Synapse is a FREE RPG written by me, Greg Christopher. It is available now as a Public Beta, to be improved over the course of the next few months into a final release. The PDF is nearly 300 pages long and in full color with stunning art donated by artists from around the world.

The game is a completely open-ended universal system with strong emphasis on character depth and personality. The primary elements of a character are seven mental attributes, including the namesake Synapse. In addition to these, your character chooses from 21 talents to customize precisely what their brain is good (and bad) at. This brain is then placed in a physical body. Build a race using a point-buy system from nearly a hundred biological characteristics; ranging from mandibles to turtle shells to wings to echolocation. This is followed by a similar system for culture where you define the society from which your character springs. Build any culture from Ancient Egypt to the Galactic Empire. Your character is the given life experiences using another point-buy system, where you make choices about your education, siblings, parentage, and more. All of these systems feed into a personality model to build a unique personality from 22 different motivation values. You define what exactly drives your character in their daily life. Choose from six morality models that go far beyond good and evil. On top of this, you build a network of NPCs which your character has met over the years. These NPCs integrate you into the social fabric of the game world, providing resources, contacts, allies, and more. Finally, choose from a long list of skills for any setting you need and buy your starting equipment (or property, if you are rich enough). As you can see, this game generates characters of stunning complexity.

The game uses a d6 success-based mechanic to determine success/failure at tasks. The combat system involves a bullet-time model that resolves quickly and decisively. The game also includes a conversational mechanic where you can pick and choose motivational appeals to make in your adversaries to influence their decisions. Even if you choose poorly, you get a few chances to attempt to get the conversation back on track. It also has a standard roll-vs-difficulty and a manuever mechanic that works for chase scenes; from horses to starfighters. Your body is represented by three values; strength, endurance, and resilience (resistance to toxin/disease). You can take damage to these values independently as if they were different kinds of hit points. You also track mental stress to determine how well your mind is able to keep it together under adverse circumstances. As you take stress, you start to get shaky and make mistakes. If you reach a critical stage, your brain shuts down and you withdraw into a catatonic state and cower on the floor.

Since the game emphasizes the brain and not the physical form, it easily supports any setting. Your mental skills are used to run all the mechanics, not your body. Instead of drawing upon your physical body, simply replace your body with the values of a giant Mech and take to the field as if you were merely a giant armored combatant. Build a new body as a vampire, choosing from dozens of vampiric powers. Or teach yourself magic and choose from dozens of magical abilities.

Synapse is a powerful character development engine that can be used to play any setting, any genre, any game that you desire. You owe it to yourself to check it out.

DOWNLOAD FROM HERE: //www.synapserpg.com/download

Please post commentary in this thread or on the Synapse forums. I am very very interested in everyone's opinion, good or bad. Thanks!

I took a look at it, I'll try and be honest and polite. The book is very beautiful, it is remarkably well laid out, its graphics are nice, and it reads quite well.

 The system is just too heavy for me.

 Someone might have time to make use of all this detail, but I don't. Is is obviously deep and well thought out material.

 I certainly would love to finish reading it just because of how well considered it is, but I won't manage that anytime soon. I think the shortest thing I can say: It is obviously not for me.

I was very excited about it by its art, and sci fi aspects, I was ready for elves in space, even. Since it seems to have them both. I realize now its meant to be a "generic" system, which dampens some of my enthusiasm.

Nothing wrong with generic systems, at all, I'm just more interested in games and settings that meld together well.

Keep up the good work, regardless of my opinion, you've done a wonderful job for what it seems to be aiming at in design.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply, Silverlion. I'm sorry it isnt your style.

Keep in mind that actual play at the table is very quick. It is the character creation process that is "heavy". There is a lot involved in creating a character, but once you are done the actual core resolution system is not that much more complicated than Fate or d20. Certainly not anything on the scale of GURPs where you need 50 pages of rules to run a combat.

The entire chapter on resolution mechanics is only 17 pages long. The game actually relies a lot on GM judgment to set difficulty numbers, which means that you make one count of all the modifiers at game start and that is your dice roll every time (i.e. roll 6 dice for climbing). Then the GM has the flexibility to set difficulty numbers to be whatever they need and table play goes something like this:

GM: The door is locked
Player: I lockpick it. I roll 6 dice.
[rolls 3 successes]
GM: Difficulty was 4. You fail but you feel like you almost had it there at the end.

That's it. Combat is slightly more complex than that, but it really actually isnt that complex compared to other systems. You are not keeping track of ranges, squares, hexes, etc. There is a lot of freeform to it.

If you still feel it isnt for you, that's cool of course. I just wanted to give you some more information.

I'll second what Silverlion said, it looks like a beautiful and well structured book for a "hobby project", which I gather it is. Good art and nice layout.

Unfortunately I also agree that the level of detail is far too high for me to use Synapse.

I have never run games where I've had the need for that amount of complexity in character creation alone. And although I found the race/culture buying interesting and open for a lot of fun it also seems on the excessive side, with the whole buying type of feet/hands/lungs.

I have a couple of questions:

I'm curious, why did you feel the need for such a detailed mental attribute system in a rpg?

And how did you imagine that character creation should work (I apologies if it is in the book somewhere, I've only skimmed it)? Do the GM put out guidelines for what type of game it's gonna be and then the group works out their characters together? With such a detailed system for background and culture I could imagine groups ending up as a bit of a crazy melting pot.

Good luck with Synapse!

Yeah, thanks for responding with more information, it doesn't make much difference. Long character creation puts my players out of playing. Some of them have short attention spans, and no real patience for such things. They want to play when we get together, not spend that day making characters.

Same tends to go for me, I've got more patience, and focus. (Sad considering some things.) I might make a character just to see how it goes, which is usually the first test I have for a system, but if I lose focus on it? Well that's not a good game for me or my groups.

Quote from: DKChannelBoredom;401657I'm curious, why did you feel the need for such a detailed mental attribute system in a rpg?

And how did you imagine that character creation should work (I apologies if it is in the book somewhere, I've only skimmed it)? Do the GM put out guidelines for what type of game it's gonna be and then the group works out their characters together? With such a detailed system for background and culture I could imagine groups ending up as a bit of a crazy melting pot.

The answer to the first question is Jason Bourne. I was brainstorming about how could you design a combat model that would make Jason Bourne work properly. Having a Synapse attribute was the answer to that. It made that kind of high-speed combat possible.

The second question is more complex, but basically I envisioned that the GM would choose whatever constraints they want to put on character creation, just like you would in GURPs or HERO. The GM should probably not allow people to build ant-people in a modern espionage game. If the GM has a specific game world planned out, they may delineate cultures and races to choose from. They may even say "all your connections must live in the city of Neverwinter" if they are restricting the campaign to that city. That kind of thing.

Have skimmed it, but still going back to review sections. An interesting read though as with the others, not quite to my tastes (I like killing things and taking their stuff). Certainly the artwork is incredible, and I didn't note many if any typos or grammatical stuff (one minor - for pg 23, I think you mean "yoke" not "yolk" of the aircraft ).

On my first pass through I skimmed over the "what is roleplaying" kind of section, which unfortunately also meant I missed out on some context as to the mechanics that would have probably have helped during chargen. On rereading this made more sense, though perhaps bringing details on the core mechanics forward would have helped.

I'm still scratching my head over the core precepts here - that your essentially modelling a character as developing organically with their mental potential and experiences interacting to shape all their later development? The section explaining this deed seem a little negative toward traditional RPGs, over what's a subtle distinction if any. I'm not sure there's really any difference between "character with strong Spatial ability, with experiences around combat" and "character with high Dex and levels in fighter".

The mentals-only system might be a good system for something like a transhumanist SF setting (e.g. Eclipse Phase ), given that system from what I've heard has body switching but handles attribute changes from this badly.
I don't actually agree with this from a simulation perspective though - I do think there is an organic basis to physical attributes to some extent (e.g. for Strength apart from height effectively changing muscle cross-section, there are specific genes that give differing metabolisms, limit maximum muscle development due to bone strength, or give different numbers of muscle cells or breakdown of slow twitch and fast twitch fibers).  I do like the way character options can boost Strength later since exercise is a key factor, but I think there should be an innate component to Strength as well.  

As far as quantifying contacts and motivations + cultural factors, I'd have to read through it in alot more detail before I could really judge whether you've succeeded in making a system that represents sentient psychology adequately - something most systems give up as waaay too hard. Personally this isn't something I particularly want to model, in that I'd rather come to my own decisions about my character. I suspect the Roleplay-focussed players would generally rather just roleplay without the stats, and the not-so-RP-interested characters would rather devote character sheet space to more weapons, but I could be mistaken. Mostly I can only see evil applications for your system i.e. where the GM runs Synapse because he's sick of bland characters and wants to force munchkins to be Roleplayers.