RPG Ideas

awhile back i made a ttrpg that i ran for friends who didn't really play ttrpgs- it was kinda calvinball but also just fun and easy. i basically cut out all intricate rule stuff and made character building into a part of the active play rather than something done solo and prior to getting to the table. i feel like character building is one of the bigger stumbling blocks for people learning ttrpgs. idk if others have done this but let me know if you've ever heard of or played something similar:

the game is played with a GM and some amount of players. each player has a character, the GM takes the part of narrating the world and all non-player characters as well as helping with rules and deciding on success/failure of actions. the players start by describing their characters in vague details- name, job or archetype, aesthetics, that sort of thing- and write the bits they want to remember on their character sheets.

players take actions by rolling a d100- percentile system, essentially, because it made it intuitive to estimate odds of success- and if they roll below a certain number they succeed. that number is based on the difficulty the GM picks for whatever the action is. something has a 50% chance, they have to roll 50 or lower, etc. circumstances could raise or lower that number, and players could negotiate the difficulty with the GM.

so far, pretty standard for a ton of games i'm sure. the key mechanic that made character building part of the action was: whenever the player attempts an action, they have the option to write down a short description of the action type on their character sheet, e.g. "big hops" for being good at jumping. if they succeed at their attempt, they can add a number of tally marks under the action type based on how well they succeeded, and if they fail, they can add just one tally mark. they can then reference the action type when attempting actions in the future. if they get 5 tally marks on the action type over time, they mark through the tally and optionally add some more descriptive text related to how they developed the action type- it's now a trait for their character, and they get a 10% higher chance to succeed on any future rolls with that action type.

further tally marks could upgrade traits to increase their bonus to success, and traits could be combined to make more specific traits that had higher bonuses but narrower scopes. i had a lot of variable rules for how this all worked and it mostly depended on how the players wanted to progress. if they liked things to be risky and difficult, i made it possible to lose tally marks or get negative traits. if they haggled for switching tally marks around or taking negatives in order to get a positive trait, i worked with that too. i mainly used the "degree of success" system i learned from the WH 40K ttrpg Dark Heresy for determining how successful an action was, and thus how many tally marks, but i was also flexible on things being cool enough to deserve more tally marks or whatever.

i had a lot of fun with it at the time but never really developed it past this sort of freeformish state, but maybe it being this freeform was the charm anyway? i don't think i've ever run into a game like it since, but i'm sure they must exist.