Rules for the darkness, for light and torches, spring up among OSR games like a new cockroach infestation - first you see one, but a thousand more hide in self-made dark recesses.
And like cockroaches, the rules are not new.
They’re simply presenting themselves loudly.
Because people used to know the darkness, and now they don’t.
So the old-guard make rules to show the youths how the darkness works.
One Reddit comment described the problem of using Mana Points in an RPG (as opposed to spell slots):
If it’s a game with more-or-less d20 fantasy or JRPG video game progression, then it’s very difficult to find a cost for an ability early in the game that feels worth the price when you have max 8 mp that doesn’t seem unreasonably efficient when you have 100 mp. Cure for 2 mp seems fine at level 1 when you can do it 4 times. When you can do it 50 times, it’s kind of a design issue.
And if you really look at them, a lot of JRPGs are actually very imbalanced with MP. It’s not a problem because it’s a single player PvE game, but even then you might have issues with class balance.
When you switch to MMOs like WoW where that isn’t the case, you start to see things like…potent abilities with 1 minute, 5 minute, 10 minute cooldowns, or requiring orchestration of abilities using timing to reach maximum effectiveness, or having to balance efficiency with mana recovery rate.
And even then, most CRPGs and JRPGs have only three categories of spells: combat-only spells, healing spells, and quality-of-life travel spells. There’s seldom anything else at all. Meanwhile, magic in most TTRPGs is allowed to do any number of things outside of combat.
Music cannot add much to a game, and can easily remove a lot.
If one must add music, it should always avoid being too lively, or attention-grabbing, because players shouldn’t spend their attention on the music - it should be on the game.
Soundtracks often work well (nothing too recognizable).
Game sounds should never have identifiable lyrics.
Every RPG class system is bad, but before I tell you what you should want, let me tell you about you.
Or rather, let me say whom I want to speak with.
I’m not writing for people who enjoy class systems, so much as for people who want to sit above it all, with an ineffable air of enlightenment, saying ’everything is preference, truth is a lie’.
I’m here to ’eff’ their air, and bring them back down into the muck.
People may prefer a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but since we make reality-based judgements about washing-machines, the health of eyeballs, and quality of food, we can definitely make statements about game mechanics.
In ye olde A,D&D the rules said dwarves have a 1 in 6 chance to detect ‘sloping passages’.
The idea was that some modules would trick players into entering the more dangerous lower levels of a dungeon with a long passage which sloped downwards so gently that nobody notices until they encounter a ‘high-level’ monster.
But despite three decades of playing RPGs I have still never encountered this tricky sloping passage.
The rule should never have entered the Players’ Handbook.
The rule could have been used only where required - in modules which have such a sloping passage, just beneath the boxtext which says ‘this long passage continues farther than your lantern can see, but the echo suggests it goes a long way indeed’.
I just wanted to rock up to the table and start the game, but the DM had other ideas.
He wanted all of us to write a character back-story.
Having three jobs at the time, I didn’t feel enamoured with my homework.
The little story meant a hurdle to jump over to get to the actual game.
But let me back-up and take the hurdles from the start.
The first hurdle is reading the campaign notes (otherwise the character’s background would make no sense), the second is writing the thing, and the third comes when the DM finally reads one story per player and attempts to minimally reconfigure the established world to allow for the backstory.
Game designers talk about balancing powers far more than airtime.
In fact, I’ve not heard anything about balancing airtime in some years.
Balancing power restricts stories.
We’d have to class Buffy the Vampire Slayer as ‘unbalanced’, even if all characters receive equal airtime in an episode, with equal decision-making abilities.
Balancing power demands we cross-compare making a source of light to inflicting a wound on someone.
It’s a fool’s errand!
For anyone making an RPG system, I recommend the following systems/ patterns.
One Roll Per Action
If Alice’s PC wants to kick down the door, and Alice rolls a ‘5’, then the roll is ‘5’ for everyone.
If Alice’s character has a +2 Bonus then the total would be ‘7’, and if another character has a +4 Bonus, then their total would be ‘9’.
But nobody rolls again.
This cuts out a dull minute, while various players try to roll the same action.
Every time I find some interview with an RPG creator, I notice some trickery, or perhaps confusion.
The presenter brings up a question about how they make their RPGs, and the answer explains how they make money.
There’s nothing wrong with having a job, but how a woodcarver carves wood isn’t the same as how they market their carvings.
And the question of ‘will this make money?’, has nothing to do with ‘how do we make a kick-ass RPG?’.