Make It Yourself

[aramis erak]

And these modular systems give players lots of flexibility without needing the GM to continually approve home brew or third party stuff, too.

And yet, they're largely trivial in terms of market share, only Savage Worlds, Fate, GURPS and Hero having any real broad name recognition. D6
Plainlable, CORPS, EABA, Masterbook, Tri-Stat/BESM, D6, FUDGE - only the more nerdy will recognize.

The issue with most of these is that setting setups are not trivial efforts, even with these frameworks.

Many GM's homebrew is unfun... hence my use of "victims players" -- I was as guilty of that as any back in the 80's.
I didn't realize how bad it was until I started asking. I was tempted to quit GMing... but my players asked me to run the rules. once I started running the rules as written, I learned to use them. I used one particular homebrew to good success for a span of 5 years, but only for a year's worth of play... I hybridized FASA-Trek, Car Wars, d6 Star Wars, and TFT to come up with a ruleset for classic Trek that was pretty damned fun to play... but character gen SUCKED - it averaged an hour. It was procedural.
What I didn't realize is that I could pendragon it just as easily. Oh, from car wars? I stole the idea of skills getting more expensive every third level. Essentially, take the FASA character, and look up the skill percent on a table. Attributes got treated as a percentage of 20 so a 50 FASA-Trek att was a 10 att.

Skill %	Test Level	Bonus
0 1	0 1	0
2 3 4-5	2 3 4	1
6-7 8-9 10-12	6 7 8	2
13-15 16-18 19-22	10 11 12	3
23-26 27-30 31-35	13 14 15	4
36-40 41-45 46-51	17 18 19	5
52-57 58-63 64-70	20 21 22	6
71-77 78-84 85-92	23 24 25	7
93-100 101-108 109-117	26 27 28	8

The task mechanic was (difficulty)d6 for (Skill Test Level+(the bonus of an attribute or a second skill)). If you helped someone else, they added your skill bonus to their test, and one helper was free. If you had leadership, your leadership bonus was the maximum number of helpers.
If you wanted to add another skill bonus or attribute bonus, increase difficulty by half a die.
1d was simple
2d was routine - most of the time, in department, you couldn't fail.
3d was moderate - this was the standard for needing a roll.
4d was challenging
5d was hard
6d was very hard
7d was formidable
Rushing, damage, lack of tools, and stress added dice to the difficulty.
range was based upon grip points. a smooth grip point was worth 1, a handgrip or frictionized stock end was 2. Out to Grip Points, it was 1d; double was 2d, quadruple 3d, and so on... but the base for a shot was added to the target's Dex Bonus in dice...
If someone wants to recreate it, you've got the framework now. It's not a great design. It worked well, but only because it just happened to be the right math to make it work, and the players were all just happy to be playing a character with a mix of easy base competence...
Oh, and I tweaked total points, too, so schools were 24 points per year, fleet service was 12 points towards service, specialty and assignment skills, and 4 points to hobbies per year.
I've not run it since 1995. But it was this system in which I ran the 23 character, 12 player Trek game.
Does the math sound fun?
If I hadn't had the FASA Trek to start with, I'd never have gotten it to playable... there were several minor revisions. I used a rank point system based upon FASA's OERs. I don't remember the rank points table... but captain was 125... somewhere I've got a copy. I should probably add the fan work boilerplate and put it up on the web....
I can't do so with the ship combat - it was tied into SFB. ADB is far less open to fan material than Paramount.

 

[Breaking Star Games]

I do feel like the thread is understating the amount of effort that goes into good design, though I suppose it matters how much the game's rules and mechanics matter rather than using a lot of GM rulings. But really good game designers read tons and tons of rulebooks and playtest for thousands of hours. Its a field that requires a huge variety of skills on top of GMing that requires a huge variety of skills.

It feels like a more useful premise would be going through your own homebrewing process and emphasizing taking something very close to what you want and tweaking. Getting buy in from players to be semi-playtesters. Finding systems that do mostly what you want. And how you come to realize what works and what doesn't and how you make playtesting not feel bad - for example, nerfing a player's favorite feature or item.

Whereas "You can do it. I believe in you" might as well be useless to anything but joking or antagonistic discussion. The only thing to discuss is whether you are understating the effort or not and making poor analogies to cooking.

In the end, its also a lot less effort for you to just pass by posts and comments that are complaining/venting than to make this post too. And probably a lot more productive for the community too.

 

[dbm]

And yet, they're largely trivial in terms of market share, only Savage Worlds, Fate, GURPS and Hero having any real broad name recognition.

You could say that about pretty much any game that isn’t D&D or an off shoot of it.

The issue with most of these is that setting setups are not trivial efforts, even with these frameworks.

It’s degrees of effort in my opinion, however I think that Savage Worlds as an example of a successful flexible game system owes a big chunk of that success to the many worked examples that it has. There is Deadlands in multiple flavours, Rifts, Necessary Evil, and Pathfinder just as first-party examples. There is lots of third-party support, too.

So it has players and GMs well supported from both a pre-made and a flexible framework perspective.

 

[kronovan]

In my opinion, there is a spectrum of pre-made versus self-build. Some games have ‘big’ components like classes so getting or making a whole new class can be non-trivial unless it is basically a re-skinning of something. Some other games, have lots of small, mix and match components which mean you can easily build a new ‘whole’ out of existing parts...

This is why I prefer prewritten adventures and campaigns that are built upon modular TTRPGS. My tendency is to always begin with the desire to homebrew my own world wth some adventures to go along with it, but time constraints get in the way. At least if the system is modular, I have a way of accomodating for a missing element - whether it be me or a player that wants it. I can do that by creating it myself, allowing a player to contribute, or by borrowing from another source.

I can appreciate the experienced Chef cooks the best meal concept though. I'm content to play in a prewritten campaign and even those where the setting is tied to the unerpinning rules, just as long as its quality. Such prewrittens aren't my peferred choice to run, but if there's a quality publication that matches what my desires are, I'll buy and use it. At least for me, it takes a good deal of effort to homebrew up something that begins to approach the quality of the better authored settings, campaigns and adventures. I have adult age children though that have left the nest, so my obligations are much less than others here. If my children were still school aged, I'd no doubt be less keen on homebrewing and more geared towards finding the top quality prewrittens.

 

[dbm]

This is why I prefer prewritten adventures and campaigns that are built upon modular TTRPGS. My tendency is to always begin with the desire to homebrew my own world wth some adventures to go along with it, but time constraints get in the way. At least if the system is modular, I have a way of accomodating for a missing element - whether it be me or a player that wants it. I can do that by creating it myself, allowing a player to contribute, or by borrowing from another source.

I feel very similarly to this perspective. I don’t want to create things whole-cloth very often, but I do want to tailor things. I also love the flexibility of playing different genres of campaigns over time.

A well supported flexible game gives me this.

 

[Reynard]

I do feel like the thread is understating the amount of effort that goes into good design, though I suppose it matters how much the game's rules and mechanics matter rather than using a lot of GM rulings. But really good game designers read tons and tons of rulebooks and playtest for thousands of hours. Its a field that requires a huge variety of skills on top of GMing that requires a huge variety of skills.

It feels like a more useful premise would be going through your own homebrewing process and emphasizing taking something very close to what you want and tweaking. Getting buy in from players to be semi-playtesters. Finding systems that do mostly what you want. And how you come to realize what works and what doesn't and how you make playtesting not feel bad - for example, nerfing a player's favorite feature or item.

Whereas "You can do it. I believe in you" might as well be useless to anything but joking or antagonistic discussion. The only thing to discuss is whether you are understating the effort or not and making poor analogies to cooking.

In the end, its also a lot less effort for you to just pass by posts and comments that are complaining/venting than to make this post too. And probably a lot more productive for the community too.

The error you are making is thinking that you have to produce something as tightly designed as a professional might do, with all the requisite knowledge and playtesting. You don't. You have to solve your problem. In some cases, that might be a big problem, and the solution might be to pick a different game, or to choose something "good enough." Most of the time, though, these aren't very big problems. "the champion fighter is boring an weak" has a simple solution: give the champion fighter more stuff. What stuff? What does the player feel is missing?

It is your table and your game. Ostensibly you are all there to have fun together. You are playing a game you like that is almost there, but it has a couple flaws. So find solutions to those flaws for your table and don't worry about making those solutions perfect.

Or, keep complaining and then be insulting to boot.

 

[Autumnal]

Yeah, the biggest advantage the DIYer has is getting to ignore all the kinds of cases that never arise in your play. And conversely, being able to lavish more attention on things they do arise and do interest you that commercial designs may not go into so much.

 

[John Dallman]

But really good game designers read tons and tons of rulebooks and playtest for thousands of hours. Its a field that requires a huge variety of skills on top of GMing.

Are you sure about "thousands" there? A thousand hours would be 40 hours a week for 25 weeks.

You also seem to be conflating three things: Designing a rules system from scratch, which is a lot of work, modifying a rules system for a particular campaign, and generating your own settings and scenarios.

It's the last of these that is commonest in my experience. Having started gaming at the end of the 1970s and lived through the classic TSR era, I formed the opinion that while the rules were usable with a few patches, most of the scenario design failed the plausibility test. Not because there were things in them that don't exist, but because the way the societies of game worlds were affected by their fantastic elements didn't make any sense. Scenario designers didn't seem to understand elementary politics, basic crime and law enforcement, or even the beginnings of economics. When they started to deal with sizes, weights and machines, students at an engineering university just fell about laughing.

The professional designers at TSR didn't seem worthy of respect. A few at other companies were much better: Greg Stafford as a worldbuilder and Steve Jackson as a rules mechanic. For scenarios, I felt I could do better myself, and have continued to do so for over forty years.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Are you sure about "thousands" there? A thousand hours would be 40 hours a week for 25 weeks.

I'm pretty dubious about that too. Far as I can tell even most pretty capable game designers find extensive playtesting--especially blindtesting--an unaffordable luxury.

You also seem to be conflating three things: Designing a rules system from scratch, which is a lot of work, modifying a rules system for a particular campaign, and generating your own settings and scenarios.

It's the last of these that is commonest in my experience. Having started gaming at the end of the 1970s and lived through the classic TSR era, I formed the opinion that while the rules were usable with a few patches, most of the scenario design failed the plausibility test.

I think this only works as long as your standards are relatively permissive, or you're careful to shop the system you're going to use for a given campaign before you start. There are any number of campaigns I've run where D&D would have been a remarkably poor fit, and in some cases would have required me to tear a significant chunk of the system to use it (usually magic, but occasionally the combat or class systems). Fortunately I had other options to start with so that I didn't need to do anything that radical, but not needing to hack a system is either dependent on other systems being practical, or being willing to choose the campaign to fit the rules.

Not because there were things in them that don't exist, but because the way the societies of game worlds were affected by their fantastic elements didn't make any sense. Scenario designers didn't seem to understand elementary politics, basic crime and law enforcement, or even the beginnings of economics. When they started to deal with sizes, weights and machines, students at an engineering university just fell about laughing.

I suspect in many cases they didn't care and assumed their audience wouldn't either. I'd hesitate to say they were wrong.

 

[Reynard]

So, you don't like it, or it's missing. But you don't feel confident changing or making it yourself. Now what?