It’s funny, I always assume that people are bored of us talking about things like inspirations for 3E design, and the 3E design process. Mike Mearls always assures me that I’m wrong but I never believe him.
It’s very flattering, actually, that various people point to things in 3E and connect them with their other favorite games. That always says to us that we did something right. And I think all three of us have been pretty straight with the fact that 3E has lots and lots of important influences. Jonathan played a lot of Runequest, and wrote Ars Magica, Over the Edge, and Everway. I worked on Rolemaster, Champions/Hero, Marvel Super Heroes, Alternity (although technically it was not mechanics work), a brief bit on Gamma World, and played a lot of Call of Cthulhu, Villains & Vigilantes, and other games. Skip had a lot of experience with Call of Cthulhu and Runequest as well, and also Top Secret, as well as lots of other games.
I believe it would be foolish to try to deny that any of these games, and a whole lot more, influenced 3E. And I don’t think any of us have done that. But it would be untrue to say that all these games had the same impact on us. And in fact, I’ve left out of that list the game that influenced us by far the most: D&D. The previous editions of AD&D, Basic D&D, and a surprisingly tremendous amount of what we always called “1974 D&D” were such a huge influence that it’s easy to forget that—it’s so obvious you don’t even think to say it most of the time. My own biggest personal influence was the 1E Dungeon Master's Guide (and of course Gary's work in general).
But I won’t bore you with any more about that since I wrote about it
already .
What you guys seem to be interested in is what other games had an influence. Well, the only non-D&D games I remember being mentioned in this way: “Maybe we should do it like _____” were Runequest, Ars Magica, and Gamma World. Those were strong, direct influences to say the least.
Other games, like Rolemaster and Champions, are games that I have a lot of affection for and owe a lot to (I won’t bore you with the story of how I got started in the industry at ICE since I
already wrote about that too and you can see the long list of Rolemaster and Champions products on my credits list on my site as well) I don’t remember being so direct, except in negative ways. For example, I think the Hero “initiative” system is a bit too slow and cumbersome, so we avoided mechanics like that, and we agreed that a pure spell point system like Rolemaster’s, while it has advantages, has disadvantages we didn’t want to introduce into D&D. (These are not meant to be slights against these games. I like both still very much. Every game has flaws—I think in the past I’ve been pretty frank about what I see as 3E’s flaws.)
The biggest influence for me personally that I got from Rolemaster was a good indoctrination of why people left D&D to play other games. I talked to a lot of Rolemaster players, most of whom loved to talk about why the game was better than D&D, or why they left D&D to play rolemaster (to be sure, I was such a player in the late 80s). Rolemaster was perfect for this, because it’s a fantasy game just like D&D. You can argue that people left D&D to play Traveler because they wanted a genre change, but clearly people who stopped playing D&D to play Rolemaster did it because D&D wasn’t giving them what they wanted. We took a lot of that kind of experience and tried to address at least some of those concerns, as much as we could, to both bring back disenfranchised players and to retain existing players longer.
Someone brought up the skill system. I certainly agree that there are aspects of the 3E system that resemble Rolemaster, and there might be a direct influence, but I don’t know for sure. The skill system in 3E is a strange Frankenstein design in which I didn’t play a large role (well, that’s not entirely true—I didn’t play a large role in the skill system that got used, which is probably the third skill system that was developed for 3E), and it’s one of the few subsystems of the game that didn’t come out of the three of us main designers working together. (Others would include prestige classes, magic item pricing, and some of the concepts involved in monster design, each of which I suppose are their own story.) The skill system in 3E came out of work that Peter Adkison did, which was then developed by Jonathan. The idea of buying skill ranks with points was Peter’s initiative, and his largest mechanical contribution to the system. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was based on Rolemaster, but I don’t know. It’s a bit more complex than I would have liked, but I can’t deny it works pretty well on a lot of levels. I can tell you exactly how feats came about, but I feel like I'm really digressing at this point.
So, I guess to stay on topic, Rolemaster was certainly an influence on 3E. But if you want to look at more direct, major influences, look at Runequest, Ars Magica, Gamma World, and of course all the flavors of D&D.
