Writing a roleplaying game
As you might have noticed, I’ve been busy in my free time with my completely self-written new roleplaying game „Raiders of Arismyth“.
Unlike „Mail Order Apocalypse“, which was me applying a wild hair setting idea to an existing ruleset, this project has a different background: I wanted to play in a particular style, and was lacking a game system for that. Not to say that there aren’t systems that could work for this, but there would be compromises and homebrew rules and so on, so I might as well start from scratch!
It is now a bit over a year later, and I’m nearing the finish line. A good moment to take a look back: What design goals did I have in mind, what kind of fun did I want to capture, and do I think I succeeded?
The main drive was that I had accumulated a lot of painted and unpainted fantasy miniatures over the past 30-odd years I’m playing this sort of games. And most of the time, they have been sitting in display shelves or boxes, not being used at all. And I really wanted to use them!
So, I wanted a regular game where I could bring them to the table. And there is a fun in moving them around, counting squares and looking at possible tactics. The game I wanted should support this.
Wanting to have miniatures on the table also sort-of dictates what kind of scenarios and adventures you play: There is little sense of setting up miniatures for a court intrigue, or a detective adventure where the majority of the session involves talking to a bunch of people.
So, combat scenarios it is, and most often, this means dungeon crawling.
And that brought up the next requirement for my prospective new game: I didn’t just collected miniatures over those 30-odd years. Of course I also have a library of adventures and scenarios. It’s a hodge-podge of systems and settings, ranging from one page scenarios to sprawling megadungeons. I should be able to use those in the new game!
Let’s make this a list:
- I want to use miniatures
- I want a dungeon/combat focused game
- I want to be able to easily drop in lots of different scenarios and adventures
Some other things are also important to me, regardless of the game system or setting I play: I like to play fast and player-centric. While I do enjoy the storytelling parts of being the dungeon master, I don’t want to monologue. Instead, the players should be the ones who talk most and who drive the action as much as possible.
I’m most content if I can lean back and react to the players, instead of dragging or pushing them towards a goal of my own.
That also means that I don’t want to be bogged down by too many complicated rules. Every time I have to stop the action and look something up, things get delayed too much in my opinion. So the rules should be very clear and concise, and allow me to come up with rulings on the fly that don’t feel out of place.
So, let’s add two more requirements:
- Have simple and consistent rules
- allow for as much player-empowerment and player-centric game as possible
That said, I wanted the game to be accessible to new players, but also provide mechanics and crunch for them to sink their teeth into. Videogames have these skill trees, where one can plan and map out a progression, looking forward to that juicy power at the far end of the tree.
That makes another two requirements:
- easy enough to start playing within 15–30 minutes of introduction
- deep enough so that experienced players can plan ahead and spend time „tinkering“.
And then I added one last requirement simply for personal taste:
- Certain tropes and „problematic“ content should be left out. I always for example hated the pseudo-dilemma of „orc babies“.
Let’s have a look at the individual requirements and how I tried to meet them in terms of game design:
I want to use miniatures
„Just put them on the table.“ might be the most straightforward answer, but I also wanted the to be useful for the game. So squares-based floorplans, movement rules and other mechanics that are derived from miniatures were added. I didn’t want to overcomplicate things, so I left out things like which way a miniature is facing and the like.
As a corollary to the use of miniatures, I wanted to make combat a very dynamic thing. Combatants should be moving around a lot, instead of just standing there and bashing at each other. I tried to help this by adding skills and rules that promote lots of movement, and penalized standing still.
I want a dungeon/combat focused game
This didn’t need a lot of conscious effort to make it happen, but having it listed as a requirement did inform me a lot on what I could leave out of the game. There are no rules for social conflict, diplomacy, ruling fiefdoms or similar things. I left out rules for overland travel, or rules to keep track of consumables.
I want to be able to easily drop in lots of different scenarios and adventures
This led me to two things:
- I needed to make the game world open and vague enough so that I can drop in a broad variety of other content into it with minimal fuss
- Have some sort of idea of how to easily convert monster and NPC statistics into my own ruleset.
To be honest, I haven’t really tackled the second part yet. Mostly because I didn’t need to so far, but I think it won’t need a lot of work. My monster stat blocks are usually short enough anyway, so adapting others should be easy.
For the first part, I found inspiration in the world setting of Earthdawn: The world gets rediscovered after the survivors of some cataclysm finally come back to the surface.
My worlds cataclysm was a war between an evil goddess and the rest of the world. In the end, she was defeated, but half of the continent became inaccessible for a thousand years. That made the south both known (from really old maps and books) but also unknown and dangerous (a lot could happen in those 1000 years).
The player characters are those brave adventurers who venture into the south to rediscover the lost parts of the world, and just maybe preventing that evil goddess from rising again.
All this really allows me to drop in nearly anything that is even remotely of the „fantastic“ genre. The world in the south is mostly just the sketch of a map, leaving enough room for nearly anything.
Have simple and consistent rules
When writing „Mail Order Apocalypse“ I really fell in love with the Into the Odd ruleset again. With just three stats and an „everything is a save“ mechanism, one can easily find rulings for every situation.
Except, I don’t really love-love stats. And I especially didn’t want too much randomness for character creation. No randomness at all might even be best, at least for the core character bits.
Instead, I came up with the idea that „everything is a skill“. Those can be purchased with advancement points, and that’s it. And each skill is a competency. You either are competent, or you’re not. No „I’m 64% good at swimming“
Mechanically, I settled on a pool system, where you throw as many dice as you have skills connected to the task at hand, then count the successes — with each single dice having a 50:50 chance to be a success. Figuring out things usually simply involves sorting and counting dice. No complicated addition or subtraction needed.
That base mechanic is used throughout the game and it proved to be working well throughout playtesting. And I could easily adapt things to new situations on the fly: You get extra dice when something helps you, or you loose successes in certain circumstances.
Player-empowerment and player-centric game
This ended up being more a „how to run the game“ philosophy than hard rules. This is not a story centric game where players have rules-encoded ways to create facts like in Fate. Instead, the rules are written in a way that explicitly leaves a lot of decision-making with the players, and only demands dice rolls when things are very unclear, otherwise favouring the „yes, that works“ answer from the referee.
Easy enough to start playing fast
It is really important to me, that people can jump into the game pretty easily, if guided by a referee who knows the rules.
I prepared character sheets that have all the important bits as checkboxes and easy-to-fill forms, as well as a simple random table to populate ones inventory in one go.
All in all, creating a character takes only a few choices: What five advancements to take, how to distribute life points, and what to put into the inventory. Add a name and a quick description and you’re good to go!
There is very little math involved in this, next to no dice rolling, and not too much agonizing over the skill choices: Five advancements is not a lot, and people tend to spend them fast.
Deep enough for experienced players
This is where the skill tree really starts to shine: People can explore and test and think about different combinations of skills and magic. There are a few obvious combinations, but also a lot that are not so obvious.
The skill tree really offers a lot of flexibility but also planning-ahead material.
Avoid „problematic“ content and tropes
The classic thing I wanted to absolutely avoid are things that can be tinged with racism. In-game populations that are evil by birth just rubs me the wrong way, and it creates moral pseudo-dilemma like the „innocent orc baby that will absolutely grow up to be a bloodthirsty monster, so should you kill it right now?“
I scratched the whole notion of lots of different sentient „races“ and instead ruled (inspired by this blogpost by Cavegirl) that there are no other sentient populations or „races“ than humans. Of course, there are monsters that do monstrous things, but there are no civilizations of orcs that are jus there.
(In fact, in my game world, Orcs are human corpses brought back to beastly life by some otherworldly evil entity)
Similarly, there are no elves or dwarfs in the game world (although there are humans that might fit the stereotypes in some way). Getting this right while keeping to some „fantastic“ vibe is still a work in progress, but I’m getting there.
Generally, the world is more and more borrowing from classic „medieval“ tropes and clichés, so my players can expect a lot more monsters from that sort of place.
Conclusion
I think in terms of the rules mechanics, the game is done. Of course, there’s always more spells and skills and abilities I could add, I should probably revise a few of the random tables a bit, write out more examples and have an editor have a go at the rules to make sure they are really as legible as I want them to be.
And then there is the world: It is evocative, but with only very broad strokes, leaving a lot of room for anything I might want to add later.
It very much supports a West Marshes Campaign style of gaming, where groups from a large stable of characters form and disband to explore different places and return home to report. I have managed to set up some sort of overarching thread and threats, but the player characters are still trying to get a grasp of what exactly these are.
I do wonder if I should write the background of these threads and threats into the gamebook, as inspiration for other referees, or if that would ruin the blank canvas and rob others of the chance to build their own world of the Kari. (Kari being the name of the human empire the game world is centered on)