Wrestling Mechanics?

So being away, camping with 16 teenagers for five days at the largest Christian Youth event in the UK surprisingly leaves very little time for hobbying (who’d have thunk?).

But on the odd occasion between making sure everyone had eaten, applied enough sunscreen, and had drunk enough water, there were a quiet few seconds I could consider the mechanics of my Wrestling game (with big thanks to the comments on my last post!).

As previously mentioned, I think movement has to be a thing, and has to be key to proceedings. This is simply because I want the game to work as a miniatures game, afterall I do now have a ring, and I have painted a bunch of wrestlers. Without movement you could just make a card game, and admittedly that might be a better way to actually produce a wrestling game. You could have a deck per wrestler, with preconstructed decks sold in stores to represent famous wrestlers, but I’m not exactly Wizards of the Coast, nor would I have the attention span to produce such a thing. But, anywho, I want to keep movement straightforward and simple, so I’ve gone for grid movement, with some facing rules. I think an opposed roll, including a speed or agility stat will determine which wrestler gets to move, and then when wrestlers are in adjacent squares an opposed roll again, including a strength stat, with bonuses for facing, will determine who gets to perform a wrestling move. In that way, you can have those smaller, faster guys outmanoeuvre bigger, stronger opponents.

As far as moves go, I’m no wrestling expert, I know the basics, having watched a lot of WWF (before the WWE) as a kid, but I wouldn’t know enough to know what moves are best to counter others, and I’m sure there’s a certain amount of improvisation anyway (afterall Wrestling is an exercise in improv), so I’m reticent to be too strict with my empathetically imagined mechanics of real wrestling. So I want to keep things loosey goosey.

I’m thinking of breaking moves down into a few categories: Strikes, Grapples and Aerials. I think you need speed to dodge a strike, so that’s our speed stat playing in again, and a strike could counter a grapple (a boot to the chest, or thump to the back). Where Aerial attacks play in, like leaps from the top rope, I think that comes down to a stamina check, to see if the targeted wrestler has enough fight left in them to roll out of the way. I think I’ll leave it up to the players’ imaginations as to which specific move is being used in any situation.

Of course there’s special moves, which fit into the above categories, but I presume would just get a buff to damage done.

So stat wise I’m looking at…

Speed/Athleticism – Good for determining who moves and when, and Aerial moves.

Strike/Brawling – Punches and kicks.

Grappling/ Strength

Stamina – Health

Then I think something like crowd influence, as fan favourite wrestlers tend to come out top, should be a part of it. Which also likely ties into Stamina, as it’s the crowd’s support that keeps the favourite going.

The major other aspect of Wrestling that I can really think of is ‘Faces’ (good guys) and ‘Heels’ (bad guys). But I don’t think there’s too much you need to add to make that work. Faces can get a bonus to their crowd support, and I think Heels can have the ability to use dirty tactics, like low blows and eye pokes (when the ref’s back is turned).

I need to think further about the fact that this is Mutant Wrestling too. So there’s got to be odd stuff going on, but I think that’ll be an add on, so you can still use the same rules for human wrestling. But on the Mutant front, there’s got to be some of that ultra-violence, crowd riots, acid-vomit, lasers and explosions.

Thoughts?