In the D&D 6e thread - Slambo said this...

Quote...my unholy DCC/Godbound/ 5e abomination to run.

and that's a pretty heavy mix. SO...

For you GM's out there that kitbash systems... or just tweak your favorite with mechanics you pull from other systems - what exactly are you using and WHY?

As for what I'm currently doing (if anyone is interested)...

Spoiler

I'm currently running a Talislanta campaign. I'm using 4e as the primary chassis. But I've codified all the skills from 3e, 4e, 5e and Talislanta:Savage Lands, into one clean skill list. I've done a lot of condensing and pruning and adding of mechanical heft to skills I think are necessary, and killing those that aren't. I've taken 5e's Quirks and broken them out into Advantages/Disadvantages with some of the pruned skills now codified as a simple Advantage.

I've taken the Lifepath system from Witcher RPG, and re-purposed it for my Talislanta game (which I'm still in the process of - I did a last minute slap-dash to help flesh out background stories for my PC's - it's turned into a really rousing success. LIFEPATH RULES). Now I'm going to make one tailored for Talislanta (and all my games going forward).

I'm using the Paths for Chargen from 5e and trimming them down and "rebalancing" for the changes I've made to Skills and Advantages (Quirks). I've been greatly informed by the Omega System from Atlantis 2nd Age in a LOT of this, which itself is a Talislanta system hybrid.

The Goal - I wanted to run Talislanta with a system that can work with any edition of Talislanta without having a stack of editions whose subsystems I like - while others have grown a bit out of control, to parse through. I further wanted to create a clean template for a setting-free version of this ruleset (which I'm effectively playtesting) so I can use with other settings and genres with minimal effort to port over.

My two of note were;

A) kitbashing d6 Star Wars and LUG Star Trek into a post-Dominion War Neutral Zone series.

B) my aforementioned d20 Modern/World of Darkness game.

I replaced palladium's armor rating with damage resistance from pathfinder. I really like armor being both resistive and ablative. Stops damage but also takes damage.  I also have crits doing max plus roll, though i'm not sure what system that originate in. A few other things that I dont think came from any other game at all...

Quote from: VincentTakeda;1117805I replaced palladium's armor rating with damage resistance from pathfinder. I really like armor being both resistive and ablative. Stops damage but also takes damage.

um... Palladium FRP had that.
Armour had an armour rating, you had to roll over that to actually penetrate the armour to damage the target directly. Otherwise the hit subtracted from the armours SDC. When that was gone you had no more protection from hits. Also when the armours SDC was reduced to half its AR dropped by 2, and dropped 2 more then the SDC was down to 1/3rd.

Example: Hard Leather had an AR of 10 and 30 SDC. When the SDC is beaten down to 15 the AR drops to 8, and then to 6 when the SDC is worn down to 10.

I've resumed my rules conversions of early World of Darkness materials to Big Eyes Small Mouth 1E.

In fact, I've nearly completed the first draft and might be looking to playtest it once said first draft is finished.

Quote from: Omega;1117811um... Palladium FRP had that.
Armour had an armour rating, you had to roll over that to actually penetrate the armour to damage the target directly. Otherwise the hit subtracted from the armours SDC. When that was gone you had no more protection from hits. Also when the armours SDC was reduced to half its AR dropped by 2, and dropped 2 more then the SDC was down to 1/3rd.

Example: Hard Leather had an AR of 10 and 30 SDC. When the SDC is beaten down to 15 the AR drops to 8, and then to 6 when the SDC is worn down to 10.

Yep. I've disconnected the armor rating from the strike roll and now its simply how much damage per strike the armor can resist. It all behaves like natural armor rating so isnt penetrable, though an armor piercing round can counteract a degree of damage resistance from armor rating, its still not penetrating so much as giving the attack its full damage potential back to tear the armor to shreds.

Well for me I introduced everything over time. For DCC I had a supercomputer that regulates magic from its natural form (DCC magic system) into a safer alternative (5e's magic system). They had the option to turn it off completely, or just edit themselves out of it by asking the A.I.
 The DCC wizard is treated as a completely seperate class that doesnt multiclass into anything.

Later i had them meet the worlds greatest swordmaster who agreed to teach them, the deed die only applies to their damage and they're slowly learning over time (just the Barbarian and Paladin though atm, he refused so far yo train a Bard, and i want them to visit the monks temple before he gets to do it with his fists).

Finally, they've been having issues with an ancient Druidic demigod so they went on a quest to steal bits of divinity from wherever they can. Atm they have only managed to get a minor gift from the Beast word and they can only use it once per day.

I did it cause i wanted to introduce some people who will only play 5e to some of the fun concepts from other games since i couldnt get them to just play DCC GODDAMMIT.

I probably don't kit bash.  I'm more the type to put everything into a blender and see what comes out.  The parts aren't recognizable as coming from a particular source at that point.

I use rules from both Mongoose Traveller 1st and 2nd Edition.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1117832I probably don't kit bash.  I'm more the type to put everything into a blender and see what comes out.  The parts aren't recognizable as coming from a particular source at that point.

What do you do as a baseline? Or do you create a task-resolution system every campaign and just build from that? If not - What are your go-to ingredients from other games?

Quote from: tenbones;1117842What do you do as a baseline? Or do you create a task-resolution system every campaign and just build from that? If not - What are your go-to ingredients from other games?

I'm either running something more or less straight (with a handful of house rules, but hardly kit bashing) or starting from ground zero.  

For example, let's take the system I'm working on now.  You could get a somewhat similar play experience by mixing D&D RC and 5E, Dragon Quest, with a few vestiges of Rune Quest, Toon, GURPs, and Hero.  However, the reason I'm doing that system is that I want to work around the nagging annoyances from those systems--nagging to me, anyway.  While some of the influences are there (and the DQ ones obvious), it's really a new system built from the ground up.  More inspired by than kit bashed.  and of course, taking my time, there are some play experiences in it that you can't get with kit bashing.  (Or I can't get them.  You might be able to.)

For new campaigns, I nearly always use one system with house rules for that campaign.  However, I'm also not playing the range of genres that you and others are.  I don't need to do an unholy mix of Toon and Hero to play a light-hearted version of the Eddings novels, because I don't want to do that, much less horror or sci/fi or modern, etc.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1117832I probably don't kit bash.  I'm more the type to put everything into a blender and see what comes out.  The parts aren't recognizable as coming from a particular source at that point.

Yeah, I don't so much kitbash, as much as I modify or even redesign the whole from scratch using what works from different systems as a baseline, but repurpose them for whatever I'm trying to accomplish till they come in ways that might be unrecognizable, except maybe as variants of whatever components I used as a base.

One variant mechanic that was close to kitbashing I tried in the 90's that's common use now was to take Cyberpunk 2020's/Fuzion system's skill mechanics (which use d10 +Attribute +Skill vs Target Number) and translate them into D&D to end up basically with d20 System style mechanics (only this was pre-3e, back in the AD&D 2e era). The D&D that I used at the time, though, was a homebrewed monstrosity were you could build custom characters by picking a bunch different class features and mash them together to build a custom class. The game used a highly modified, expanded and refined version of the optional guidelines for class creation found in the AD&D 2e DMG.

This eventually led me to simply start building my own homebrewed classless systems from scratch, which was more efficient than trying to make D&D work like a classless system. One of the systems I made at the took those d20+Mod mechanics then added game effects inspired by Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP), but more consolidated and standardized, using levels instead of Ranks to measure powers, that ended up looking like a stripped down d20 version Hero System--though, I wasn't familiar with Hero at the time, so I ended up reworking FASERIP powers into effects instead. I'm still working on a more refined variant of that system, which I restarted a few years ago after years of being on hiatus from tabletop.

I have done a few in my time.  At one end, the process ranges from CT/Striker/MT hybrids - with lots of house rules of course, this is Traveller after all.  A more extreme example would be a very hacked about Twilight:2000 1e system that I used for moderns and sci-fi gaming in the first half of the '90s.

This had a hacked about damage system, some tweaks to the character generation system (although it still retained the tradeoff between stats and skills from T2000 1e), plus a variety of house rules.  In all, I ran 4 sci-fi campaigns with it and several moderns games.  At one point I did a cyberpunk hack for it to address some of the flaws in the CP2013 system.

After that I did a brief segue back into using Traveller for sci-fi.  Then I drifted away from role playing in the 2000's and came back about 2015 or 2016.

I've done CP2020 + Mekton which is pretty kitbash-lite. But hey - Mechs in Cyberpunk? hell yeah!