How many of you have tried designing youor own game?

[Mouseferatu]

Hmm... Developed a d100-based fantasy game a while back, a few years before D&D 3E came out.

It was a class-based and skill-based system, not entirely unlike D20. In retrospect, while I like the D20 combination of class and skills, I think my own system would have been better suited as entirely skill-based.

I was never able to come up with a magic system I liked. I wanted you to be able to build your own spells (sort of like Mage or Ars Magica, but with a much simpler and much more rigidly defined system). Never could come up with one, and eventually went to a standard "Here's a list of spells, here's how many points they cost."

Ultimately, it simply isn't different enough from D20 (die-type notwithstanding) to ever try to go any further with it, at least not in its current form.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Oh, around the same time (a few years before 3E), I also designed the basic aspects of a game called Seraphim, which was intended to fit into the World of Darkness paradigm. But since I used the WoD mechanics, rather than designing my own, I'm not sure that qualifies for this discussion.

 

[Arnwyn]

Me, but that's only because I had no idea D&D really existed during Grade 7, all those years ago...

Imagine my shock, excitement, (and a bit of dismay) when I found out that there was an entire published ruleset that detailed what I was trying to do for a few years, and held together when muliple characters were involved...

 

[Plane Sailing]

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.

You can see mine here

http://www.starguild.freeserve.co.uk/starguild/toc.htm

The web page version isn't as pretty as the original (I'll have to PDF it) and is about 5 years old so the web pages need radically redoing.

This was the result of about 8 years work all told and went through 5 major iterations. It started off as Runequest in space ('cos we loved RQ2) but eventually I thought about making it publishable so I gradually removed the RQ mechanics and replaced them with homegrown ones.

Probably the most tricky thing was getting the combat system to work right, and to have something that scaled well from personal combat through vehicle combat and up to starship combat.

I keep thinking about doing a d20 conversion of it for OGL.

Cheers

 

[Henry]

I don't know a single gamer in my area who's been playing for more than 5 years who HASN'T attempted to design their own game. Comes with the territory of trying many different games and saying, "I could do better myself" - which for most people is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Back in the late 80's, I designed a post-apocalyptic game a while back (Inspired by Joe Dever's Road Warrior series of choose-your-own-adventures). It was in hindsight way too AD&D, with far fewer hit points so you could get killed easier, but I could find no one willing to play it with me. In the end, its hand-written notes got thrown out along with a whole bunch of other stuff from my childhood.

Second time I designed a game, I was working with my gaming group back in the early 90's, and we had taken a bit from Mythus Dangerous Journeys, a bit of Greyhawk, and make a Fantasy RPG based on the work someone else did. That enjoyed a few weeks of success, but died because we started playing AD&D again.

The more recent, I've both helped a friend with playtesting a Star Trek d20 variant (which could not be stretched all the ways we saw Screenwriters stretch Star Trek technology, so it never went past the "Reconstructed Star Wars" stage), and more recently I've had some notes on a classless Shadowrun system in d20 that I've toyed around with. I've never really had the drive, nor the monetary impetus to carry anything to completion, though. I could make more money just going to work, than working on a game.

 

[Wombat]

For the last few years (4-5) I've been working on my infamous "Musketeers & Magic" game, one set in not-quite-Italy during the not-quite-Italian-Wars of the 15th & 16th centuries.

I have decided that using tarot cards as a randomizing agent works well (esp. since I have found so many sets of rules to tarroc and other similar card games of the era) and that social status is at least as important as martial and magical skills.

The problem is a strange one. I don't want "realism", but rather "assumed realism". In other words, I want dueling to work the way people assumed it worked at the time, including all sorts of fancy trick maneuvers of dubious quality. Equally, I am trying to base the magic on the styles and manners of assumed magic at the time (i.e. necromancy mainly is used for calling up the dead to either get the dirt on your opponents or to find out where treasure is buried, etc.). The whole notion is to come up with a game that fits the mindset of an era.

**sigh**

I'm gonna be working on this for at least another four years...

 

[Tonguez]

I was mucking around on a system that used a d20 mechanic (actually it was percentage based using 2d10 but I was thinking about going straight d20) and was entirely skill based 'feats (called Talents) could give Skill increases or special skills (eg Arcane Talent would give access to the Spellcasting skill, something like Barbarian Rage would also be a Talent in the system and give access to Rage Skill)

Anyway basically the stats - Power, Dex, Agility, Perception, IQ, Intuition and Presence were your base proficiency and you added modifiers for whatever skill you wanted (eg if you had Pow! of 16 and wanted a 'Bending bars' skill +7 your proficiency = Power + skill (16 + 7 = 23), if you wanted a skill in Origami it would be (Manual) Dexterity + skill, Weapon skill was also Dexterity, whilst agility refered to movement skills (climb, dance, dodge, snowboarding), Arcane Spellcasting was a IQ based skill, whereas Divine Spellcasting and Rage would be Intuition based.
It also used a Sanity Save and Stamina Save to deal (respectively) with Mental and Physical damage

I had designed a freeform spellcasting system and was gonna carry on when 3e came out using its D20 Skills and Feats system and so I switched to that...

The biggest problems as stated before me is deciding how much each talent/skill should cost and how to pay for them (ie balanced character creation)
then of course getting all the details covered

Classless D20 would be ideal imho...

 

[The LMS]

I started working on a RPG designed with over the top comedic combat. Which seems to work fine when the players are attacking the baddies, but I havn't been able to determine a good way to deal with player "HP" and "AC"...oh well, always somthing to do in my free time.

 

[adwyn]

I've designed a couple, and like most the rules were poor "tweakings of things I did and didn't like about other systems. In the end I had spent too much time on things that had the life span of a gnat.

The one time I did like the rules I used was in field camp when I had a few people who wanted to play, but we had no books or dice. Instead we settled for chits made of discarded dinosaur fossils and bits of bison bone that were around the campsight. The rules were loose, bordering on free form, and character sheets were drawn in the dirt. It was great, but the thing those rules taught me was don't sweat the rules, they rarely really need to be rewritten.

 

[Jeph]

I have designed many games, and consider myself something of an expert. A few of them are here, and others can be found at jpatt.net, 1km1kt.net, and 24hourrpg.com. And, aside from all that free stuff, I have published one game, Pagoda, as part of the No Press Anthology, at www.nopress.net.

It's really fun. I work in eclectic styles, from the "D&D but better" that every gamer and his brother seems to have attempted to Peter Pan or Narnia-esque children's fantasy to martial arts to soft-scifi space action to space horror to Middle Earth to old skool and back again. Roll and add, roll take high, success-based dicepool, diceless, matching, others. Classes, point based, template based, mononumerical. Through designing my games and reading related material, I've learned that to write a new game, the first step you need to take is to throw out all of your assumptions about RPGs, and only take back the ones that fit the style for which you are aiming.

Game design is truly fascinating.
--Jeff