Hello there, fellow RPG designer!
If you’re anything like me, you too love to discuss roleplaying game mechanics, and how they affect gameplay. That is precisely the kind of thing we’ll get to do in this community. Personally, I’m currently working on a roleplaying game that I’m so far calling Unified RPG which I sort of think of as a “rules-lite, GURPS-like” TTRPG. So don’t be surprised if you see me creating posts about that here in the near future.
But what about you? What brought you to this community? What kind of game are you working on, or what do you want to make in the future? I’d love to hear all about it!
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I am a hobbyist game designer. I really like to read and discuss rpg. Right now I write a bi-monthly blog for my game Chronomutants where I write about what I did (as it’s my most recent project) but try and discuss how others have approached similar problems or aspects of design. I just really love talking design. Since Reddit is on fire, and my blog traffic is now in the toilet, someone suggested I add Lemmy to my social media rotation. Hoping it’s cool here. We’ll see.
Current Favorite games: Electric Bastionland, Microscope, Agon
I’m here to try to catch the podcast-driven wave of renewed interest in RIFTS to get more people into Palladium-style gaming (the system is broken so you can fix it to your liking).
I see! Can you tell us something about why you like that particular style of gaming?
It makes violence less fun to play than the alternatives; combat is bullet-time; skill use is a montage. That said, it’s not overtly anti-violence, allowing players to figure out that fighting isn’t the best approach (or not, if they actually like bullet-time battles).
It rewards experience for solving problems, rather than racking up kills. Modern gaming is too corrupted by the reductive influence of video games and the market-driven need to minimize GM workload to ever really break it of this.
It encourages groups to develop house rules by making changes to the “RAW” only very gradually, instead of constantly reinventing the rules.
I’m working on getting yet-another-Knave-hack together. Also beating my head against its inability to write lists without getting very bored.
Interesting. What do you mean by Knave-hack? You’re making a modification for Knave?
Yeah. A hack is usually a little more than just a modification, but there’s no strict definition or anything.
I basically like the way Knave is, but there’s a few things that I found didn’t work well at my table.
- Item choice paralysis. Do you buy/carry a hammer? Nails? Chalk? Ink? An hourglass? … There’s like 36 odds and ends in the game (100 in 2e.)
- One use per day spell books. Knave 2e solves this with Int uses of spell books but I mixed it with:
- Ability to lose items. A character built around a concept should retain the ability to use that.
So I changed some things.
- We use item kits. These are quantum bags of items related to a purpose. Say a climbing kit or an alchemy kit.
- Item kits can be tracked with item slots as they are, but most kits will be like 2-3 slots so it makes more sense to cut the number in half and stop varying size of items.
- Having cut the number of things to track in half, Art slots are added back in. These represent proficiencies/abilities that can’t be lost. Most of them literally are just kits but they can’t be taken away. So a Climbing Art does what a climbing kit can do (save for things like pass an item around since this is a personal ability).
- I use a standardized art point system so all arts consume these points to activate.
There’s some knock on effects too. So I have different ability scores for instance.
