Experiment Interest, Ideas, Warnings
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.