GURPS Sliders
From AngilleWiki
The universe is infinite. In fact, it's so infinite that every decision we make creates a whole new universe that could be completely different from this one. The universe is also not perfect. Sometimes a rip, a tear, or just a nudge connects one possible universe to another, and weird shit happens. Missing persons, "alien abductions", the Bermuda Triangle, and raining frogs are all results from this fact. Sometimes specific people or things become unstable and begin sliding between these probabilities. You happen to be one of these people. Lucky you.
Whether you are just trying to get home, or if you've found you love this nomadic life, you keep leaping into that swirly. Soon, you find others like yourself. A few people you've never met pop out of a swirly alongside you. You become attuned to each other and start sliding to the same places and times. And thus our adventure begins...
Mechanics
Ok, so here's how this works. Every session starts with the words, "As you pop out of the purple (or orange, or green) swirly..." and ends with the words, "...and you leap through the colored swirly!"
For the ruleset, right now, I'm thinking GURPS. I have a fairly decent set of 3rd Edition GURPS books, but I just got rid of most of them. If anyone's willing to spring for d20 Modern or 4th Edition GURPS or 2nd Edition Mutants and Masterminds, I'm all for trying them out too. But this is probably easiest to cover the widest range of character ideas. You can be a DnD-style wizard, a 1920s gangster, a feudal samurai, a Babylon 5 Narn or Minbari, or whatever else you want.
For balance, I'd like everyone to start with 100 points, with a possible 45 points from Disadvantages. Here's the hitch: nothing that doesn't go with you through the swirly. For instance, the Wealthy advantage means pretty much nothing if your credit cards don't work or if gold isn't precious. The Enemy disadvantage is almost doable, but a big hassle for the GM of the night to deal with. It is also notable that the Xenophobic disadvantage is probably a game-breaker. You guys are smart, you'll figure it out.
Speaking of the "GM of the night," I do not want to run this game. I want to play in it. Anyone can try out their GMing skills without fear of having to come up with overarching plotlines or whatnot. We can even play pick-up games of Sliders. We don't need to worry about whether someone will make it to a game, 'cause they probably just slid somewhere else this time. The GMs will have characters they play in other games, so it's perfectly normal to have at least one party NPC at each session. My suggestion is to award the players with 2-6 character points for each session, depending on roleplaying, contribution, length of play, etc. This means the characters might end up ranging from 120-200 points after several sessions. That's cool. It's not a sport. It's storytelling.
