Systems should represent genres, and some do this better than others.

System Excellence

Dr Who

One Dr Who RPG (I forget which) contained an absolutely genius initiative system. The initiative turn-order was:

1. Speak
2. Run
3. Use an item
4. Attack

This clearly produces unrealistic results. The system cannot allow anyone to …

Radio dramas often have their characters speak so as to indicate their actions.

Does anyone have an extra blanket? If I get cold I'll wake up with a bad back.

Hearing this, we know

1. The group is sleeping outside,
2. the speaker is old, and
3. the speaker wants to sleep.

I wonder if the group adopting this habit might …

As established in the previous article , the World of Darkness' combat system sucks. But the right system can make everything better.

(If you want to skip the system explanations, you can just download the revised White Wolf pdf )

No Combat Emphasis

First off, I'm not making a combat system. The World of Darkness …

White Wolf games always mentioned how small their system was - roll a number of D10's equal to your Wits + Athletics (or whatever), and count all the dice which land on 6 or more. The player then reads the dice like so many runes, and the final result would yield detailed information.

• 0 successes means failure, or at …

Weighing into an ancient (or at least senile) fantasy debate, I'd like to go back a step. The debate usually goes like this:

An elf punching a dragon to death because of monk-training isn't realistic.

    You think dragons are "realistic"?

No, but a certain semblance, in certain regards, to reality, which we …

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 …

Systems can be boiled down to input, process, and output.

┌────────────────────┐     ┌───────────────────┐     ┌────────────────────┐
│   Monster: AC 17   │ ──> │                   │ <── │ Player: Attack +3  │
└────────────────────┘     │      process      │     └────────────────────┘
┌────────────────────┐     │ …

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 …

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 …