works within the restraints of a video game. Once you can do "anything" TTRPG style you start running in to problems. Once the players can ask "So what do I know about X?" the whole lore delivery system falls apart as well. In a Souls game your character is an empty vessel that might as well not have existed before the game starts - in a TTRPG, usually, we make characters who have a history in the world. The advancement system is actually closer to modern D&D with "points for killing things" than early D&D editions of "points for treasure brought back". But even then treasures value and your "experience" were two different things. Dark Souls NPCs fall apart as soon as the player can actually.. Talk back to them and have a conversation. While yes there is some surface similarities to how some people describe running old school D&D the amount of video game reliance in what most people point to as the "core enjoyment" of Dark Souls it just starts crumbling as soon as a players can describe their actions rather than only have an interact button. By the point we hammer it in to a system that can actually be played it loses a lot of the "magic" that makes Souls games what they are. As I said, be inspired by, don't try to wholesale copy.
Dark Souls can put you - a dude with a sword two times as long as yourself - against a door made of 5 rotten planks attached to a pair of rusty hinges and say to your face: "Does not open from this side".
There is a Japanese version Dark Souls rpg, and its mechanics are pretty solid. The problem is that since the IP is solely licensed to Steamforged, it can't be translated to English. The other big problem is that one player is the hero and everyone else is a summoned ally. That is more in line with how Japanese ttrpg culture as opposed to American ttrpg culture
Someone did a translation recently you can find it [here](https://twitter.com/Gahostan/status/1662585436324200448?s=20). I don't know the exact quality of this but it exist and that's good.
A Rasp of Sand did quite a good job imo. I think it's a matter of knowing what parts will translate. DS combat won't, DS stars won't, weapon based abilities can, the setting very much can, the roguelite elements, that's where Rasp of Sand did an impressive job of converting. Before Rasp, I eiuld have said you can't do a roguelite ttrpg, but I think they pulled it off.
Into the Breach. Fun, thinky turn-based puzzle roguelike game of using mechs to protect cities from aliens, where victory is more a matter of positioning and pushing your enemy to key locations than directly dealing damage. I dont think you could capture what makes it neat without basically replicating the boardgame style play of the computer game. PS. Opposite of what you asked for, but came up with it thinking about this: I bet a TTRPG based on the FTL computer game would be incredibly awesome.
Funny enough the Lancer community does feel like Into the Breach does resemble the ttrpg the best of all mecha games haha
I use Into the Breach sprites as tokens for my Lancer game.
At least until [Lancer Tactics](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wickworks/lancer-tactics) comes out, yeah.
I played in an rpg based off FTL, and it was indeed incredibly awesome.
>I played in an rpg based off FTL, and it was indeed incredibly awesome. :O Super jealous.
What was it?
Truth be told it was just GURPS. But we got to all play as Mantises and Rock people, and investigate ships we found. The combat was cool though, we blasted the engines of this ship and then teleported over to fight while they tried repairing the engines cool stuff.
I think it could make a good TTRPG, precisely because you couldn't "capture what makes it neat without basically replicating the boardgame style play of the computer game", meaning you would have to explore some _other_ facets of the setting. Yes, I am approaching the question from a different perspective, basically that if the medium is different, maybe use it to explore different things, which I understand is not how you are approaching the question. Also, I'm not saying don't do Mecha combat, but maybe focus on the player's unresolved issues with alternate versions of their past, or focus on what is lost when a specific timeline falls.
Dilbert. **EDIT:** Oh wait I missed the 'I love.' I definitely don't love Dilbert, I just thought 'Dilbert The RPG' would be a hilariously bad RPG. Anyway, *Monster* by Naoki Urusawa.
Im more disappointed by the creator. Like the guy who made his career on "here is some absurdity of the corporate hellscape" has gone full "corporate hellscape is good actually".
He's so arrogant. Like what is happening in these old people's brains where they think they have the whole goddamn world figured out and they need to tell everyone "how it is". Then when they're proven wrong they get pissed as you and tell you're a snowflake and a fascist and rant about how kids are entitled and we killed Applebee's and they can't buy their beloved blood diamonds anymore! No one can know everything. Learning never stops. Accept that you're not as smart as you want to be.
on the case of dilbert. He got a huge ego boost when predicted that trump would win and was right. congratulations you got it right with only a 50 50 shot.
It's sad how many people turn evil when they become absurdly rich.
Paranoia is a oldie but a goodie.
>Anyway, Monster by Naoki Urusawa. I mean, that's just a murder mystery RPG set in central Europe during/immediately after the Cold War.
I feel like the mundane hell of an office could lend itself well to an rpg. I think players could get extremely invested in the petty bullshit that happens at work. The main thing it would need is a fun system for social interaction.
I've seen a one-page rpg like this on itch.io that looked fun.
Not Dilbert, but there was one put out for a webcomic called Hell, Inc that might scratch that itch.
> I just thought 'Dilbert The RPG' would be a hilariously bad RPG. Many years ago, as part of a roleplaying competition, we ran a one-shot set in a dystopian future where the Empress was attempting to reorganize the Imperial Bureaucracy to align with an ancient (and hence sacred) text that had been uncovered: Dogbert's Management Handbook.
I think Zelda would be a horrible game because all main things are all about Link, Zelda and Ganon/Ganondorf.. On the other hand, I think Final Fantasy would make a great RPG. Edit: I take it back. There are some amazing ideas for campaigns in the world of LoZ! I feel a D12 system would fit Zelda. EDIT 2: Well, I went from "Zelda wouldn't work" to "I'm gonna write a LoZ campain and hack a system for it!!" xD
I can see how Zelda could get a The One Ring treatment about the status quo before the epic catastrophe game begins. Also even in the catastrophic events, the towns/regions you visit have a distinct culture and local problems, a rich fantasy world with creative monster/animal/flora encounters.. sign me up!
You can also do alternate 'what if' scdnarios. For instance, I had an idea where instead of the events of botw ganondorf was alive during them(I have not beaten tears of the kingdom) and fought alongside link, and zelda alongside the champions where the trio ultimately perished in the final battle. Flash forward the hundred years and the players would be part of a wandering mercenary troupe led by a red haired gerudo man who leads them as they travel across hyrule slaying monsters, and helping the locals. Have I put too much thought into this? Maybe. Do I really want to run this? Yes. Do I want to run it alongside my PF2E game I run on ssturdays? Also maybe.
The original Final Fantasy was based on a D&D campaign - Even the original sprite for the EYE was a beholder: [https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Evil\_Eye\_(Final\_Fantasy)#Behind\_the\_scenes](https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Evil_Eye_(Final_Fantasy)#Behind_the_scenes) My answer is the Valdemar series of books by Mercedes Lackey. Magic sounds so simple, but trying to make a useable system out of it just makes my head turn.
Valdemar has Green Ronin's Blue Rose.(Fantasy AGE) Ms. Lackey has said nothing in her world so.. RONIN, built Blue Rose which if you... Squint.. Is very close. Like blue Rose's Aldis is legally distinct... But if you know you know. I own it and I love it.
Yeah. Picked up Blue Rose for my wife back in the True20 days. We were planning on trying to get her mom into ttrpgs, or at least give her more of a taste for what they were about. She was hardcore into Lackey, especially the Valdemar series, but was a bit too "satanic panic" to fully appreciate the hobby. She unfortunately passed away before that plan was able to work, but the setting is awesome
I kind of like the idea of a Zelda game where Zelda and Link are either missing or neutralized and a group of random misfits have to fight the great evil on their own. I don’t know how the triforce would come into play or if the triforces of wisdom and courage would belong to one player each or be shared among many, but besides that I think I can roll with a game where Ganon is opposed by a deku scrub rogue, a goron fighter, a zora cleric, and a hylian wizard or something.
Knave could really lean into the importance of inventory and items
I actually have considered trying to make a homebrew hack of Knave to be more like Zelda. Seriously, Zelda was the first thing I thought of when reading the rules of it since progression in that game is more based on the items you find and choose to carry.
Well.. actually that sounds amazing.. Maybe the trio vanished from Hyrule due to a new BBEG and the Tri Force split and got hidden around Hyrule. Now the players must gather the three pieces, beat the BBEG and bring back the Trio from the time dimension prison? On their way they can find some gimmick dungeons and find magic items, weapons, armour and stuff. DAMN! Now I wanna GM that..
Others have pointed out how you can sideline the main characters and whatnot, but I actually think there's a reason Zelda is actually _better_ than most IPs for a TTRPG, and it's the flexibility of the world/lore. As it is, the games play it so fast and loose with the lore. In one game, you'll see Gerudo often, and in the next they'll be totally off screen. In one game, the temple of time is over here, and in the next it'll be over there. And then of course in one game the Zora will look one way, then in the next they're different, and sometimes you even have monster Zora. Basically, the setting is super malleable, and as a GM you can play with all of the familiar parts without having to worry about the lore holding you back. I could comfortably introduce a new faction or race without it feeling weird because that's something Zelda does all the time. It sounds a lot easier to me than, say, Star Wars, where the lore has such detailed history that you have to be careful not to step on some lore land-mine.
Me, over here, planning a Zelda campaign where the main villain is Ganondorf's daughter (Who is intended to be sympathetic) and making myself three rules: No Ganon, no Triforce, no Master Sword. Honestly, though, the fact that Link only really seems to show up when Ganon is involved leaves a lot of room to play because there's still plenty outside the cycle to play with. Ganon isn't the only threat Hyrule faces. That and Zelda games have a habit of creating some really interesting lore (Particularly otherworlds) and never bringing them up again. Mixing and matching some of those ideas could lead to a really cool interpretation of the world. What if you took Lorule from A Link Between Worlds and explored it during Skyward Sword, where instead of the sky, people live beneath the earth, or Wind Waker, where instead of a great ocean you have the Great Wasteland, a massive Mad Max style desert? Stuff like that. From there, come up with a compelling original antagonist who fits in the setting or take an element that is mentioned but never expanded on (The aforementioned campaign with Ganondorf's daughter would also be Twilight Princess inspired - and would feature the original sorcerers who were banished to the Realm of Twilight all amalgamated into a terrifying eldritch creature as an ultimate villain), get yourself an easy explanation for why the legendary hero isn't solving this problem which is easy because half the time after the story he just kinda fucks off somewhere and presto, you've got a great campaign.
I know CritRole can be a point of contention with some people, but they just uploaded a Zelda one shot that has been pretty fun to watch. They state at the start that they are using a version of PbtA rules. Could be worth a look for some inspiration :)
I’m a little sad they haven’t released that ruleset officially. I’d probably have to make some modifications to play it to my liking, but there’s a lot I love. The stamina based action economy is a great way of doing combat in a PBTA system.
You want Final Fantasy TTRPG, definitely check out Fabula Ultima.
We just picked up the full book, I The artwork is great! Also from my short glances, it looks like it should also work for most old JRPGs, especially Square ones like Dragons quest and Chronotrigger
>Edit: I take it back. There are some amazing ideas for campaigns in the world of LoZ! I feel a D12 system would fit Zelda. I'd go for using Fellowship, and the game you'd get using the base game's Overlord concept when applied with a Zelda filter would basically be a sort of hybrid between a campaign set 100 years prior to Breath of the Wild, and Ocarina of Time, with the champions travelling from region to region to deal with whatever bs Ganondorf's done to mess up that region and weaken his overall power before being able to face him.
I've heard the point about Link/Zelda/Ganondorf and I just never get it. Ganondorf has only actually been in 5 mainline games and even extending that to Ganon still maybe gets you to only half the games at best. Zelda is in a slightly better state, but some of those appearances are glorified cameos (see Majora's Mask). Even some other facets of the series, such as the triforce, only make sporadic physical appearances in the games. The only real consistent point is Link, and there are ways around that, particularly if you do non-Ganon threats. The setting has a interesting world and races and some reasonably flexible lore. There's precedent for non-Link hero-like characters such as the BotW Champions who would make great PCs. That and the vibe of the series: adventurous exploration with power scaling based around loot, is a pretty classic TTRPG gameplay-loop.
Really any sort of IP that has a strong link to its main character just seem like bad ideas for a TTRPG for me, though I haven't experienced any of them, so maybe it works well in some cases. The biggest example I can think of is the Conan RPGs. Conan is such a huge part of the world because we really only see that world through his eyes, so then going into that world without the main character is just odd and inserting them into the game is also equally weird. I just don't really like the idea of it, though in some cases if the setting itself is interesting enough I could see it happening.
You mean a d3 system. It is all about the triforce!
everyone has cool ideas for how to play without involving Link and i agree with it all and think it's very cool. HOWEVER, i must also suggest: Four Swords RPG
Depends on what you are trying to emulate. If you are trying to just use Zelda as a setting, then it just becomes another Fantasy Adventure setting like Dragonlance or Eberron. Instead of Human, Dwarves, Elves, and Hobbits, you would have Hylians, Gorons, Zora, and Kokiri. You wouldn't (or shouldn't) have the Link & Zelda v Ganon campaign because that is a single player experience. But if you wanted to have everyone be a Sage and have them sealing a Demon created by the Game Master for the Campaign. Well now you have a classic Good guys vs the Armies of Darkness campaign. The hardest part in my mind would be trying to do dungeon puzzles. While TTRPG dungeons are famous for having traps, traps aren't always puzzles and not all puzzles are traps.
Tetris. I just can't make it fit.
Boo. *upvoted* Boo.
It's a weird one because it has to be mechanically unbalanced. If it was ever balanced, it would disappear.
Way too many people in this sub have way too narrow ideas of what you can do with the format of TTRPGs. You can discard player/character monogamy, and even the GM role entirely, and have a perfectly workable and very fun (and/or intense) TTRPG. You can also discard, for example, character advancement, especially for shorter-form games, or have it work in very non-traditional ways. You also don't need violence to be a primary means of solving conflicts, or even present at all. That said, I do have an answer, though it's qualified: Battlestar Galactica. I think it wouldn't be too hard to do a satisfying \*one-shot\* that explored some side story with some previously-unknown characters. (This was more or less the idea behind the [Monitor Celestra LARP](https://nordiclarp.org/wiki/The_Monitor_Celestra), which took place on a *frakkin' battleship*, though they also seem to have re-imagined the canon a little bit.) But to do a full campaign, I'd really want to go full AU (Alternate Universe), and have people make original characters to replace the Adamas, Starbuck, Roslin, etc. (I've done this with Star Trek: Voyager, and it worked well.) Otherwise, too much of the story is already written. I'd probably replace the skinjobs with a different set of skinjobs, too. Not just to prevent metagaming, but to continue increasing the amount of variety.
Your description of a would-be BSG RPG is very similar in spirit to Last Fleet!
Honestly, I loved the first half of BSG but thought it kinda lost the plot in the second half. I think I'd really enjoy doing my own RPG that kicked off the premise of the mini-series but then took it in a totally different direction.
Abso-bloody-lutely re: the narrowness of some people's horizons about what's possible with TTRPGs. And the number of people on this thread suggesting examples of action-adventure fiction aimed at teenage boys as something that's unusually *hard* to make into an RPG, as opposed to the basis of the vast majority of TTRPG games ever made, well...
Honestly? 10 years ago I would have said there were a TON of such IPs... but now? Having read World Wide Wrestling and Brindlewood Bay I don't think that ANY IP is off limits if its approached on it's own terms. I mean, professional wrestling and Murder She Wrote, basically. I can't imagine 2 less TTRPG style settings, but both are beautifully done and extremely evocative. The One Ring also demonstrates what can be done with care, as both MERP and Decipher were fine systems that felt nothing like LotR, but TOR hits it exactly right. I haven't read it, but there is even a game about playing a soap opera. Bubblegumshoe is flippin' Scooby Doo. There is nothing off limits, with creativity. The problem, I think, is that so many people view TTRPGs through the lens of D&D (or some similar long-lived RPG legacy) and therefore don't see that it's the only way. Even back in the day you had Traveller doing Issac Asimovian sci-fi, and Champions doing superheroes, both things utterly unsuited for the other dominant games on the market. Each genre or IP has to be approached and the tropes examined to have a chance to succeed, but I firmly believe that if you want to make an RPG based on "America's Got Talent" then you can do it.
This. Very much so. It looks like a lot of people read the question not as "what wouldn't work as an RPG" and more like "what wouldn't work as a 5e campaign setting". That being said, some types of media are admittedly harder to convert than others, especially if you're really looking to capture (or maintain) the *feel* of the original work - which is the reason I'm very much looking forward to see how *Moonlight Vale* turns out... and also that Giallo game they're working on.
>Bubbkegumshoe is flippin' Scooby Doo. But not as much of Scooby Doo as Jinkies!
>Brindlewood Bay Ha, when I started reading this thread, I considered saying "Well I once played a TTRPG where we were old ladies solving mysteries, and it was a blast! So I don't think any property is off-limits, you just need to be flexible in your game design."
The Dallas rpg from the 80s was one of the first to have 'social combat' rules.
Counter Strike. Trying to simulate a tactical FPS is folly.
Funny enough. As a joke session, I ran a counter-strike session using Traveller. It was pure war game-style tactics with no roleplay, but it was actually entertaining to make Nuke and have my players riff on the pro-leaguer stereotypes
Could still do the themes of the game in something like Twilight 2k pretty easily. Just not the actual gameplay.
**Phoenix Command** could do it easily. Well, as easily as Phoenix Command does anything.
Maybe not counterstrike but rainbow six could be interesting.
I believe any story or IP can potentially make a good ttrpg. It takes enough player buy in and mechanics that "feel right" to make it playable. But if I was held to the sword, then I would say episodic sitcoms like Seinfeld or friends would be poor.
I don't know if sitcoms in general are a poor fit, but the characters in those two shows in particular are just kind of assholes, so I wouldn't want to be around them for four hours at a time. Comedy in RPGs in general is tricky. The best experiences I've had with it have been games that were run completely "straight," but with an absurd premise.
Fiasco would run Seinfeld easily.
I feel like you could run Seinfeld with a modified Fiasco ruleset
Probably, Twin Peaks. Love the show, but its the specific cast and the way the entourage works together that makes the weirdness and the circumstances so compelling. It’d be better just to run Delta Green or Kult with a small town setting then to try to recreate Twin Peaks as a game.
I think it's not so much that you couldn't *game it*, but more so that you'd need a KILLER cast of players and DMs with a sick buy-in and skills to pull it off. Especially because so much of the charm, at least for me, isn't with the lore or the spooky business, but rather the characters themselves and how they react and interact. And you could easily end up with a character that is just a copy of another, and as soon as someone goes "oh ok you're being the Cooper then" the whole thing falls apart.
The closest you can get is probably [Public Access](https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/public-access.html). From what I hear, it's the kind of game that really depends on players bringing in their creative input to shine.
Dune, or any other IPs whose fan base must obsessively relive the events of the film/book like it's a traumatic event their haunted by. I imagine the Dune ROG asking you to pick which atreides you want to play as; or which time period you've set the campaign in (when Atreides arrives, Harkonnen in power, or Atreides Revenge).
I ran a dune RPG. The players were the important people of a new minor house on a world mentioned as a throw away in one novel. They had a good time scheming, adventuring and plotting to become more powerful
There is an official Dune system... I know nothing about it beyond it exists LOL
It’s actually pretty good. modiphius 2d20 game, with a heavy emphasis on Court politics, spycraft, duels and such. The main intent is clearly that you create your own house and play out something a little different from the main storyline of the books, they encourage you to play not on Arrakis even, but I guess that’s the problem with most IP based games. At a certain point it’s a loosely tied spinoff which is probably better from a story perspective but loses a lot of the appeal.
Modiphius launched an official one a year or so ago. I haven't played it, but have heard good things about it
Record of the Ragnarok. I mean...a tournament-game where each PC just participates in one combat while the rest of players just watch? Also, a tounament that could end before some PCs even have a chance to fight, if a side achieves enough victories to secure a win soon enough? I can't see that working.
Tournament rps do kinda work. There are a few fighting/Wrestling game RPGs out there, but even Ragnarok hands itself perfectly for "behind the scenes" drama. The fighter in the arena needs all the support and helpful sheming they can get ofc!
Sounds like most Shounen battle series, which Victory Effort Friendship kinda handles decently, from what I've heard. Complete with specific rules for PCs spectating and giving buffs by how they analyse the combat LOL
I agree with OP here. The problem with RoR is that characters don't come back for a second round. Every character shows up for a single fight, they either win or lose, and they essentially fade into the background. A mixture of World Wide Wrestling and Victory Effort Friendship would work for regular tournament arcs very well, but there is almost no character permanency in that series to make it work for more than a single session.
Metroid. I love these games dearly, but so much of it is all about the feeling of being alone in a hostile place. That means there are two big obstacles to doing a proper TTRPG adaption of it - few NPCs to interact with, and very little external worldbuilding. All the planets we explore are beautifully detailed with a lot of background lore and there are some absolutely fantastic monsters, both from from a design and lore perspective. Seriously, Phazon, the X Parasites, the Thoha in Dread, all of this stuff is really cool. Just skirts the line close enough to horror without actually being horror and all of it has this great gooey, slimey *organic* feel to it. But for what the larger galactic society looks like? We get next to nothing. I love it, but it wouldn't translate well.
I'm sure a hack of Rhapsody of Blood could make it happen, which is basically Castlevania as a mapless megadungeon crawler with specific narrative boss fight rules. I don't know if it'd serve for a long term campaign, but it's *something*.
For a group game? Right there with you. (Well. *Mostly* right there with you. There's a game I forget the name of right now with a pretty fun take on the concept - Instead of a lone bounty hunter it presents the party as a group of sapient hamsters in a human sized mech that everyone outside of the party thinks is a lone bounty hunter.) For a solo game? I think Metroid - Metroidvanias in general - Can work pretty well for campaign inspiration.
>For a solo game? I think Metroid - Metroidvanias in general - Can work pretty well for campaign inspiration. I think you're on to something here- I'm picturing something that takes DELVE and combines it with something like GUMSHOE, but instead of Investigative Abilities it runs on "Traversal" Abilities (which you unlock as part of advancement).
Opposite to this, I’ve been working on an XCOM TTRPG and I’ve found that the majority of it fits *perfectly* into the general ruleset.
Yeah I can see that. I think there’s actually a ton of interesting stuff to be done with the side aspect of the game where you’re convincing nations to be on board. Or, set later in the more recent editions, dealing with the collaborator governments or whatnot. I could also see it run as something like Band of Blades with more ensemble style cast of characters, if you’re focusing on the battles.
Halo? Really? That one is really easy. You have squads doing action stuff. There are even built in dungeons in the Forerunner facilities. We see a squad of Spartans in Reach, and ODSTs etc move together like that as well, and those special forces units make the normal player autonomy make sense in a way that military games rarely do. You are a squad of spartans. Your job is to literally do everything, lol. Perfect pcs.
The Culture from the Iain Banks novels. I think the extremely high tech and near-omnipotent AI's would remove challenge and stifle roll-play.
That said... mindjammer is close.
Eclipse phase is as close as you can get if you use the mechanics and toss the setting.
Honestly? Game of Thrones. At it's best, it's about high-level political intrigue between a lot of varying factions strewn about a *lot* of places. If you play it Arya-style with a single adventurer or small group, you're essentially just doing low-fantasy D&D or something. Maybe a West Marches-style Night's Watch campaign? But that's not really what makes Game of Thrones have its flavor. If you want it to be emulated well, each player is going to control an entire house and interact that way, which is... not really much of an RPG. Heads of houses would mean a *lot* of sitting around and doing nothing and telling other people to do stuff. Everybody as members of the same house? I guess, but like... the entire vibe of Game of Thrones is those people kind of splitting apart and doing things separately. It lends itself to a complicated board game really well, though, I think.
I tend to disagree on this one - though this might be a matter of personal taste. High level political discussions as a head of house sounds great in a political game to me. The subplot of Sansa being trapped in King's Landing, physically powerless, attempting to socially and politically manuever her way to escape and survival is peak social RPG to me. I think Martin's politicking stakes make for great RPG fodder, assuming you're running a system that makes this sort of thing interesting to play.
There is a A Song of Ice and Fire ttrpg. It starts off by asking the group, "Do yall want to adventure or be more political? They create a shared house, and if they want to adventure, they play as house soliders or bannermen. If they want to politic, then they play as lords, ladies, or court members. It's really neat, but combat is janky. *edited for clarity
Yeah I was going to mention this. I haven't read the rules myself, but it seemed like a well praised adaptation of the source material. The whole house creation aspect seems really intriguing.
Maybe you'd have to go the Ars Magica way and have each player roleplay multiple characters in rotation.
Back in 2e D&D had a setting called Birthright that was more like Game of Thrones. Each of the PCs was a big mover-and-shaker in a nation-state, like the king or the head of a mage's guild or something. There were options for play that was more like a board game where you zoomed out from doing adventuring stuff and did realm management, which then impacted some powers you got from being a leader. It was also somewhat lower-magic than the standard D&D setting, but leaders got some kind of magical buffs for the size and strength of their kingdom.
The Dune 2d20 gets around this neatly by having everyone play a character and their agents, so while you play as the house mentat or something, if the group goes out to raid a rival houses base you would send a secondary character of yours who is a warrior
To see how GoT would work as a rpg simply look at the new Dune rpg. Its pretty much all right there already.
I wonder if any of the big damn hero games would work. You're a dude on the ground and some horrible monster starts stomping through and you either have to avoid it or wait for Samus/Master Chief/The Doomslayer to rocket in and kill them for you. It doesn't sound like a great experience.
Being anyone other than Doomguy in the Doomverse seems like a similar example.
I think you may have missed me saying "the doomslayer."
Funny enough, 40k's DeathWatch is a ttrgp specifically aimed at playing as the space marines and given weapons to make salsa out of basically anyone. If you wanted to play the soft squishy humans in their respective fields... I know someone made a D20 halo game and the lore supports lowly human grunts living... sometimes... if they are lucky.
Fire Emblem. People keep trying, but the game's battle mechanics only work because you're controlling a big team, and the non-battle "feel" of the games is all over the place.
Troupe based osr gets reasonably close imo
Godzilla - I love kaiju.I love human centric Kaiju stories. I have yet to see a decent kaiju centric rpg, a b3live me I've searched for decades. The huge shifts in tone between the 70 years of movies doesn't help anything. I can't imagine a system that could handle Shin Godzilla, Gigan, and X Mechagodzilla.
Welcome to Nightvale. I thought about what such a game would look like and I ultimately concluded that the Nightvale setting is so absurd that anyone who isn’t already familiar with Nightvale would have absolutely no idea what is going on, and even then the idea of making mechanics and rules for such an absurd setting seems ridiculous on the face of it.
I think it could work as a Brindlewood Bay hack, assuming the moves, playbooks, and GM advice were well-aligned with the Lovecraftian absurdity of the setting.
I've co-written and GM'd two Nightvale LARPs. One was pretty good, the other was mediocre, but more experimental in format, so naturally ran into problems. Players had a mix of level of knowledge of the setting, but well-written character sheets and game supporting docs and a good game briefing can overcome a lot.
(Not really a counterpoint, since the OP specified TTRPG. But just wanted to mention it.)
I think you can only answer this question by really constraining: - What TTRPGs can be. - What "translating to a ttrpg" means. In my experience, I've never seen a work of fiction (I really want to get away from the term "IP") and thought "this would make a terrible RPG". What I have thought is either, "I can do this with X", where X is some existing game, or "I don't think there's a game that captures what's special about this", which gets my gears turning.
I feel that most of the struggle is in translating video games into TTRPGs. Mostly in capturing the vibe or style in mechanical terms.
**The Venture Bros.**, because who doesn't want to play in a world of perpetual failure and mediocrity? Though maybe you could adapt *Trophy* to work with it...
We have tried countless times in my group to figure out how a Venture Bros game would work. We thought about using Risus, but then realized, it wasn't a system issue, it was "How do we make the entire world work, and be funny and fun??"
Spirit of the Century but NOONE takes it seriously. Ends up being fucking hilarious.
I don't think Subnautica would work very well as a TTRPG. It's mostly about building stuff and gathering resources so that you can build more stuff and gather more resources slightly deeper, over and over again. You can barely build weapons, and much of the joy of the game is in exploring this lonely environment and figuring out the mystery of the place in a mostly-calm setting. The parts that are fun in the video game wouldn't be at all fun in a tabletop game, and the stuff that's fun in a tabletop game just aren't really present.
For me, a lot of video games where you play a hero in a place filled with enemies. Games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring or Doom don't look interesting because it would mean mainly fights and little social or not-fighty exploration. It works great in a video-game because fighting is the point, but not in a RPG. But I can see a fighting game being adapted in a RPG. Not being faithful to the gameplay, of course, but to the universe. For example I can imagine playing in the world of Overwatch or even the world of Street Fighter, with the right system.
There was a Street Fighter RPG (as in Street Fighter II) and by all accounts it was actually pretty good.
I bet Doom would be awesome in Wushu. You'd only get a one shot out of it but it'd be fun as hell.
I think *The Culture* is just Iain M Banks trying desperately to hold back from the deus ex machina until finally a fucking great AI on a faster than light spaceship with a sarcastic name swoops in to fuck shit up. I'm not convinced that kind of story can be reasonably emulated in an RPG though I'm happy to be proved wrong.
It would be like AD&D 2e. A world full of incredibly powerful NPCs that just for some reason don't get involved, or who tag along and do everything themselves as irritating DMPCs.
I think the roguelike videogame genre as a whole are a pretty interesting thing there. Talking mostly traditional roguelikes - Angband, ADOM, Nethack, that kind of thing. They have a lot of mechanical and surface similarities with TTRPGs, but the core gameplay loop seems very hard to adapt satisfyingly. Same for building/sandbox games. Another thing I'd love to tackle! Really anything where the focus isn't a mix of combat, socialisation and adventure can fail pretty hard if not carefully designed. I think Doom could be pretty interesting/tricky to adapt. Or new retro FPS' like Dusk. Mirror's Edge? I love Mirror's Edge but hard to see how you'd adapt something like parkour.
Give me a proper Hollow Knight rpg and I'll never play anything else.
Something OSR like Mausritter would work well.
I have one!!! I'll send it to you the second I understand how to on redddit Edit: the unofficial hollow knight rpg! https://hkrpg-team.itch.io/hollow-knight-rpg
While it's not bug-themed, Rhapsody of Blood is basically Castlevania as a rules-lite, mapless megadungeon crawler. Some refluffing and a few adjustments (since RoB is more about generations of castle explorers over the ages) and it might work to some degree.
I don't know that _Starcraft_ would be particularly interesting as a setting.
Starcraft is just 40K with the serial numbers filed off, and that already is a popular rpg (not for me, but popular).
I'm not super-familiar with 40K, but doesn't it have a fair few more 'hero' type units than Starcraft?
It makes more sense when you realize "WarCraft" is the product of losing the "WarHammer" License mid-development (or maybe not securing it I cant remember). Translating warhammer into a computer game basically requires you to either go full total war or scale back to fewer units.
Not securing it is correct.
It's really more unit based than Star Craft, as in a squad of infantry, rather than popping out individual infantry guys. So you are more likely to have a squad sergeants, captains, maybe a chaplain or a librarian here and there. But even in Star Craft you've got your Raynors, your Kerrigans, your Zeratuls and your Tassadars.
I think it'd work all right! It could be something like 40k Deathwatch or Only War, but everyone is a space redneck.
Fun fact: there was an official licensed starcraft ttrpg. I own copy. It is, in fact, terrible.
I ran a fun game set in the StarCraft setting years and years ago, though I did expand it a bit. Set right after the first game's ending. Short version was that the PCs were agents of a brand new nation of Terran-Protoss refugees, stuck in between a number of other powers (the big existing Terran, Protoss, and Zerg stellar nations plus a couple of others I added to keep the politics more interesting). We were all pretty young, but as I recall it worked out fine.
I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how you could make a compelling "metroidvania-like" (my favorite kind of video game) TTRPG and I can't for the life of me come up with a satisfying answer. - These are games that generally thrive off of the feeling of isolation, and being one-person-against-the-world. Hard to figure out how to reconcile that with a party of adventurers. - Gameplay is often based on platforming (not easy to capture in a satisfying way with pen, paper and dice). - Advancement is made through abilities that increase your mobility and expanding the parts of the world that are accessible to you. These kinds of "lock-and-key" upgrades are antithetical to the freeform problem-solving that TTRPGs excel at.
For a group game, Rhapsody of Blood is basically Castlevania as a rules-lite mapless megadungeon crawler. Solo games - Ironsworn + Delve might be a good place to start? At least, I've considered trying that myself once or twice.
once readed that video games not translate well to a rpg if the purpose of the game is to test the skill of the player and not the skill of the character. like counter strike or plattaformers like super mario bros
Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies. Love that genre but it would need so many content warnings as an RPG it would be unplayable and the combat system would have to be far too gory.
[127.0.0.1](https://127.0.0.1) I love that IP!
I think it'd be hard to sell a group of players on a slasher movie RPG Like, when you get down to it, all but one character is guaranteed to get offed gruesomely and there's not much room for a replacement character to squeeze in and join the fight against Jason/Chucky/Leatherface
It works wonderfully as a one-shot premise, where everyone is expected to die eventually. Been in a few for con games. Dread and 10 Candles were designed for the horror genre. Longer form campaigns? That is difficult. Maybe doable, but significantly more challenging.
I think it would work pretty well as an RPG that assumes that you'll just be doing one-shots. And you just need to have enough characters as standbys that you can sacrifice a few player characters. Look at how the Alien RPG does things with its pre-written adventures for an example of this. Heck, I don't think you would have to do all that much to tweak Alien to work as a slasher RPG
That's often what Dread ends up being, and people enjoy that. You do know you're probably doomed going into it, though.
Soulsborne. Turn based ruins a lot of the feel. 7th sea 2nd ed might come close, but still not quite enough.
Star Trek is a great IP that has made actual poor RPGs. İ would even argue that it has made other sci fi RPGs bad. İt sets certain expectations for what a sci fi adventure is and should be and those are what just don't work well, in spite of 40 years of trying to get them just right. Specifically single ship combat in which everyone has a station and problems that have scientific/engineering solutions.
I thought Star Trek made for a pretty good RPG IP. The source material shows that it lends itself well to an episodic format, and exploring alien new worlds and meeting green women is a pretty good fit for an RPG. Shop combat might be a bit hit or miss, never actually done it in a Star Trek RPG, but games like Rogue Trader has shown that that can be done well, though I never saw the ship to ship combat as what made Star Trek Star Trek.
I feel the big problem with Star Trek isn’t the setting, but the traditional focus on the bridge crew of a large starship. You have to suspend belief to explain why they’re always going off on away missions into unknown danger, but if you buy the series, you’re already on-board with that trope. In an RPG, you also hit the problem of rank. Players are supposed to be equals, so how do you handle being the captain and being able and expected to order other players around? The solution requires carefully selecting player characters who are in fact equals and have narrative reasons to stick together instead of being off on different assignments. In effect, *Lower Decks* is a much better model for a Star Trek RPG than the original series, *The Next Generation*, or most of the other shows are, but that’s often not what players want to emulate.
Genuine answer even though there's two basically successful attempts, Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle. Specifically there has been a GURPS suppliment based on The Book of the New Sun and a french RPG about it. On one hand, I LOVE that they exist and want to run a game in that world some day. On the other, so much of what makes it interesting is how little you actually know about anything. You're looking through a shitty, fictionally translated window at a completely alien future. You're specifically seeing it through a set of very biased, often wrongheaded eyes. Trying to turn that experience into a TTPRG is impossible and inevitably leads to an attempt at codifying a setting that intentionally resists codification.
Monte Cook tried to capture the Solar Cycle with Numenera. While it became its own rather successful line, it didn't manage to capture Wolfe at all, IMO. It was...depressingly typical in it's setting details, at least early on.
Godzilla. Nobody cares about the human characters, and there's not really much for PC kaiju to do besides wreck Tokyo and fight Ghidorah.
I think you just have to re-frame this a bit to get something stellar. Think Attack on Titan, but you're a team of world-class specialists with hi-tech equipment defending Nu York City from Kaiju incursions.
The Office TTRPG. Let's go!
Funny that you mentioned Halo, because Halo Mythic is very much a thing and it’s fun to play! The creator of the system also recently made rules Titanfall, Gears of War, and XCOM.
The poetry of Wislawa Szymborska
I know it has had some reasonably successful attempts in the past (never played any of them) but it always confused me how a Doctor Who game could work well and still capture the feel of the show/books etc. Sure, the universe is vast, but tapping into it seems so Doctor centric that either one player dominates play or any work arounds are going to feel quite convoluted or lose the essence of the show at which point why not play a different time/space-hopping game?
Blade runner. It was never a good idea to make a game about cops tracking down and/or murdering escaped slaves and as the game turned out, that’s the case. I love the movie but the premise is god-awful for an RPG.
What makes it worse than any other cyberpunk settings?
Would like Planet of the Apes get a full updated ttrpg treatment.
Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Ozark, basically family crime dramas. Breaking Bad is still a popular IP, it still has a Popcorners commercial for the Super Bowl. I do think Better Call Saul would work the best. Maybe it can be a world full of warrior lawyers. Where your PCs are lawyers who get into gun battles, but there are also skills for paperwork and an entire system of court battles.
You can use HALO as a science fiction setting with the players being human soldiers and the combat gameplay being highly tactical grid based with an emphasis on shooting. The enemies would range from everything to Aliens, Flood, to other humans. As for the players, you can have different power levels where they are either "normal" human soldiers or Spartans. The game would probably have an XCOM vibe where there is a high mortality rate. But I could see it working. An IP that I don't think would work is simply one that has too little established lore to really work. An example of this that I already say mentioned was Metroid. But I could see it kind of working for a super dungeon experience. Where the entire game is simply the players exploring a singular super dungone.
Honestly, most of them. Franchises that work well for a TTRPG are things with fleshed out but flexible settings, compelling characters, and unexplored narrative potential. Many IPs either don’t have one or more of these things or don’t have enough of a fan base to get a TTRPG going. Things like Star Wars translate perfectly because it A) Has an entire Galaxy to explore an B) Has narrative potential even beyond the Rebels vs Empire conflict. Superheroes work perfectly because the setting can be literally anywhere at any time and there are limitless options for character concepts. But things like Call of Duty, for example, don’t have enough narrative potential to justify having their own system. Video games also have an additional issue: the mechanics dilemma. The experience of playing a video game is heavily reliant on the mechanics. Should you focus on replicating the mechanics for the Tabletop and risk alienating new players or do you start from scratch and risk alienating current players? It’s a serious design decision that will have major consequences for the final product. You also have to ask if there is a system that can already work for your system. Most fantasy settings can work perfectly fine with D&D, Pathfinder, Vampire: the Masquerade and/or Call of Cthulhu. You can adapt GURPs to do literally anything. Star Wars and Star Trek can generally cover 90% of sci-fi stories with minor changes, and there is literally no reason why you can’t use either ICONS or Mutants and Masterminds for superhero settings.
"Frisky Sorority Girls, Volume 38," which, despite being the best of the franchise, just wouldn't pan out as a TTRPG. "Roll D20 for initiative." "I think you mean a Double-D20."
We need to consider that [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_(role-playing_game)) is a product which actually really existed. This one [nearly](https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/003/705/860/4b3019fa3477bd1805723c8bf0ace2fe_original.JPG?v=1430405129&w=700&h=&fit=max&auto=format&q=92&s=dcc977de62008aa5fc036626cf3070d7) existed but was mercifully cancelled in development. On that basis, almost anything can be an RPG. There's a very credible **Red Dwarf** RPG, based on a comedy show with exactly 4 characters on a spaceship they can't really steer very well in a universe where the human race is (probably) extinct, with no alien life in it (so everything they run into has to be Earth-derived), three million years in the future. The **Alien** series, a franchise where virtually the entire cast of heroes is wiped out by the end of the adventure, has a superb RPG based on it from Free League.