#incidentally also the system i would recommend for a game based on homestuck

[prokopetz]

What system would you recommend for the sort of rules-lawyering-heavy urban fantasy like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Madoka Magica, or Fate/stay night, where powers range from "does one oddly specific thing really well" to "nonsense but in a good, fun way" and fights get really ridiculously conceptual all the time?

See, that's a tough one.

I absolutely know which system I’d use for that sort of thing, but I'm not sure it's the system I'd recommend, at least not without knowing a great deal more about both your GMing style and the inclinations of your table.

What I’d use is Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine.

It holds the nearly unique distinction of being one of the most complicated games out there in spite of the fact that it involves practically no math. It's a game where it's completely plausible for a starting character's writeup to be a dozen pages long, and almost none of that will be stats and numbers: the bulk of it will simply be explaining what it is that your character's abilities actually do, and how those effects interact with the system's underlying metaphysics.

And yes, it's a game system with metaphysics; in fact, most of its basic rules concern those metaphysics. There are rules for tracking narrative progress progress along your character's personal story arc (and it takes place in a world that runs on narrative causality, so your story arc is a thing that actually exists from an IC perspective and has concrete mechanical effects), rules for how the action economy interacts with the exigences of drama (for example, some powers are cheaper to activate if you deliver a monologue first), and even rules for determining whether a particular action was, in the abstract, the right thing to do.

Once the big guns come out, conflicts are typically resolved less by raw numbers and more by complex legalistic arguments about which character's powers ought to win, you know, all things considered. This is not rules-lawyering, but the intended mode of play.

It's a game where turning into a kaiju or having actual, no shit, narrative level, you-can't-even-hurt-my-feelings immortality are reasonable traits for a starting character, yet may actually be less valuable in play than being kind of good at sports. The pre-written player characters for the game's default campaign – a light-hearted pastoral fantasy about adolescent gods growing up in a post-apocalyptic small town – include a wish-granting dragon, the King of Evil, a boy who technically does not exist, and the actual fucking Sun.

It's six hundred pages of long-winded, discursive, densely written, frequently incomprehensible bullshit, and it's one of my very favourite games.

That's what I would use for the premise you've set forth.

Should I recommend that you use it? Well, you tell me!

#gaming #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop rpgs #tabletop rpg recommendations #violence mention #swearing #incidentally also the system i would recommend for a game based on homestuck #for what i trust are tolerably obvious reasons!