Project Nemesis is a fan driven website for games that use the One-Roll Engine (like Nemesis, Wild Talents, Reign and Monsters) or Chaosium's Basic Roleplay System (BRP) (like Call of Cthulhu) and the Delta Green setting.
While reading through Reign I became quite attached to the idea of
using it to run a Forgotten Realms campaign set in Waterdeep with the
various Waterdhavian factions statted up as company's and so on. I was
then faced with the task of trying to determine what elements of
D&D need to mechanically represented and which can be left as
flavour/story concerns.
At the moment the elements which I feel need to be mechanically
addressed are the various fantasy races, the classes which objectively
exist in setting (e.g. in setting one may refer to Mazlan the Black as
a wizard but could call both Kragor the Hillsman and Darrick the
Swordsman warriors) and perhaps most importantly magic.
For the races I'm planning to use some of the ideas presented here to assemble ability packages for the default races presented in the Forgotten Realms Campaign setting.
In regards to classes most of them dont require any particular
additional mechanics. After all the difference between a Barbarian,
Fighter, Monk and Paladin are primarily flavour based and can easily be
mirrored via Esoteric Disciplines and Martial Techniques.
The classes that perhaps need to be addressed mechanically are the
magic using classes i.e. clerics, druids, wizards and sorcerers. The
magic system presented in Reign is fairly different from the standard
D&D one and if used wouldn’t produce the same "feel". After
thinking about it for a while I thought that perhaps the best way to do
it would be to use the power creation system from Wild Talents to mimic
the traditional abilities of D&D magic users.
Perhaps through the use of a new Advantage where a magic using
character would pay X character points to gain Y Wild Talent creation
points. Such creation points must be used to purchase powers which fall
within the general purview of the class e.g. wizards can’t have any
healing effects while clerics can. I was also thinking of including
three new skills Prayer (for Clerics and Druids), Thaumaturgy (for
Wizards) and Sorcery (for Sorcerers) which are used when casting magic.
Having magic use tied to a skill is appealing to me because then
specialisations and clerics Domains can be represented by MD or ED
(e.g. a Wizard who specialises in Necromancy rolls Stat+Thaumaturgy+1MD
when using Necromantic effects but suffers a -2d or -3d penalty when
using effects from an opposed school, Clerics gain +1MD when using a
spell tied to any of their patrons domains but suffer a penalty when
using opposed effects).
However, while I own Wild Talents I haven’t had a chance to read it yet
and so I was hoping that those with some experience with both systems
could point out any obvious flaws with the idea.
Also if anyone else has used Reign to run D&D or has any
suggestions on how to do so or what should or should not be
mechanically represented in order to generate the right "feel" feel
free to chime in.