(Warning:
Long rant incoming.
For most of these cases I've done this before in Chinese, 1/2 the people just skim it anyhow, 1/4 pick parts out and made their own separate whatever, and 1/5 got completely different things from them from what I was trying to do.
That's kinda why I stop doing Chinese unless its vitally important, and this piece certainly don't fall under that category.
Since this is not important at all, you might not want to waste your time on this. Go do something that you enjoy or bring you a more fruitful and productive life, or go actually play a game... Most anything you do would be better than sticking around reading this.
Don't say I didn't warn you, just saying.)
Part A)
Riiiight, making up systems...
It is definitely just me (cause I know how weird I am
) butttttt... Isn't there too much overthinking in all the inefficient ways?
Point:
>There are thousands of TRPG systems out there in public circulation.
(Just go check DTRPG or John Kim)
>Out of the thousands of systems, maybe 10 actually earn regular profits. 100 more might have a very tiny niche following. The rest don't even earn beer money.
(Seriously, if fame and fortune is what you're looking for, go kickstart a boardgame or something.)
>People aren't looking for the "best" systems if there are one. In the business, being able to stick around is itself a major positive.
(DnD might or might not be a good system depending on who you ask, but they are definitely the most known with the most splats, meaning most people can
find more players to
do more things for
less hassles... On the flip side, try to find long-term RaHoWa group that aren't playing it ironically... Nah, let's NOT do that.
Anyhow, its the essence of a sellable product: Market/players, Resource/splat, and Accessibility/ease. Mechanic is only a small factor in that.)
>People who build models eventually want to customize; People who read novels eventually want to write; People who are great at sports eventually want to open an academy(If they don't get a Nike deal anyhow); People who look for great meals eventually try to cook. It is natural for people who play TRPG to eventually want to make one for themselves. That is the ONLY reason there need to be, and in many case for the "successful" games out there that's the only reason they had too. (Don't forget PF is pretty much made by people who didn't want the edition change...)
Yes, it's "for the lulz". And incredible number of things in life, no matter how you spin them, all came from them. Things like going up the Himalaya or getting to the North pole or getting to the orbit before the commies do. Most of the times it ends there, but sometimes great things do come from them.
>Doing, by itself, is always reason enough... That being said, most people who do are very crappy at them, hence the doubt others exhibit when they bring their products out in the open. It is also far easier for them to transfer the crappiness of their products into personal motives, ie. "It's not that my games are rotten pieces of trash, but
these people are just
trying to get at ME personally because they are
trolls who don't get my
visions."
Welp, sometimes people can be trolls, but most of the time it is also that you game system really is crap at the same time; As for vision? TRPG is a
social game that heavily relies on
communication in every single one of its parts. Selling a product is also a
social interaction that heavily relies on
communication in every single one of its parts.......................... It might not be for every single cases, but in quite a few IMAO they might want to learn how to communicate first before trying to make games.
(As for me here. I fully expected people to not bother to read this wall of texts even if it is in Chinese. That in itself have make me a troll in some people's eyes even if that ain't my intention at all... Well, you can say I just gave up on communication, which is certainly not anything good. v
v So Tl;dr don't do what I do.)
>As for the "action" of designing a game itself. Once you understand the idea that:
1) It won't earn you money.
2) It won't bring you anything more than a VERY niche fame, that is if you're successful.
3) People won't think you're smarter for making a game. - You are certainly stranger, but probably not smarter.
4) It's a really bad idea to have it be a substitute for making a console game. - Go learn C, Python or Scratch instead. Even RPGmaker or Mugen is better than this. The internal working between the two are so different in many ways that it'd be a waste of time unless you're already a big brand name with huge $$$ backings... Or, weird enough and dumb enough and have enough free time to waste.
5) It doesn't have a point, and doesn't need a point, but it also WON'T prove a point.
6) Your action will not "broaden the TRPG horizon and make it more openly accepted." Frankly the problems TRPG faced is exactly the "Market/players, Resource/splat, and Accessibility/ease" mentioned before. Anyone who would be into TRPG for long must already fit the selection process, the same process that makes people choose TV over books mind you, and that criteria is a pretty steep one in our busy modern world. If you really want to "broaden the TRPG horizon", it'd be easier to go fund another season of The Big Bang Theory or buy more DnD products.
7) Whatever you come up with it's not gonna be the thing to end all things in TRPG, ESPECIALLY if you've only ever played one system "and thinks its not good enough". - Sorry about having to point that out, but most Heartbreaker projects, as how we call them, pretty much came from that one thing, and tend to lead to results that are mostly crappier personalized housemodded version of the very same game.
- The simple idea of different people having different preferences aside, we are talking about nearly 50 years of collective history and resources and innovations of millions of TRPGers. If your idea is that good, chances are its already out there in separate systems. And again, "Market/players, Resource/splat, and Accessibility/ease" over quality.
7) In short, it's penniless, thankless, pointless. You do this only because you want to do it. And no matter what you come up with, its not gonna change a thing, in TRPG or in your life. (Too bleak?
)
Once you get it through your head though?
Just go ahead and do it. What else is there?
===============================================================
Part b ) (Or Part
as the XTHML wants it to be known as.)
The actual action of doing it... Is not such a big deal. What I've seen people keep talking and talking and talking about the why what and how... Why the heck am I sitting through an interview?
Seriously nobody gives a f__k on all your personal success story unless you actually succeed.
What I want is: Gimme your core mechanic. If it works, it works; If it doesn't, it doesn't. Keep on pestering your potential customers without usable results, means you will annoy enough of them to turn them off from actually reading your masterpiece. (Think about it like those Kickstarter scammers who promise everything but give no results. A few of them do eventually deliver, but by then their names are already in the dirt... Or this piece for example: How many people are gonna skip right to the end even if they read it?
That's why the game's in part C, though maybe telling you this right now will just make more people skip... Nevermind.)
There are some people who "said" they made a new system, but just gave a bunch of data and classes without any usable mechanics whatsoever. <<<=== Those are call "splats", as in "splatbooks" or "3rd party resources". Those are additions to games, not games by themselves.
Worst than the above would be people who popped out a bunch of class names, skill names, element names, yadayadayada.... Riiiiiiight, so what the f__k do you want us to do with them? No mechanics, not instructions, no anything that tell us "how" to play with them, do we just write them on paper fans and start hitting each other?
A game that cannot be run, isn't. I know its very hard to curb your enthusiasm and to tell others what you do every step of the way, but, well, DON'T. A game that you can show people is one where you can at least do a basic resolution on, and if you don't even have that you'll get a_holes like me saying exactly what's been said up till now to you, and then you'll just think it's a personal vendetta against you by a conspiracy of trolls who don't know better, and then you can freely blame us on how you never got to finish your game so you can feel better to actually not finishing your game... "Trolls" are the best excuses since internet after all, when you can use them to externalize all internal problems and feel better yourself (Like Taylor Swift and almost every song she wrote. Or Donald Trump and every single thing he did.
)
Writing a game really is that easy:
0) What's your central idea. This common question is actually always already answered. When you get to the point of wanting to make a game, you would already have a central idea even if it is "make a better DnD". So what people actually are asking here is "How do you show me your own central idea isn't crap?" even though many people who asked this didn't even know that themselves; Anyhow the answer is highly individualize to the questioner, to the point it is impossible to standardize and dependent on the previous experience of the questioner, meaning its actually kinda pointless no matter how experienced the questioner is since its always subjective experience at hand.
1) What is your central resolution mechanism?This also depends on your central idea. Think of is as "there is one thing you really wish to do here, so what is the most effective way for you to do this?" Effective is not necessarily equal to efficient here, though eventually you will have to make it as streamlined as possible for ease of access, and by that point it might look completely different from what you started with.
eg1. COC is all about the SAN check. Even people who don't know what TRPG is know about the SAN check. This is because COC is about people who'll all probably died sh_tting their pants mad, and the SAN check mechanic is the central key to it. The rest of the system is about pacing the lead-up to the point of your character getting brown stinky pants, and maybe sometimes not getting it if you're lucky.
eg2. DnD is all about hitting people in the head (and other places). It's the game that coined the term "murderhobo" as in a)killing and b)robbing. Everything up to 3R is solely geared to more ways of hitting people and more loots, the odd RP-centric splats notwithstanding. 4E is around the gaming culture shift when FATE & PbtA really popped up, but they kinda misjudged and overshot, where they rebalanced in 5E.
eg3. WWgames are all about "release the self", most of their lines are solely about "Being The Monster" instead of playing the game. It was why before it got mainstreamed in the TRPG world its players were mostly all goths, and why sometimes their splats go deep into OMGWTFBBG territories.
eg4. FATE&PbtA are about people who want to be most proactive in the storytelling bit in general. Some of the traditional GM responsibilities are released to the players, and scripting becomes more shared than GM-dependent.
And their mechanics are all established to bring out their central ideas.
2) What is your supporting mechanics to empower your central mechanism?Yes, the falling rules and grappling rules. You might not like them, might not even use them, but they are here for a reason. Sometimes you even get a whole game that built itself just for the sake of one mechanic. (COC)
And... That's it.
The background, history, people, flora and fauna. The "fluffs" are always interchangeable; Any games can run any fluffs with modification (eg. It might not run completely spotless, but FATAL can run Blue Rose as long as you get rid of the r_pe rules... Even if it means getting rid of 99% of the system.
)
After you slotted in the fluffs, add rules that link the fluff together with the mechanics. (Or not. May games run fine even if rules and fluffs are completely unrelated.) And then debug till things are mostly bug-free.
Making a game itself really isn't that big a deal. At least not that big a deal to the people who aren't directly involved.
(Making people want to play your game though? That's a completely different matter that's not related to game creation itself. It'd take way more to explain it with a lot more uncertainty too, so it's not something I am capable to talk about.)
===========================================================
Part C)
Well, its an original rules forum, so I might as well throw something up.
The rant above took me 4 hours, though it'd be 3 days or so if I have to handwrite it in Chinese, and then after that probably pain meds for my joints.
The rules below took me less than an hour.
BTW it's probably similar to the proportion of time people spent arguing online vs actually writing the rules? Nah, arguing would probably take longer than that.
<<TRPG Headed>>Tool:
1 coin
Mechanic:
1. Flip coin.
(Must be a flip with air/height of at least one foot. No Spinning because spun coins can have as much as roughly 80% chance of landing on the heavier side.)
2. Head=Good, Tail=Bad.
(For most mint-new coins a 51/49 odd due to mass)
3. In dramatic situation, things get better or worse.
(GM can describe both, or player describe positive and GM negative; For GM-less games, the designated antagonist who can be alternated between characters can describe the negatives; Or just pick from a list of good/bad things.)
4. In any sort of checks, it's straight success/failure.
5. For increase/decrease difficulty rating.
-3 Flips for 1 Success (87.5%) -Mild
-2 Flips for 1 Success (75%) -Average
-1 Flip for 1 Success (51%) -Trying
-3 Flips for 2 Successes (51%)
-2 Flips for 2 Successes (25%) -Difficult
-3 Flips for 3 Successes (12.5%) -Insane
6. Group flips, under GM discretion:
a) All characters flips for target # of successes.
b) All characters must have at least 1 success each, for the total # of combined successes.
Character Setup:
>>> Characters have knacks.
>>> Knacks must be short(one complete sentence of no more than 20 words), unique and specific.
(Any knacks that can apply to more than 3 uniquely specific things cannot be used... Or, write down the first 3 specific things it's been used on, and it would never work beyond those.)
Knacks can be used once per scenario (or 1 scene, or more) as
1) Turn 1 coin into automatic success before flipping.
2) Re-flip one coin once.
3) Sacrifice and out of play for one scenario, to negate one whole failure. (Not required to be specifically applicable here.)
>>> Knacks can be left "blank" to be filled and applied in game. Blank knacks can still be used for sacrification purposes.
Characters get additional knacks when GM thinks they should, usually at end of scenario.
>>>Non-blanked knacks limits can be applied by GM if they wish for less OP characters.
(5 named knacks should be quite enough?)
(For characters with more, they can choose which one they will "bring" this scenario, and "grey out" other named knacks to be temporarily treated as blanks - In-world explanation would be their current environment made those knacks unusable, the didn't bring required tools, off-scenario injuries in mend etc.)
***
So,
Point= To illustrate how mundane game making can be & To fulfill basic forum criteria.
Central mechanic.
Support mechanics.
Fluffs to be filled by users. (Or call it "Universal" for more marketable terms.
)
It's not a good one, but at least its workable.
And it's about the most basic things required for a game, just saying.
(Comments unnecessary, it's just my personal piece of rant that, as always, I really should learn to just shut up instead of getting sh_t thrown at
. Feel free to do so anyways if you want to.)
