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◀ Rulebooks

Ver. 1.3.1

Rules Variants

This section lists optional rules for adventures using mRPG and its modules. The GM decides which of these variants to use.

Advanced Skills

Main Page: Advanced Skills

The Advanced Skills rule set is an optional variant that changes how skill improvements work. Instead of spending character points on skill increases, player characters earn skill points every time they attempt a skill check. The GM keeps track of the total number of skill points each player character has accumulated in every skill on a campaign progress tracker, and the player earns a skill improvement and a number of bonus character points whenever they reach a certain skill point total. Because players earn character points more quickly with this rule, more points are required to level up.

Inspiration

Main Page: Inspiration

The GM awards a player with a point of inspiration whenever they accomplish an outstanding feat or roleplay an encounter exceptionally well. Players start every session with one point of inspiration each. A point of inspiration can be spent to re-roll any one die during a check, damage calculation, or roll on a table. At the end of the session, unspent points of inspiration are converted into character points equal to 25% of the character's current level increment - in other words, 1/4 of a level-up.

Group Progression

Rather than tracking each party member's character point total separately, all players receive the same number of character points every session, so they always level up at the same time.

Milestone Progression

The GM doesn't award or track character points, and instead chooses when the party levels up at specific milestones in the adventure. When the party levels up, all player characters automatically gain the amount of character points to reach the next level.

Combine this rule with the Advanced Skills character point table to allow players to take more feats at each level.

One-Shot Mode

For shorter adventures or single-session games, speed up the character creation process by assigning ability scores and skills randomly using die rolls. For ability scores, roll 4d4 seven times. Drop the lowest result, and choose where to assign the six remaining values. For skills, assign each one a value from 0-5 by rolling a d6 and subtracting one from the number rolled.

There is typically no progression in one-shot mode. Players choose all feats during character creation.

Extra Reactions

During combat, combatants that have used all of their reaction frames can still attempt additional reactions by making Reflex saves. The difficulty starts at 10 for the first extra reaction, plus 5 for every additional frame already gained. If the reflex save fails, the combatant still attempts their reaction, but it takes place after the action they were reacting to.

This rule can slow down combat, so you may consider limiting the number of extra reactions each combatant can take.

Hard Mode

Increase the difficulty of an adventure by adding a constant modifier to the difficulty of all ability and skill checks. This modifier doesn't apply to trivial actions (those that have a difficulty of 0.)