Let's Design A Game By Telephone!

[Big Friendly Fat Guy]

I've been a dedicated lurker on this forum for more than two years, and in that time I've been consistently amazed with the creativity and ingenuity of the folks here on the EN World boards. And not just in the threads about homebrew campaign settings or the wonderful Story Hour posts, but those about rule fixes, house rules and the mechanics of game design as well. Lately, I've been on a bit of a game design kick, looking up games I've never even heard of before to see how they handle particular rules or situations at the table, and an idea's been rattling around in my brain for a while now, refusing to let go. Essentially, I've got a bit of an experiment in mind: can a worthwhile game be produced by crowdsourcing it to the collective hive-mind of the EN World community?

The game would be developed like in the old children's game Telephone, where each player whispers the same phrase into the ear of the next person in line; what you get at the end is almost always wildly different than what was started with. I've produced a simple skeleton for a rules system that I've attached below. I'd like to see each post in this thread make a change to it, or to one of the previous changes. I'd collect the changes in a new PDF every so often, so we could track our progress, and eventually we'd get a Frankenstein monster of a game we could then streamline into a new "edition". Even if what's produced isn't your cup of tea, at the very least I hope we'll all get to see some interesting game design suggestions and new takes on solutions to common problems.

A few suggestions:

- Let's avoid walls of text. Please try to limit your rules changes to two paragraphs or less at a time.
- Likewise, give everyone a chance to contribute. No spamming with multiple posts in a row.
- If someone makes a change to one of your changes, or changes something that you liked, don't "un-change" it back into what it was before. Be a good sport and either leave it as is, or propose something new in it's place. Hopefully this will force conflicting goals to keep making changes until something acceptable to all parties comes about.

Finally, a word about the base system I've come up with: It's nothing to write home about. It's my best at making a first attempt at game design; I'm not married to anything in it, and I freely acknowledge it's overly similar to several games out there (though you know what they say, if you steal from one source, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research ). The point is, if you don't like something in it or if you have different tastes in games than I do, I would sincerely hate for that to turn you off from contributing. If you find the lack of tactical combat maneuvers galling, post some! If you think opposed rolls slow things down too much, come up with a better mechanic and share it with us! If you favor classes and levels over a point buy system, come up with a rough draft for how that might work!

The goal is not for this to be any one person's dream system (though if that is what this ultimately turns out to be for you, more power to you), but rather just to see what comes out it. Maybe someone'll introduce a mechanic you just absolutely love and have to steal for your own table, or maybe this will inspire someone who's never really thought about designing a game before to try there hand at it. And maybe, just maybe, we all might get a fun and exciting ruleset to play out of this.

Or maybe none of that'll happen. Still, I think it's a fun little experiment and would love to see exactly what it is we end up creating together!

 

[Evenglare]

awesome idea ! Let me give it a look over and i'll see what I can come up with. Have you by anychance looked at my zelda RPG? I tried to put a game design section at the end of every section to show the thinking behind the rules I chose and why. Anyway, i'll get around to this soon !

 

[Stormonu]

Heh, I'll play along

SKILLS AND ABILITIES

After assigning character points to various abilities, you receive 15 points to assign to skills. You cannot place more than 5 points into a given skill. There are three types of skills that may be purchased: Broad skills, Narrow skills and Templates.

Broad skills cover several related actions, such as Athletics - which covers running, jumping and other physical activities. Broad skills cost two skill points per +1 bonus you gain with them.

Narrow skills generally cover a much narrow activity, such as Jump - which only covers how far/high a given character can jump. Narrow skills cost one skill point per +1 bonus you gain with them.

Abilities are a collection of skills that define what a characters is. An example would be Nightvision, which gives the character the ability to see in the dark. Abilities cost two skill points, but grant specific abilities instead of bonuses to skill checks.

Characters may choose to take drawbacks for additional skill points. Drawbacks are like skills, but incur a penalty to checks equal to their rating. You may not purchase more than a -5 in drawbacks. For each point of drawback that you take, you gain one skill point.

 

[Big Friendly Fat Guy]

Alright, so seeing now as Skill points are disassociated from the Intelligence Attribute, it mostly covers just lore or background knowledge rolls. So to avoid it being the primary dump stat, the primary Attribute for Tech, Psionics or Crafting rolls would be Intelligence, much as Spellcasting Roles utilize Willpower. This would mean Intelligence is probably not the best choice for strictly martial characters, but a character-type wishing to rely on gadgets (James Bond, Batman, any hacker character ever, etc.) would need at least a passable INT score.