RPGs that you feel trip over their own cool ideas

RenleyRenfield · Tuesday at 10:29 PM

mamba said:
and yet they arrived at using 2d6 at over a year of trying different things, custom dice, not d6s, … so it is not a rip off, it just happened to end up in a similar spot in some regard (granularity is also different than for much of PbtA)

I never said is was a ripoff ... Maybe some other people had some argument elsewhere and this is just bleed...

I am ok with designers getting inspiration from anywhere and modding it for their needs. way obvious that is what happened here. So for me, there is no negative connotation to saying Draw Steel got its ideas from PBTA (and other things too)
And "granularity" really changes nothing. By the way he talks about 2d6 normalization in his video, and how PBTA is mentioned everywhere their game is - I am fully sure they played PBTA, saw some cool mechanics done well and gave it a try in their tests. Fits what he says, fits what is seen. Again, its fine, i am happy, his team got to a good place. I am not going to play make pretend that Draw Steel crew whole-cloth invented a new rule that just so happens to be near identical to a mainstream other. that's silly. Draw Steel clearly has PBTA intended its design, and that's a good thing.

mamba · 2026-03-04T00:04:08+0000

RenleyRenfield said:
I never said is was a ripoff ... Maybe some other people had some argument elsewhere and this is just bleed...

call it influenced directly then, you are not influenced directly by anything if you spend a year trying out various approaches and arrive at your result from a blank slate, what worked for you and iterative refinement

RenleyRenfield said:
for me, there is no negative connotation to saying Draw Steel got its ideas from PBTA

it’s not negative to be inspired by PbtA, it’s just not what happened. They had their own design and eventually realized that distribution wise it was almost the same as 2d6 and then went with that…

RenleyRenfield said:
By the way he talks about 2d6 normalization in his video

which video?

Tigris · 2026-03-04T00:35:04+0000

RenleyRenfield said:
I never said is was a ripoff ... Maybe some other people had some argument elsewhere and this is just bleed...

I am ok with designers getting inspiration from anywhere and modding it for their needs. way obvious that is what happened here. So for me, there is no negative connotation to saying Draw Steel got its ideas from PBTA (and other things too)
And "granularity" really changes nothing. By the way he talks about 2d6 normalization in his video, and how PBTA is mentioned everywhere their game is - I am fully sure they played PBTA, saw some cool mechanics done well and gave it a try in their tests. Fits what he says, fits what is seen. Again, its fine, i am happy, his team got to a good place. I am not going to play make pretend that Draw Steel crew whole-cloth invented a new rule that just so happens to be near identical to a mainstream other. that's silly. Draw Steel clearly has PBTA intended its design, and that's a good thing.

Yes even if they "tried different things", then the reason they tried 2d6 (and liked it) for sure has to do with PbtA. Sometimes inspiration is even subconscious/ people forgot where they saw things.

There are so many things one could have tried instead (including not having dices) but they chose to try the PbtA inspired mechanic.

Also I would not just say that getting inspiration is ok, its necessarily for good designers. The problem is that bad designers only take inspiration from 1 or 2 games, because they dont know enough...

Micah Sweet · 2026-03-04T01:18:09+0000

mamba said:
call it influenced directly then, you are not influenced directly by anything if you spend a year trying out various approaches and arrive at your result from a blank slate, what worked for you and iterative refinement

it’s not negative to be inspired by PbtA, it’s just not what happened. They had their own design and eventually realized that distribution wise it was almost the same as 2d6 and then went with that…

which video?

Have they denied being inspired by PbtA? If not, then you can't claim that's not what happened.

mamba · 2026-03-04T02:01:20+0000

Micah Sweet said:
Have they denied being inspired by PbtA? If not, then you can't claim that's not what happened.

they said how they went about establishing their system, as I said, using a blank slate and experimenting, so yes, I can deny that. As I wrote:

mamba said:
you are not influenced directly by anything if you spend a year trying out various approaches and arrive at your result from a blank slate, what worked for you and iterative refinement

RenleyRenfield · 2026-03-04T03:24:53+0000

mamba said:
they said how they went about establishing their system, as I said, using a blank slate and experimenting, so yes, I can deny that. As I wrote:

This is dead wrong. Like laughably wrong.

He literally lists the games that inspired him.
To the point that he even goes into how they implemented OTHER creators ideas for Draw Steel. At mid point he talks about 2d6 systems and narrative systems being how he wanted damage to go, and not how attack to hit to go - he is directly referencing PBTA style systems. (I doubt he or anyone would say it in any explicit terms as PBTA is not anywhere near a monolith, look at how different Pasion de las pasiones is vs apocalypse world and Legends in the mist.)

RenleyRenfield · 2026-03-04T03:26:00+0000

One of the main design talks that he talks about his how he used other peoples ideas.... like its the MAIN thrust of this entire video...

mamba · 2026-03-04T04:41:36+0000

RenleyRenfield said:
This is dead wrong. Like laughably wrong.

lol, that video pretty much confirms what I am saying. They started with a blank slate and experimented for a year to figure out what mechanics work best for what they wanted to do. This video goes through some of the things they tried. That he references other games with similar ideas does not change that, it’s not like he would use a mechanic that resembles nothing else out there…

It’s not quite the one I had in mind (not going to look through tons of hourlong videos to find it), but it certainly says something similar, e.g. 0:20 ‘we started out with a lot of ambitious ideas of how our dice might work. Spoilers: we threw all those ideas out’

The one I am thinking of said that they explicitly started from nothing and built a system that works the way they want rather than starting from something preexisting, because they did not want to assume that any existing thing is the best / right one

Aldarc · 2026-03-04T09:52:04+0000

Gradine said:
Funny enough I also thought of Monte Cooke's Cypher System when I opened this thread but for the exact opposite reasons of the OP. I think the Cyphers are the cool idea here; the best mechanical expression of anti-hoarding I've ever seen. The character building system, meanwhile, is really cool in concept but needlessly restrictive in execution.

Every Game Group I Have Run Numenera: "This setting is awesome, but why do characters and character options feel so conceptually limiting?"