How many of you have tried designing youor own game?

[Modin Godstalker]

Out of curiosity, I would like to know how many of you on these forums have actually made a real attempt at designing your own RPG.

If you have, what were the biggest problems you had when trying to design the mechanics of the game?

 

[Kanegrundar]

I tried my hand at game design back in the days when I quit playing D&D 2E and couldn't find anything else that suited my tastes (until I found Alternity). It was called Forerunner, a percentile-based game that drew heavily from Fallout (and then heavily from Alternity when it came out). I got a good bit of it written and play-tested before it struck me that I was reinventing the wheel since a LOT of the game was too much like Alternity. I scrapped the idea and just played ALT, which was alright until 3E came out and I'm been playing D20 ever since.

Things went pretty smoothly for a while. Then I started to run into circumstances in the game that I hadn't considered, so I'd have to add more and more to the game until I needed to revise what I had done since it became a cobbled juggernaut. It was a good experience since it gives me a better idea of game balance and what goes into striking up that balance.

Kane

 

[kitsune9]

In 2nd ed, I wanted to design my own rpg too, but it was too much writing, and now that I'm a little older, game design involves making the rules work to make the game more balanced and that's a skill aspect that I don't do statistical analysis and all that jazz.

 

[WalkingDead]

When I was a kid/teen in the late '80s and early '90s, I tried my hand at game design. Honestly, it was just too much work considering there were oodles of different games to check out, and the only people who would ever see the designs would be my group of friends (and they frankly didn't care what games we played in those days).

Still, I gave it a try. I think most of my designs ended up being based off of old D&D/AD&D and/or Palladium mechanics -- with probably quite a few of my designs taking the best of both systems and merging them together. But again, I didn't find it worth the time. I found that I would rather use someone else's mechanics and focus on providing a good story for people than trying to deal with the nitty-gritty of building a game from scratch.

 

[ackron]

A few years back when I was in college, a buddy of mine and I spent about 3 months during the summer desinging our own rpg system. It was loosly based on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, and set in the Wheel of Time world (this was before the WoT RPG was out, and we wanted to try playing in that world).

It was a ton of work, probably between us we spent about 250 hours over the course of that summer working on it. In the end it was developed enough so that you could play it. All of the systems were in place, we came up with a really cool channeling system that had a lot of fun overchanneling stuff, and stuff to come up with your own effects on the fly that was probably its best feature. We also had our own systems for character creation, combat, and skills, loosly based on WFRPG. It was a lot of fun, and when we finished, we ran a game using it for some of our friends, but it was still pretty rough, and in the end we abandoned it for more finsihed products, and never went back. I think i still have most of the stuff lying around somewhere though.

 

[RFisher]

If you have, what were the biggest problems you had when trying to design the mechanics of the game?

• Figuring out how granular skills should be & defining them.
• Figuring out how much each ability should cost.
• Keeping a balanced level of complexity.
• Trying to figure out what a magic system I'd actually like would look like.
• Finding time to playtest.

 

[Teflon Billy]

Out of curiosity, I would like to know how many of you on these forums have actually made a real attempt at designing your own RPG.

Way back in the day.

If you have, what were the biggest problems you had when trying to design the mechanics of the game?

The fact that I wanted a very "realistic" combat system, but knew absolutely nothing about real combat and had no idea what that was.

What I really wanted was hit locations, limb severing, putting out eyes etc.

Shortly thereafter I found Runequest, which filled all of my needs in this regard.

 

[Crothian]

Like Billy, I also designed or tried to design a game that suited bmy needs. But shortly afterwards I found a game that did that and it was much better written then I had done.

 

[Psion]

Out of curiosity, I would like to know how many of you on these forums have actually made a real attempt at designing your own RPG.

I did. See here.

If you have, what were the biggest problems you had when trying to design the mechanics of the game?

1) I was going for something with realistic gunfire and damage mechanics, and it got pretty complicated pretty fast.
2) It was a basic point build system that I was trying to add some structure too. The point build part was easy. The templates turned out to be more work than I bargained for, though. (You won't notice any in the docs I linked to.)

I still think my armor and penetration mechanic is "the way to go", but if I were to do it again, I think I'd opt for something a lot simpler on the damage side of the house.

 

[Afrodyte]

Out of curiosity, I would like to know how many of you on these forums have actually made a real attempt at designing your own RPG.

If you have, what were the biggest problems you had when trying to design the mechanics of the game?

I've designed two games that I've allowed to see the light of day. You can get them here.

The hardest part about designing mechanics, for me, was making sure that they supported the sorts of things I wanted the players to focus on in-game. To take a simple example, X-mas is about a war between rival factions of Christmas elves. To really get the best out of the concept, I couldn't bog down the mechanics with a lot of extraneous material. I also didn't want to copy ideas and rules that other systems handled as well as or better than my own.

In addition, I had to be sure that the underlying assumptions behind the rules made sense within the context of what I want the game to do. It's one of the reasons why both D20 and Storyteller can be frustrating for me. With D20, I have to deal with the idea that leveling up makes characters tougher and more competent in all ways, not just a few chosen by the character (escalating BAB, saves, skill points, and HP to name a few). This is fine when it comes to playing a standard D&D game, but when you want to try something different, you definitely have to take this into consideration. With Storyteller, the dice pool mechanic can work for or against you regardless of how competent you are. This is fine if you are a lucky roller, but if you have a 10-dice pool and fail more often than you succeed, this can be irritating. CODA (well Decipher's LotR RPG), by contrast, has proven elegant and intuitive despite some glaring mechanical issues more easily corrected than in D20 or Storyteller. With Kathanaksaya, less competent yet more well-developed characters could regularly outshine more competent, less well-developed characters. This is something I wanted the system to encourage because power is defined less by the cool stuff that a character can do and more about how much control she has over the course of her own story. Hopefully, the system reflects that.