Oh young one! So you think you have an idea. Well let.me.tell.you: EVERYONE has ideas. Nobody cares if you have ideas. The real results are in work, in the execution. It’s about labour, not inspiration.
I’ve seen this kind of patronising lecture a few times on various RPG boards, and speaking as someone without any ideas, I fundamentally disagree.
Most of my RPG work has involved taking other people’s ideas and polishing them.
I have the stamina to write, review, test, and repeat for months.
Sometimes years, if the ideas still feel fun.
“Product Identity” means product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark clearly identified as Product identity by the owner of the Product Identity, and which specifically excludes the Open Game Content;
System inputs and outputs are different from an actual game’s inputs and outputs.
A GM might say ‘you split the basilisk’s leg-tendons open as it belches a final noxious cloud’, but the system just says basilisk = dead.
A player might describe elaborate lies their character weaves, but the system just has them roll a die and the results are yes or no.
Reading over systems with all of those ‘Add this, roll that’ can give someone the appearance of a massive RPG engine, churning out all sorts of details and replicating various interesting minutiae of the gaming world.
But sometimes what’s really happening is pointless plastic tapping noises, and once the plastic’s taken away, you get to see what’s underneath.
You get to see what really matters in the system - the options and the results.
Meaningful options, ones which allow you to push the result one way or the other, are the totality of the game’s engagement - the whole of what makes the game a game.
Random character generation is great, especially random Attributes.
Why you hate random Attributes
People think Random attributes will ruin your game because D&D has taught them that Attributes cannot be raised quickly.
If one rolls a bad character, they’ll have to play ‘Jake, the pointless’, forever after.
This problem vanishes once people can raise their Attributes after play.
Problems with Point-Buying
Bewildered Noobs
There are 7 races to choose from, and 9 classes. We also have some campaign-specific races from these splat-books.
The cynics say that we keep reinventing the wheel.
They say we have too many RPGs, mostly doing the same thing, and why bother to write yet another RPG about elves and magic swords?
And they have one thing right - we should stop re-writing RPGs from scratch.
Instead, we should change them.
Knave started as a modification of Cairne, as the writer wanted to add a few rules.
And then someone copied Knave to create Vaults of Vaarn, and so on.
Without the ability to copy these texts, the authors may never have made the books.
Problem: Players never engage in the adventure in the right way; when they should go left, they always go right, but railroading them never gives good results.
This was one of the greatest adventure modules out there.
I played it so many times that I once used it as a Mind Palace in university, because I can remember every single room.
White Plume Mountain
The original adventure took the adventurers around a ‘house of fun’ style dungeon, with a ham-fisted hook, and no kind of plot.
They enter a room, and beat up baddies.
Sometimes those baddies have a magical weapon.
One room has a big zoo of monsters in glass boxes, and the PCs must fight through them.
They can’t defeat the evil wizard who sits at the base, because the plot says so.
The evil monsters with magical swords will fight one at a time.
RuneQuest’s Glorantha setting is 500 pages long, so it’s about half the length of Lord of the Rings.
In order to help with character creation, players can get a ‘Player pack’ pdf, which tells you that the book as written was too confusing for normal players to build a character.
The character creation begins with your grandma, determining her occupation, skills, and what that means for you, before we move onto the next grandparent, and so on. I’m not fucking kidding.
Trouble at Grogs is one of the best adventures I ever ran, and I’ve run it many times, in multiple systems.
It looks like any other adventure at first.
The players find a roaring tavern owned by a half-ogre named ‘Grog’.
Grog asks them to find out who’s been stealing things in town.
Reading more, you (the GM) find out that Yuri (another tavern owner) has hired two half-ogres and two elves to start the trouble.
The bad-guys (Yuri and his crew) have found underground tunnels, and use them to steal and make mischief.
On day 2, Yuri’s two half-ogre cut-throats come to rough the players up.
The town is brimming with various people and places, such as an ex-ranger sheriff, a banker, and a maid at Grogg’s who secretly works for Yuri.
The first time I read it, I was surprised to find it didn’t have an ending.
I leafed back a page, and read more thoroughly as if I’d missed it.
But no - there was no ending.
I played it anyway.
