Explaining an open source RPG to the community has been a challenge. Sometimes the misunderstandings are obvious. At other times, not.

Systems already have no copyright, so RPGs are already open source.

The mistake here is quite plain - this person has got mixed up between the rules and the rest of the RPG. This kind of comment often comes with the follow-up:

The rules are what matters, so we don’t need the rest.

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I warned ye!

but did you listen to me?

Oh no…

you knew didn’t ye?

It’s just a harmless little licence, isn’t it?

…sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

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.

The player rolls 2D6…

               (( _______
     _______     /\O    O\
    /O     /\   /  \      \
   /   O  /O \ / O  \O____O\ ))
((/_____O/    \\    /O     /
  \O    O\    / \  /   O  /
   \O    O\ O/   \/_____O/
    \O____O\/ ))          ))
  ((

and they land on ‘8’.

Game designers often lecture (or bemoan) that nobody can possibly make a realistic game. But in the words of Queen Victoria, I am not interested in the possibility of failure.

Instead of looking at ‘is this showing what would happen if you really mounted a dragon while wearing armour’, I prefer to look simply at the ordinal Mathematics (i.e. relative values).

• If someone’s a shit-hot martial artist then I really don’t know how many people they might kill in a minute, but I know that more training should up the expected kill-count.
• Better ‘Persuasion’ should mean a better chance at persuading people.
• Wearing armour should increase a character’s chance of surviving a battle.

Players won’t notice much about the chances of doing something, and probably don’t care if a torch illuminates 10’ or 5 metres. What they all care about however, is that holding a torch lets them see better in the dark. As long as ordinal relations hold, the system has done its job of responding to a change in the plot.

My favourite word-game is Ghost.

1. You go round in a circle, each person stating a letter, which builds to a word.
2. If someone completes a word of four or more letters, they lose.
3. If someone receives a set of letters which cannot complete a word, they can challenge the person before them.
   • If the person before states a legal word, they lose.
   • But if they state a word, then the challenger loses.

Example

Round we go:

My favourite WoD RPG will always be Changeling. I’ve run one campaign, and I wish I had time to run more.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have time to re-write it, like I did with Vampire, but I have plenty of concrete plans for changes.

Seelie vs Unseelie

The book began by saying ‘Seelie’ does not mean ‘good’, and ‘Unseelie’ does not mean evil, then instantly forgot its own advice. Every paragraph associated the Unseelie fae with bedlam and banality, with slavery and death. The Unseelie clearly received the role of the ‘bad guys’ at every turn.

Some RPG systems are obviously more of a faff than they need to be, and some take more time than others. This feels obvious, but I want a better way to measure it than using my gut. I want to give a little flesh, with a Maths-flavoured guesstimate, similar to ‘Big-O notation’ (a method for guessing how fast a sorting algorithm works).

faff noun: An unnecessary or over-complicated task, especially one perceived as a waste of time. verb: To waste time on an unproductive activity.

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A few RPG creators might make bank, but for the most part, we don’t. For the most part, people don’t even want to make it their entire career - they have a particular vision of a game they want to make. I think if indie designers want to see their ideas succeed, they should release them and start working with others, because nobody has all the skills needed to create an RPG.

So there you are, storytelling a twisted tale of modern horror about a coterie of vampires, when an odd ability crops up. One of your players has focused on controlling people so much with the Dominate Discipline that she can now enter other people’s bodies, taking them over as if they were her own.

So we know that the ‘soul’ - that is, the mobile part of the mind, the non-brain part of the mind, has just shifted over into a new body. One might expect the experience to be quite harrowing, for the vampire to collapse like a newly born deer or a stroke victim, and later slowly learn how to walk and speak. But apparently it’s quite easy; the vampire’s mind (or soul) steps into the new body like a comfortable suit. We can only conclude that all the muscle memory is part of the body - and where else could it reside except the brain? So the brain allows a translation of the soul and the soul just does the general work. So while dyspraxia is about clumsiness in thought and clumsiness in the body, a dyspraxic vampire should, in theory, be able to wander into the body of a dextrous athlete and become dextrous.