Bushido

Role Playing in Feudal Japan



Telnet: bb11.betterbox.net Port: 4321




First thing, although I want to base the game on feudal Japan, I don't want the setting to be Japan. It will be a mythical world which borrows much from Japanese history, but it is not intended to be historically accurate. For one thing, anyone can rise up to fill any position through RP. The birth or sex of a character does not limit them, although nationality may.

Samurai is not a profession, it is a rank of social standing. New characters do not begin as Samurai, but must roleplay to earn that rank. By joining a family or clan and swearing loyalty to them. A ronin is a character who decides to forego the joining of a family to work as a for hire mercenary or one who leaves a family for any reason.






Combat

Base 100 system: Attacker must roll greater than the Target Number on a die 100 to succeed.

Target Number = 100 - (Victim's Armor Class / 2) - Attacker's Weapon Skill Level + Modifiers

Rolls over 90 automatically successful. Rolls less than 10 result in failure.

Armor Class ranges from +100 to -100.

Weapon Skill Levels range from 0 to 100

Modifiers are things like bonuses/penalties for dexterity, being blind, special skills and affects of magic.




Time in the game



Real Time Mud Time Misc Notes on time
15 minutes 1 hour (60 minutes) The mud time will remain constant over reboots. Each year is going to be made of up of 13 months of 28 days each. The mud will age four years for every one year of real time.

How do we make the movement between cities, that should take days, fit into the time schedule without boring the player to death for 6 hour periods (one mud day)?

1 hour 4 hours
6 hours 1 day (24 hours)
1 day 4 days
1 week 1 month (28 days)
13 weeks 1 year (13 months)




Misc Information



Honor Points: These are points awarded or taken away by one player to another. When a character does something honorable, another character may ask for an honor award to be given to the first character. On the opposite side, a character who does something dishonorable will be able to request an honor penalty. This will result in a +1 or -1 to the character's current honor point total. See player points system below for limitations. Other characters and mobs will be able to get a feel for the character based on his/her honor level. Mobs will act appropriately to characters based on the honor.

Glory Points: These points are not awarded by standard players, but can be awarded by high ranking characters (those who have established a position of note thru RP). Immortals will be able to award glory points as well. These represents a measure of how well a character is thought of by the community as well as a standing within the community. Characters will high glory will be well received in the land and be considered to have some influence with the ruling family. Glory points may be exchanged for favors. What these favors are will need to be decided later. This may result in a lowering of the character's glory or a separate total being maintained for used glory. Glory can raise or fall, but it almost exclusively controlled IC through roleplaying. It should be treated as a form of public recognition for something the character did. Glory may be tied to honor, so that for every 10 honor points awarded a new glory point is granted. Loss of honor may result in the lowering of glory.

Role Playing Points: These are similar to honor points, except they are awarded by players to other players for role playing of their character. The reward is always a positive one. Since levels and experience have been stripped out of the code, I am thinking of using the role playing points as a means to earn practices to train in skills. Something like one role playing point could be translated into one practice. Probably 1 to 1 won't work, more likely a 5 to 1 or 10 to 1 ratio would be more accurate. The reason I'm thinking of linking skill training to role playing is to prevent someone from logging in and focusing only on skills. Using skills should still result in some increase in skills. Maybe the skill will improve with use and automatically use the role playing points.

Lo Wang the Bushi has 20% in katana and has 10 role playing points. He could spend 5 role playing points to practice his katana with a sensei (earning 5-10 points per practice) or he could use his katana and every 2% increase in skill would cost him 1 role playing point. Using the trainer would result in a random number of points, but just using the skill would tend to result in the higher point range.

As with the honor point system, this one is under the control of the players, so see player points system below for limitations that will be in place.

Quest Points: Quest points can be considered mob awarded role playing points. They are only worth a fraction of role playing points (4 quest points to one role playing point is what comes to mind). Mob run quests, such as a sword master sending his student out to get his sword blessed before continuing his training, would award a quest point upon completion. This is in place for the players who may have trouble getting into the role playing part of the game. It gives them a chance to still improve their character, and hopefully the mob quests will help to lure the player into interaction with other players.

Player Point System: Anytime we leave something like awarding points to other players we open ourselves up to player abuse. There are a few limitations I want to put in place for this type of system.




Skill Information

Weapon Skills

Each weapon skill means that the character gains some benefit with this weapon. Each weapon belongs to a group of weapons. The character will gain a lesser advantage when using weapons in that group, unless the character already has a skill in that weapon.

Skill in general

Some skills will only be able to be learned if a pre-requisite skill is know. For example, it may not be possible to learn dual wield until at least two weapons are at 50%.

Some skills are generally considered dishonorable. Gambling and poison are two of them. These may result in an automatic honor penalty each time they are used.

Skills will be taught by mobs teachers and by other players. Mob teachers may require some service be done, the character be of the correct nationality, the right honor or right glory level before offering to teach the skill. A player has no such limitations. Of course the player teaching secret techniques to outsiders may find himself ousted by others for his act.

Skill ideas (not a complete list)
No-Dachi (two-handed sword)

Katana (long sword)

Wakizashi (short sword)

Tanto (dagger)

Naginata (Polearm)

Dai-kyu (Bows)

Bo (staff)

Tactics

Defense - Dodge

Hand-to-hand

Iaijutsu (fast drawing of a sheathed weapon)

Athletics - Running/jumping/lifting

Calligraphy (shogaku)

Read/write

Riding

Hunting

Investigation

Medicine (acupuncture / herbalist)

Meditation

Gambling

Poison

Stealth (shinobi)

Armorer

Weaponsmith






Races & Classes



There will be only one player race, human. The code will support multiple nationalities at this time, but I expect to begin with only a feudal Japanese based nationality. Additional nationalities may be added later (English, Dutch, French, Spanish, Chinese)

There are no classes instead there are backgrounds that will represent what the character has done up to this point in his/her life. All skills/spells are available to each background. What the background does is give the character a benefit when first learning the skill, how quickly they advance in it and the maximum they can rise in it. Generally some skills can only be raised to 100% if the character has spent his entire life studying it (ie has it as part of his background). There should only be a few skills that fall into this category. Currently there are two backgrounds, Bushi and Shugenja.

Bushi are those characters who grew up with some type of military/combat training. They are going to find it easier to learn combat skills, and more difficult to learn skills that involve communing with the spirits (spell casting).

Shugenja are the opposite of Bushi. These characters have a scholarly background and will find it more harder to initially learn physical skills. On the other hand they are going to find it easier to master skills that involve studying, research and patience.






Attributes

Str/Int/Wis/Dex/Con/Cha/Lck

Thinking of a point assigning process. A player is allocated X points to assign to his character. The points fall between a range of 3 and 18 for each attribute. The number of points will probably be 87 points. Role playing points can be used to raise attributes to. Probably something like needing to spend the number of points equal to your next step before you can raise it (ie you need to spend 13 roleplaying points to raise a stat from 12 to 13, and 14 to raise it from 13 to 14).

Another option is just to let the player pick the priority of the attributes, and assign them points 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10 and 9 in order. I'd like to keep the character creation process simple and have most of the customization of a character occur in game.