Roundabout: A JJBA Splat For The OSR

 Alright, I'll admit, I'm part of that new wave of Jojo's enjoyers. I first got into it in 2018-ish, on recommendation from a friend. I tend to be very choosy about anime particularly, with a special disdain for the specific genre that JJBA is. Years and years of Naruto this, Blue Exorcist that, had worn away my patience for so-called "shonen" shows. But, holy fuck, JJBA was just different. Stylish, with interesting power systems, characters that you don't loathe when they appear on-screen, actual stakes and threatening villains, and all at a time when the en-sloppening of entertainment as a whole was beginning. It was like a hit of crack after a long period of restless boredom. Phantom Blood was good, Battle Tendency was excellent (Joseph was the best Joestar), Stardust Crusaders was absolute cinema, and the peak just kept coming.

At the time, I was just only dipping my toes into the TTRPGs. I was, to my great shame, DnD 5E only. Tried something similar to this back then, but being profoundly 5E-brained at the time, it failed spectactularly.

Now, I might as well lay out what "this" is. I have, to the best of my abilities, worked out a framework for running Stands specifically in OSR type systems, doing my best to simultaneously ensure compatibility and preserve the feel of Stands as they're presented in the source material.

The first step was figuring what to do about stats. One of the failures of my first ill-fated attempt was trying to convert Stand capabilities directly to core-six stats, and I nearly made the same mistake again, when it hit me; the stat wheel was already waiting for me. So, what I decided on was to re-use these same six stats; Power, Speed, Range, Durability, Precision, and Potential. And then I thought, well, might as well full-send it. The OSR is no stranger to funky mechanics, so long as it's not a GURPs-style 15-step calculation. Therefore, I've graduated them from F to A for most purposes. Each grade comes with its own set of imposed stats and modifiers.

Next, I needed to figure out how that plugs in. I again thought back to my first attempt, where the Stand was a separate entity from the User, with its own Strength, Dexterity, so on and so forth. Then it struck me; use the User's stat for rolls and just add a modifier is they're using their Stand to do it. Slapping myself on the forehead for my profound retardation before, as this even would've worked fine in 5E, I went with this new idea. What each does is pretty straightforward; Power determines Strength bonus when using Strength, and unarmed damage die; Speed determines move speed and another thing I'll touch on later; Range determines how far from the User it can go; Durability was a little more complicated, but I settled on the Stand sharing the User's HP, Durability adding extra HD relative to the user, and sympathetic damage kicking in once the Stand's HP matches the User's HP max; Precision adding a Dexterity and Wisdom modifier, Widsom specifically because it's most often used as a perception stat, and high-precision Stands tend to have good vision; and Potential, that was a little harder. I'll touch on my solution to that later in the article.

Now, the surpise you'll get with Speed is a number of actions and, at higher Speed, reactions a Stand can make. You may think to yourself, "Multiple actions? What the hell, this system I'm running only gets the one per combatant!" Well, this one took some deliberation, but to reflect that Stands are often wicked fast, I chose to make a very simplistic action economy system specifically for Stands. Consider that the infamous seven page beatdown, whereby Giorno beats the everliving piss out of Cioccolata somewhere to the tune of, absolute minimum, 179 punches before flinging him into a garbage truck. The realtime of this was about one round. At absolute most, a Stand in this system would be able to throw out 8 blows. An under-tuning that is very necessary for a game system, as I'm sure the prospect of rolling anywhere between 179d20 and 25,000d20 with modifiers would make any GM pucker. My recommendation if you're playing a system that already has an action economy is knock however many any character already gets baseline, past one, off the Stand's action count and treat it as a modifier. If it's a two-action system, an A Speed stand adds 4 actions, for example.

The other thing to revisit, and the loosest part of this system, is Stand abilities. At its core, my handling of this is "make some shit up", with extra steps. Contrast this with the failure point of my previous 5E attempt, whereby I tried to make a rolled table of Stand abilities before getting about 70 deep and admitting defeat. Besides, much of the OSR is rulings over rules, so I think a good GM is equipped to adjudicate the specifics of an ability.

Now, those extra steps I mentioned. I've established a set of (I hope) decent guidelines for fitting any given ability into one of four categories; Marginal, Minor, Major, and Cosmic. Your Stand's Potential (see, we came back around) determines how much budget you have to spec out abilities. A Stand with A potential could come swinging with 1 Cosmic, and either 1 Major or 2 Marginal. Cosmic abilities are your time stopping, fate manipulating, end-level big bad abilities. Majors are your mending things, stealing things, and putting zippers in things, generally useful abilities a protagonist and entourage would have. Minor are your situational attacks, like Emerald Splash and such. Marginals are Star Finger and its ilk. Nobody remembers Star Finger.

With this framework as a whole, I'm feeling pretty good about this. Treat Stands as Spirits, Psionic, and Astral for the purposes of rules interaction, and I think they'll slot in just fine in almost anything. The rules document is here.