For those of You who Write/Design your own Games

[steenan]

What kind of games do you write, and why?

Mostly fantasy, but with widely varying approaches to the genre. I also played with modern occult and horror games a little.

Other than designing my games from scratch, I rewrote the mechanics of several games for use in my gaming group, because we found their settings interesting and fun, but their systems too complicated, too unbalanced or just unfit to the setting and style.

Recently, I design much less than I used to. I just found some games that I really like as they are (Mouse Guard, Nobilis, Dogs in the Vineyard), so, for some time, I may focus on running games instead of creating them.

What kind of game design principles do you use?

In order of importance:

1. I always try to clearly define my design goals: what is the game's focus, how it is to be played, what is the players' goal. A game with focus on immersion and exploration will be much different from one designed for fair challenges, and a game where I expect realistic portrayal of human reactions when faced with supernatural will be much different from one aiming for cinematic horror.

2. I often ask myself "how this piece of the system will help in what I want from this game?" and mercilessly cut out things that detract from the focus. Do characters learn new skills and become significantly more powerful in this kind of stories? If not, I won't have advancement at all and use a different kind of rewards. Do I want characters to die from bad luck or bad tactics? If not, there's no mechanics for being killed. Is struggling against environment important? If not, I may remove typical tests and assume that characters always succeed, unless there is someone with opposing agenda.

3. I often use ideas and pieces from other games, but always in the light of the above. If I want abstract combat rules, where gaining a better position or dominating an opponent socially is as good as hitting him, I will definitely use HPs. If I want flexibility in character creation, there will be player-defined traits akin to aspects in FATE. etc. But I won't use HPs just because "everybody does this" if they don't help in achieving my goals.

4. I either create a system that is to be played RAW, with strict rules, but is abstract enough not to restrict player choice and not to produce absurd results, or one that is designed to work as a set of guidelines, with the GM using it when and as he likes. Both approaches work well, in my experience, while trying to mix them usually blows one in the face.

What kind of game design theories do you like or use?

Various discussions and theories presented on Forge helped me enormously, both in playing and in designing games. The most important lessons I learned there were focusing on players' goals (as opposed to characters' goals), designing to help play the game the way I aimed for (as opposed to preventing people from playing differently) and treating the system (mechanics) as something that shapes play (as opposed to shaping in-game events).

What kind of design elements do you like to include in your games?

There are several. Of course, not everything fits every game and every style of play, but if there are no reasons not to, I like to have:
- Dice pools, especially d6 pools, as a method of rolling.
- Death as a possible stake, but not a possible result of a random roll.
- Character goals, beliefs and/or personality traits as something that may be used mechanically and that is rewarded when demonstrated in play (as opposed to nebulous "rewarding good roleplaying" or not rewarding it at all)
- Social mechanics with clear rules, being usable on PCs as well as on NPCs.

 

[nedjer]

I went there. I'm lost. Is there a game there? I see an article telling you to play other games in order to play your game, but I don't actually see your game.

There's a bit of a lack of navigational clarity after a few server and conversion to CMS glitches - been patching it up this weekend - should of seen it a week ago:

Treasure

Downloads at the bottom of the page

About Renegade

The Treasure images are now contained within and linked inside the HTML downloads (ZIP and Win 32 EXE) as PDFs.

HTH

Should add that you were in the right place, but it shouldn't be and isn't obvious that everything is connected, e.g. the RPG Cookbook, Renegade, Treasure, technology posts and design content. It's intended that everything is standalone/ modular at the end of the day, e.g. there's absolutely no need or particular reason to even glance at Treasure to play Renegade with any RPG/s. Equally, there's no need to touch Treasure or Renegade to use the images to do posters for an RPG event or to decorate D&D character sheets.

This can at times seem a touch non-sequential/ Pulp Fictiony, as elements only appear to 'coalesce' as you rummage around, e.g. what's that post on Web Design and Psychology from last week doing up there just now; especially when it was prepped over two months ago . . .

 

[Janx]

[/FONT]
One thing that is pretty essential IMO is understanding the probabilities behind your numbers. There are tons of great online tools for this these days so you don't need to be a math wiz to figure out success probabilities in your system.

Your other point was good too, but this is very important.

For awhile, i was playing CMGs, and one of the things that bugged me was the point cost formulas. namely the lack thereof. Game imbalances came up, because certain figures were a better deal than others.

In one of my own games (a war game using army men), I worked out the math based on the simple factors my game used for a figure (speed, hp, damage, attack and defense values).

The premise is, in any fight, 2 figures start out "out of range". from there, they will continue to move and shoot at each other until on or another is dead. The one with longer range has the first chance to hit, with the other one needing to spend rounds of movement to get within range.

Once I modeled out each combination's chances of survival (or at least vs. a baseline figure), from there the point value of each figure gets set such that when you make a unit of equal point value versus another, your % chance of victory is 50%.

pointwise, this might mean 3 machine gun guys = 1 rocket launcher guy (who moves slower, but he has rockets).

The goal is, to give players the ability to pick and choose their pieces (unlike chess), but the effective combat power of each side is equal (just like chess).

From there, it is the player's own ability that determines victory (plus random chance if dice are involved).

Though I'm not actually a math expert, I like to make sure consideration of the probabilities and power levels of game features are carefully designed and balanced.

After that, play testing should check the reality of those game balancing activities.

 

[Janx]

a side question, when this thread started, I noticed everbody else seems to be talking about making RPGs, or RPG content (not counting people who didn't say what kind of games they make).

Have any of you guys dabbled in non-RPG game making?

One of the first games I did was formalizing Toy Soldiers into a game (i never knew HG Wells had a book on the topic, and whats funny is both similarities, and points of divergence).

I had already been into games like BattleTech, but I decided this game needed to stick to its roots as a simple game.

So we arranged the troops (plus durable terrain) on the floor and took turns knocking them down or strategicallly ramming with tanks or sacrificing "heroes" for another throw.

It was actually a lot of fun, heck even my mom liked playing it. It didn't have scads of tactical consideration to it, but that was a trade-off for accessibility.

With making your own RPG, I sense a higher barrier to entry. The amount of material typically needed to represent a complete RPG is more than the amount of material needed to represent a complete board game or even card game. In addition to the "hey, do you guys want to try out my prototype board game?" vs. "who wants to play in a campaign using my own RPG rules..."

The latter actually being a turn-off to me.

 

[Bedrockgames]

a side question, when this thread started, I noticed everbody else seems to be talking about making RPGs, or RPG content (not counting people who didn't say what kind of games they make).

Have any of you guys dabbled in non-RPG game making?

One of the first games I did was formalizing Toy Soldiers into a game (i never knew HG Wells had a book on the topic, and whats funny is both similarities, and points of divergence).

I had already been into games like BattleTech, but I decided this game needed to stick to its roots as a simple game.

So we arranged the troops (plus durable terrain) on the floor and took turns knocking them down or strategicallly ramming with tanks or sacrificing "heroes" for another throw.

It was actually a lot of fun, heck even my mom liked playing it. It didn't have scads of tactical consideration to it, but that was a trade-off for accessibility.

With making your own RPG, I sense a higher barrier to entry. The amount of material typically needed to represent a complete RPG is more than the amount of material needed to represent a complete board game or even card game. In addition to the "hey, do you guys want to try out my prototype board game?" vs. "who wants to play in a campaign using my own RPG rules..."

The latter actually being a turn-off to me.

Yeah. The first thing I designed was a board game called legions of conquest (did this with a friend of mine). We made it and playtested for like a year. It was a really good game in my opinion but at the time we didn't have the resources or business know-how to get to the next level of making it happen (though we had a good looking prototype).

 

[nedjer]

With making your own RPG, I sense a higher barrier to entry. The amount of material typically needed to represent a complete RPG is more than the amount of material needed to represent a complete board game or even card game. In addition to the "hey, do you guys want to try out my prototype board game?" vs. "who wants to play in a campaign using my own RPG rules..."

The latter actually being a turn-off to me.

We can't have that; this was Gnome Stew's take on a fly-by during the pre-ENnies period:

"I also like the concept behind their free Treasure RPG, which can be played as a tabletop RPG, a boardgame, or a light CCG, and combines elements of each."

Irritatingly thorough of me - but based on exactly your thinking.

Experienced RPG players have a huge investment in their given system compared to boardgame or CCG players; while new entrants need either a good DM or a certain amount of familiarity to ease their way into RPG play.

Persuading either group to even look at anything novel is always going to be difficult - and something experimental seems most unlikely to be the route for anyone with an eye on sales and profit margins.

This doesn't present any problem for me, as the model is that of an arts collective rather than a typical business, i.e. more about raising or promoting ideas and the hobby than raising cash.

However, it does seem to follow that while I can say my design priorities call for the option of visual roleplaying or the assumption that players can tune the system, commercial publishers are going to have to steer clear simply because the inclusion of an unfamiliar element even among many familiar elements flags as a risk.

 

[Lord Ipplepop]

The last game I worked on was the same basic premise as the movie Red Dawn: America is invaded and a group of teens becomes insurgents. It eventually morphed into a new concept with the same mechanics. I did not use the d20 OGL set-up. I designed the stats off of things that the characters would need (the same basics as D&D with a few differences and a few added). Some of the stats were based on other stats ([stat A+stat B]/2). The combat system was based on the caliber of the weapon or the strength of the character in melee.
Skills were based on real life skills and experiences, and based on modern education.