How many of you have ever wanted to be a green faced goblin pillaging a well to do merchant convoy, or one of the townsmen that decides to take up arms to kill the bandit group that the goblin is a member of. Either is possible, but who would win the fight? Goblin or Townsmen? In the name of justice most would say that the townsmen would hold the moral advantage, but in Perecho Heights anything is possible. It just depends on what the players want to do. I like to consider it a free form Fantasy RPG where almost anything, as long as its not completely ignorant, is possible. Good, bad, ugly, neutral, don't care, or you care way to much. Its completely up to you.
A level and stat system will be used, but only as guidelines as to what a player character can realistically do. If a wizard only has a strength of ten then I hope that a player would not roleplay him picking up a wagon to free a trapped friend. Now if that was a fighter with a strength of nineteen then we could discuss the possibility, but that character would not be able to have an intellectual conversation with a local historian if his intelligence only has a score of nine. Also as a character progresses and levels up then more stats will be given him as rewards as well as special items and the like.
The game system itself is based on the D&D 3.5 rule set , but only loosely. I've done away with the feats system since I find it cumbersome in a writing based system, and I've replaced it with a Strength and Weakness system. This system is still in its infant stages, as I like to call it, because it has not been used in any actual game situations. I hope to remedy that as soon as the rpg gets a few players. The main idea behind it is that for every strength a character has then it must also have a weakness to counter balance it. If a thief has better than average sight in the dark, then it would be obvious that bright sunlight could make it harder for him to see during the day. I hope that players get creative with these, so they won't always sound so repetitive, but I guess I'll just have to see.
The join application(http://zarcov.smfforfree.com/topic/10.0.html) is not overly complicated, or I hope its not. The only thing that could get weird is the system I discussed above, other than wizards choosing out their spells. I don't really have a system for that yet, so we'll just go with the flow til then.
The sitewide story has not been completely decided upon, so until then standard adventures will be available for all characters. Feel free to be as creative as you want though. I have no problems with tying in a player characters story into a sitewide story, or working with a player to make their story better.
I've started working on the website again, so maybe it'll be viewable in a few days/weeks/years. It depends on how much time I get away from college, work, and coaching my baseball team. Until then I have all of the information needed for the site on the forums.
http://zarcov.smfforfree.com/index.php
Thats the gist of what I got... If I can get a few players then I hope we could start writing a bit more and actually see how things will work out. Until then I'll just be guessing as to what things will be like. Thanks for reading the whole thing through, I hope you look around at the forums a bit and like what you see. If you have any comments then feel free to make them. I don't care if they are critical or just comments on how things are going.