Activity

Thanks for catching that typo on my web site! It now includes the word “avoid,” as I intended. And thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

Your game sounds right up my alley! Is the combat XCOM-like? That’s one of my favorite franchises. When are you planning on releasing, and do you have a web site? A brief search didn’t show me anything online.

As for me:

When I was about ten, I spent enough time on the internet to know that people who liked the same fantasy books as myself liked to play Dungeons and Dragons! I asked my dad about it, and he said it was an awesome game he used to play with his brothers and that I wasn’t allowed to because it made people become Satanists.

So I scrounged around the internet for stories of people playing until I ground together a passable approximation of an RPG ruleset. I miraculously found some polyhedrals at a homeschool convention, and from that point on was a constant GM for my siblings and friends. In my first campaign, my players investigated an island filled with parasitic gnomes who frothed from the eyes, and my players made me very proud.

I kept making terrible homebrew games and talking to other people online who played other terrible homebrew games. Years down the line, a FLGS opened in town, and I jumped in the D&D Adventurer’s League that existed for all of a month before the owners were tired of running for people who never bought anything.

I started working at that store a couple days a week, and also play and run one game of D&D 5e there each week. With a diversity of RPG books at my disposal, I’ve been able to absorb many more ideas than just the paradigm of D&D, though adventuring games and wargaming combat remains my favorite to play.

I’ve never finished a game, but doodling concepts has been one of my primary hobbies for over a decade. I spent a lot more time and effort developing when I had a few friends who would help me playtest, but I haven’t found anyone willing to play anything other than D&D for years.

My sources of external learning have been The Forge website, Patterns of RPG Design, lots of game conference presentations (PAX, GDC, etc) and the /r/rpgdesign subreddit.

My interests are pretty firmly in the design space rather than the content writing space, but both interest me. Problem-solving rules text and UX intrigue me.

I’ve not come nearly close to completing any of the below games, but the bones or beginnings of games are there. Links to everything can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1lkdm79q3qu9v2c/AABlSDm8g6jkjTRVbessRjs5a?dl=0

Trimmed-down dark fantasy adventure RPG: A recent afternoon’s doodle.

SciFi skirmish Wargame – A game a friend and I made some initial planning for. Nothing special, but out of all my projects, I attempted clarity of game text the most with this.

Melancholy London – Haven’t worked on it for years, but have spent the most time working on. Fairly a D&D 5e clone with buildable powers.

Neon Evangelist – The one I’m proudest of, made when I was learning InDesign. I really liked Dogs in the Vineyard, and wanted to make a Cyberpunk game like it.

Sapient Steel – Started briefly, then dropped when I began work full-time. Intended as a fan-made spiritual successor to LEGO’s Bionicle, fairly cloned from D&D 4e.

We should release around May 1st; our website is still under construction, but it’s nearing completion. As for the combat, the core rule book is a more traditional D&D-like d20 based system, but I am working on gameplay supplements for managing tactical combat with teams of NPC soldiers, along with the strategic side of research, personnel management, and hands-off espionage; the adventure which I wrote also contains two homebrewed systems for simulating riots and company-level tactical combat.
I’m the opposite – I lean more heavily into content writing and setting, but I still enjoy mechanical design. My study has come less from external learning and more from experience at homebrewing my own systems.

Since you so kindly linked your stuff, I’ll share mine as well. Unfortunately, many of my systems were developed before I became a Christian, so some of it might still have profanity left over, which I will try to edit out. I also was in the habit of severely overproducing notes and documents, so I’ve limited what I’ve shared to core documents. Further sharing is going to involve a lot of pruning for old bad language.

Zone of Alienation – a personal fan conversion of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games to a D&D / Pathfinder format, with overly detailed equipment, numerous perks, and deadly combat. Probably my most complete system, and also WAY too complicated in the equipment department. I wrote this system before I became a Christian, and so some of the design docs may have profanity left over; I’ve done my best to prune as much crudity out of my old writing as possible.

Landsknecht – basically a low / dark medieval historical fantasy game, designed to encourage creativity with martial and stealth classes and evoke genuine tension when the supernatural shows up. A bit too much number inflation here, and ultimately the stamina system was just too cumbersome to actually pay attention to, and the adventures we ran actually tended to stay away from the sorts of fights where the weapon perks would actually come into play.

Fargonne – a piratical conversion of my Landsknecht system, with a greater focus on guns, buffoonery, and naval combat. Some documents are outdated with my new head-canon for the setting – specifically replacing elves with Naga and the setting overall becoming much more sci-fi and Lovecraftian in tone.

Where Hell is Six Feet Deep – my most recent development, it’s more setting than mechanics right now. The document can describe the setting better than I can here, but the basic idea was to create a role-playing rich system that wouldn’t require players to create a laboriously detailed backstory from the beginning, and could have high PC mortality without the plot grinding to a halt.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/00ifbczsqoqnr0q/AACovDoucsiOvWc5-Kw3LXrVa?dl=0

@taylorclogston, Sorry I didn’t reply for so long! I didn’t realize you had sent a message – it didn’t show up some how.
My preference for linear core is that it’s simple and it keeps the number of dice being rolled from becoming overwhelming, as is the case with Shadowrun. My experience with dice pools when playing that was that consistent success was achievable only with an overbuilt character with 4 – 6 times the dice of the actual challenge rating – however, that may well just be a problem unique to Shadowrun (and/or my devil of a GM who counted up every mistake, every miscalculation, every overlooked detail until we learned to stop getting caught and learned to cover out tracks like good professional criminals).

I’ve heard of those other systems, but I’ve never played them. Haven’t really run into any gamers who play the more obscure systems, but I wonder what improvements to storytelling they bring over more tactical games like D&D. I have the conceit that the strength of storytelling in a game usually depends mostly on the GM, rather than on the system.

And thank you for your kind words on Six Feet Deep! One of my worries in writing it is that no one would be interested in this strange hybrid of crunchiness, streamlining, and soft-story-mechanics – or that everyone would be disinterested in the idea of playing a soul drifting from one mauled corpse to another caught up in endless trench war.

If we can get but two more people hooked on the idea, then I have reason enough to complete it! Lol.

@taylorclogston
I can see and agree with a lot of what you say about D&D. I guess I’ve just never experienced an RPG system with mechanics focused on resolving the story directly, instead of through physical or social challenges.

I too prefer more consistent dice rolls. That’s partly why I’m writing Six Feet Deep as a d6 dependent system and using dice pools for damage; that and I hate number book keeping, and with the scale of combat that I’m envisioning for Six Feet Deep, abstractions are necessary to keep the GM sane.

I’ve actually played Everyone is John – it was, uh, strange. John died many, many times whilst in our care.

You’d really help me playtest it?
Well then.
(Rolls up sleeves)
Time to find some players!
(Know any yourself?)
We could potentially do it on Roll20, though I don’t have a webcam at the moment.

@the-inkspiller I wish I knew some players who’d be willing to play anything other than D&D =P Also, I hope you don’t mind me sending all the cool RPG design stuff I find to you. Here’s a theory article I liked: https://vsca.blog/2019/01/11/a-new-menu-for-players/

@taylorclogston, That’s an interesting article, though I wonder as a game designer how to create a system which encourages a more varied mindset than throwing dice at the problem until the RNG solves it – and how to specifically reward good planning even when the dice do not favor the players.

I’m afraid I’ve been up to a lot of nothing at all. Pretty much just work, trying to not hate everything that goes into writing and being an author, and trying to figure out if there’s a single job out there I think I could bear giving every fragment of my attention to for eight or more hours a day.

How’ve you been?

Yeah – work work work. I’m struggling with maintaining my enthusiasm and creativity in the RPG editing, which grows more and more onerous – and I grow more and more deficient. 😐
Also working on my own stories and trying to pitch in more at Story Embers, which I suck at. Trying to finish some more of my stories so Northerner can go and critique me for my anachronistically placed ceiling beams and improperly wrapped meats and garbled Arthurian references.
I guess with work the conclusion that I came to is that it doesn’t really matter much what I think I’d like to do, because even what I’d love to do for a living can become onerous – what matters is that what I do *matters*.

That sucks to hear. What exactly does RPG editing involve, and why do you think you’re deficient at it?