Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Big Friendly Fat Guy" data-source="post: 5962552" data-attributes="member: 88893">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 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />). 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!</blockquote>

Verification