THE LIPAKS WAY FRPG By: Lee, aka Dr Pepper Overview for Experienced Gamers.       Return to Lipaks main page

Lipaks is a game with its own rules and its own world.

This is a living world where things happen whether or not a game is actually in progress. Emphasis is on the interaction of the player characters with the ongoing history of the world.

    The Rules

The rules are designed so that it is only necessary for the players to learn the basic concepts. I hope everyone will study the details of course, but it is only necessary for the Game Manager to know them. Or to put it differently, the players need only concentrate on roleplaying, and let the GM figure out what rules apply.

The more advanced rules provide greater choices and possibilities.
In the basic rules specificity is kept to a minimum. I'm not too keen on "point builder" type games where every detail has to be separately determined. I prefer a more generalized approach, where a single number applies to a broad field of effectiveness.

Character creation involves a certain amount of randomness. Some people don't like that, but random factors challenge the imagination. You get something you didn't expect and show what kind of player you are by what you do with it.
The attributes and capabilities of characters will not, at least at the start, be superior to those ordinary people in the game. That's because as people, the characters are nothing special. Instead i expect the players to make the characters become special through their drive and initiative.

Action resolution is reduced as much as possible to a single ability versus difficulty die roll. Players should not expect to obtain bonus modifiers to skew the odds in their favor, rather they should try to find actions that give better odds to begin with. Player death is a real possibility that should always be kept in mind.

    The World

As this is a fantasy game, the world is what we generally think of as "non-tech". It isn't just that there are no explosives, no electricity, no plastics, but there are no physical laws to sustain them. Magic and other paranormal phenomena permeate the environment, but not that many people actually experience them.

There are many different peoples and cultures, nations, religions, and political movements. Players may see parallels from earthly history in these, that's no accident. Adventures may arise from the conjunction of these elements and the results may affect them.

One thing to keep in mind is that the cultures are artificial. They do not conform to any one reconstruction of any of our own past, nor do they contain the full range of elements we encounter in real life, those can be filled in as needed. Mostly they represent conceptual assemblages of ideals: feudalism, piety, vendetta, smugness, poverty, paranoia, and so on. Like a cartoonist, i do not attempt to produce photographic detail but rather to emphasize significant elements in a few strong shadings.