It’s been commented that BIND has no introduction, saying ‘what is a roleplaying game?’, and I don’t think it needs one.
Of course, nobody’s picking this thing up in a 90’s game store, et c., but I feel we have a deeper problem.
I think that no RPG - including D&D - really needs an explanation of ‘how to do roleplaying’ or whatever.
I started out with a confused kid, who mixed in actions with a computer game (most likely the original Baldur’s Gate).
It was a mess, but I could see how the game should have played, and immediately wanted the books.
My father bought me a basic set, and some more splat-books every time I visited him.
Soon after I had quite a pile.
Tiny rulebooks are all the rage, and it’s great.
The game of go has (arguably) 3 rules.
Chess has a dozen rules.
Monopoly has that little booklet-thing which nobody reads.
RPGs often have 400 pages of rules without counting an adventure module, and often lack proper indexing.
This hobby is mad, and the backlash against that madness feels refreshing.
But some of those refreshments cut out so much that they can’t satisfy a game’s requirements.
Time for the terminology…1
Software engineers regularly jump into others’ open source, and help out, but the RPG community do not do the same, because they do not have the right tools.
Look throughout the history of any number of software projects and you’ll find a slew of apparently random people, unknown to the software’s creator, jumping in to lend a hand.
Look at calcure (the open source calendar) and you’ll see healthy discussion on the board, about fixes and features people want to see.
RPGs where nobody dies really irk me, because they have rules for dying.
If you want an RPG where nobody ever dies (or runs out of food, or whatever), then I won’t complain…until the rulebook states ’these are the conditions for death'.
We have two problems.
Problem 1: Fudging GMs
Everyone writes up some dramatic backstory, in a loopy font in MS word, and about the 0.5 Megabytes mark hands it to them GM.
The GM then feels that killing the character wouldn’t fair, and I can understand that, given the investment.
Standard drinking games are badly designed; if someone does badly, they get drunk, then do worse on the next game, which prompts more drinking.
The only people who play drinking games want to drink, but when you lose, you drink, so the incentives don’t track anyone’s goals.
A better drinking game would have a drink as the prize, meaning that skilful players become lose their skill, and the skill-level evens out until everyone at the evening has reached similar levels of coordination, puzzle-solving, or just whatever the game involved.
Whenever I’m unsure about a rule, I pull out a basic spreadsheet, and start populating numbers.
The image I had for the ghoul spell began with a mage who could raise small things from the dead, like a cat, or dog.
Slowly, the dark sorcerer would learn to raise gnomes, then humans, and finally raise undead ogres or basilisks.
The system should clearly set some maximum HP for the target.
Standard spells in BIND always use the caster’s Intelligence Bonus, and sometimes use the spell’s level, so the final formula would have to be some combination of one of those.
I’ve found myself aghast at the multiple (not loads, but still) conversations I’ve had online where I’ve proposed an open-source RPG, and I’m told that this really isn’t adding much, because people can already copy systems.
I have personally copied a system.
I have rewritten White Wolf’s rules so that I could modify them, and it took over a month of nearly all of my free time.
I really doubt everyone is willing to spend the time they require to recreate a book, just to add a few rules, and I doubt most people could do it in the same time.
I’ve implied all this heavily in other writing, but just to be clear, here is the game plan for BIND.
Firstly, BIND doesn’t matter.
I want to see an open-source RPG that’s actually open source.
I want to see the community able to break away from a corporation telling them what they can do, and just make their own games.
While people can technically do this already, when people believe they can’t, they can’t.
I’ve heard Wizards of the Costs described as the ‘patrons’ of the RPG community, and find it sickening.
A patron gives money, corporations try to find ways to take money - if some game is brilliant but cannot make money, a corporation won’t make it, except by accident.
A player rolls the dice, and the table watches the result, like a roulette ball bouncing about.
Rothgar has a +4 to make the jump, but the chasm demands a Target Number (TN) of 12.