Considering making a Homebrew Pro Wrestling RPG

Thinking about testing this out.

First, Lurkers and gradual viewers would be free to PM myself (Gator Grym) the promoter and letting me know their favorite wrestlers or provide suggestions/input on matches.

Their input would influence each wretler's merch sales and pushes for title matches. OR matches with most hated wrestlers.

During creation players choose concepts
Aerial, Technical, Power, Brawler (each has unique primary and secondary categories with a list of moves. Player chooses certain moves from those categories)

Players choose (Face (fan favorite), Neutral, or Heel (Villain): These add more moves to select from within designated categories.

The OOC thread would be for players to invite/challenge other players to a 'match'

The PROMO thread would then be used by the players to cut promos as to why they want to face off (allowing lurkers and gradual visitors to understand the story leading into the match)

Leading into the match;

Each player would look at their list of moves and provide me
1. Wrestler's name
2. Opponent
3. 20 moves

A 15 minute match would have the players roll 15 times 1D20.

Myself (or a much better writer and willing candidate) would then clean those results into a 'commentary' and placed in a thread available for everyone.

FAME,Merch Sales, Infamy, and Rivalries would be influenced by casual visitors PMs.

Each move would have a Damage number and an Injury number.

When a wrestler's injury number reaches 30 he is at risk for a minor injury; 50 a moderate injury, 70 a major injury.

I would roll 10% to see if a wrestler suffers/avoids a minor injury.  He the player continues to wrestle, that 10% increases between 2 and 5% each match.

Wrestler Health starts at 100% up to 105% (due to stamina bonus) and each time they suffer a moderate (-1%) or Major (5%) injury that health drops.  If it drops below 80, his performance starts to suffer.
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There is more to it, but this should get a basic idea of where I'm going with this

Sounds like there ought to already be rules around for this?

It's pretty easy to hack Contenders by JJ Prince for this kind of thing. He wrote a hack called Eternal Contenders and YEARS ago I played in an MMA hack of Contenders here on rpol. At one point I had stashed the rules for that but that was several hard drives ago...

Now that I think about it Prince of Darkness Games may have a pro wrestling game akin to Contenders.



I really need a hobb- oh, wait...
This message was last edited by a moderator, as it was against the forum rules, at 17:29, Mon 17 June 2019.

Piledrivers and Powerbombs is the game.

Thanks I'll look them up and see what they are like.

There's also a Powered By The Apocalypse game called World Wide Wrestling that may be what you're looking for.

It's very, very difficult to find a copy (long out of print, and due to the licensing issues and obscurity not likely to ever be available again) but there used to be a game called the "WWF Basic Adventure Game" which was very much like this.  I do not recommend this game per se, as it was a clunky mess, but it's also the only "wrestling" tabletop game I've ever seen in my life which actually tried to simulate a professional wrestling match circa early 1990s as if it were real.

It's not a good system, it's far too complicated and unbalanced with too much book keeping, but it had some neat ideas.  Noah Antwiler I think did a video on it that explains some of its unique properties.

Basically here's some of the good parts of it:

- The higher fan support you have the more baby face you are, and the lower, the more heel you are.  Good guys ignore the penalties for facing off against multiple opponents and get up to two "comebacks" (think Hulking Up) while the heels get "cheap shots" (up to four).  This creates a dynamic where a heel player can try to do run ins and gang up on the babyface, but the babyface is uniquely able to defend himself because he can literally attack everyone at no penalty.  However, the heel can also rob the babyface with low blows, thumbs to the eye, etc.

- The higher fan support goes first, picks a move, and then the opponent picks a move.  Both moves have to be legal (i.e. the positioning is right).  If the first character's attack roll succeeds, that character rolls damage.  If the first character misses and the second character misses, nothing happens, start over again in a new round.  But if the second character succeeds when the first fails, that character now has the initiative going forward.

- Also you can't play the same move three times in a row.  You could Clothesline, Clothesline, Body Slam, and repeat, for instance, indefinitely, but it at least had that much going on for it.

- More damage for weapons, going off the ropes, using weapons or parts of the ring (I had a heel character whose manager would remove the turnbuckle pad, and then the finisher was to do a Catapult into the corner on an exposed turnbuckle for crazy amounts of damage), running, etc.

- Lots of moves with distinctive traits and systems, very simulation-ist but also very unwieldy.  It was a lot of crunch but the cool thing about it was characters were very different, the martial artist had to wrestle very differently from the powerhouse.

- Great rules for finishers (they do double damage, you can only use it so many times per match, if you go for a pin you get an automatic 1 count)

- Rules for referees, managers and jobbers.

- The referee has to roll perception to notice anything bad happens.

- Other characters can roll Business Sense to interfere with the match.

- The progression and injury systems both sucked.  Way too punitive.

- Because the system focused on "Realism", whoever rolled a big super heavyweight character was going to dominate.  This was very, very old school mentality where the bigger you were the better.  It was somewhat balanced (though not well balanced) by the fact lighter characters got some pretty big bonuses to speed and aerial maneuvers (kicks, off the top rope type of stuff) but they took some serious penalties for being so small (way, way easier to knock them down, suplex them, etc.).  The best aerial character was a middle of the road heavyweight (big enough to not be vulnerable to other characters, small enough to avoid serious penalties).

- Also it took wrestling completely seriously, there was no real intention of telling a story, on the other hand, the system forced matches to have psychology, because you couldn't easily body slam a 400 pound opponent so you had to try to knock him down or use technical attacks.  But if you did body slam him... it did so much damage!

It's an interesting idea, because wrestling RPGs have mostly gone completely away from the idea the wrestling itself is important and it gets away from ring psychology completely and voids the technical strategic gameplay when you do that.  Some of the later systems like Kayfabe are basically just about wrestling as a show or a story and don't have mechanical rules for how hard a punch hits.  But Kayfabe and I think Know Your Role both don't really do much to distinguish a DDT from a flying mare.

Another possibility if you wanted to "hack" it is the Combat Book from OWoD (or the Streetfighter RPG that it's based on) if you want it to really focus on the actual wrestling and pretend like the wrestling is real.

I'll have to check out some of the systems mentioned here, I haven't done efeds in like 15 years lol, but that was honestly my first play by post roleplaying back then.

I looked at the other games (that I could find online) and it seems that my idea had some or quite a bit similar to each one of those and yet not the same.

I plan to have each player select 30 moves (I have a list of about 75-80).  That is their bank.

Each match they enter, they provide 20 moves (shoulder/elbow lock and maybe 2 or 3 moves are required in that 20 (can't have a match without lock ups, rope tosses, or turnbuckle)

Almost every move has a damage and a bump score.  Damage is what is placed on the opponent (I body slammed you, you take damage) and the bump (when I do a suplex, we both land on the mat.) damages both.  We know it is choreographed, but they still come out with the body's wear and tear.  The more damage and bumps taken places a risk of injury, and if the player ignores those risks it becomes greater that a major injury will take place.

I'm not going to make special referees that do things in favor of one or the other.  Though they can be distracted and taken out.

Promotions didn't seem to be used in the other games, but I want visitors to actually participate in the popularity.  Fame and Infamy are equally important and that would be decided by lurkers. (if any, if not players and GM will give grades that average out a character's score.

I'd have each one roll a 1D20 for each 'minute/round' the match was scheduled for.  The dominating move (one with the highest damage/impact) would win that moment in the match.  Three consecutive rounds a player dominates equates to a pinfall/submission.

Because players can rotate their moves anywhere on their list, someone who rolled a 3 could have a more impactful move than a player that rolled a 16.  So there is a little bit of a 'what is going to happen next' feel to it.  Both lists would be PMed to myself or the 'commentator' we would use the roll results to describe the match and commentator live commentary and that is how people would find out the results of the match.
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At this point, would there even be interest because if not, there would be no point pursuing this direction.