The modern tabletop role playing scene is a very weird scene indeed. If you only have a passing knowledge of the current role playing world we live in then you have probably heard that D&D still exists, and it’s latest iteration is actually doing quite well and bringing a lot of people back to the hobby. And while that is certainly true, there are so many other things going on in this scene that it is actually intimidating to think about writing an article about it all. Even to me, a guy who commonly writes articles in the range of five to ten thousand words.

There are those who want the hobby to return to what it was in the 70’s and 80’s, they are often referred to as the old school revolution, which is an awesome movement name for anyone I think. They seem to want more heavy simulation in the rules of their rpg systems. Which is not to my taste personally, but I support them fully. There is no wrong way to have fun, assuming no one is being hurt.

Then there are of course people who want exactly the opposite of heavy simulation in their rpg’s. Systems that cater toward this newer group of players appear to be adopting the title of Story Games, which as a name, sounds super appealing to me, but I do worry that they will eventually segregate themselves right out of the hobby and essentially become a whole new hobby.

That worries me because tabletop roleplaying games as a hobby have always been somewhat niche and I don’t think anyone wants to be in a niche of a niche of a niche. Pretty much any role playing system or product that doesn’t have official D&D branding on it already suffers from this problem. I think most products in this category think they will break out of the D&D Venn diagram and become a hit with mainstream game audiences but my fear is actually that they will turn off their main market of wargaming audiences, who are the real big spenders of the gaming world.

What makes this problem even worse for anything that doesn’t have D&D branding is that one could more easily justify writing ten thousand words about D&D fifth edition itself than just about every other system or style of play combined at this point, if one was just looking at the potential popularity of ones material. Luckily that is not something I care about. What I care about is that more people pull back the curtain that D&D draws over the rest of our hobby and get a chance to see all the wonderful things that can be found here.

To that end I offer two things. Firstly a look at a role playing game that I have been cobbling together for the last few years. It has primarily been for home use, but lately I’ve been thinking of releasing it. And then later on, (probably in a month or so), an article expounding even more on the many other role playing games that came to inform different parts of my homebrew games and how those have grown over time into their own system.


Firstly - The Why

I think before I get into the nitty and gritty of the role playing system that I am currently playing around with, I need to explain why it is that a person would ever think to create their own role playing system in the first place. I mean there are obvious reasons of course, like if you are a game designer and it is job to create role playing systems. But that is not my job. Well, I certainly don’t get paid for it yet anyway. But besides doing it for work, or with some plan to sell the game that you design, why the hell would you bother? There are tons of tabletop role playing systems out there. They come in every shape and size, every theme, with every style of play in mind. So why make your own?

For myself, it wasn’t as much a choice to make an rpg system as it was a slow process of integrating disparate game mechanics into my homebrew games. There have been many systems that have entered my life and revolutionised the way that I think about the practice of playing games. Not the least of which is D&D itself I am pained to admit. But starting with D&D and continuing on even to Fate Core and onward, I rarely enjoy playing a game system exactly as it is written in the rule book. Now, the boastful creative in me wants to say, ‘that’s ‘cos I am just so imaginative, it would have been impossible for me to not revolutionise the gaming hobby’.

But in truth, it isn’t even rare or special for a GM to change large swaths of the rule book or make up entirely new rules as the game goes along. It’s basically standard practice. It often happens in the beginning because you are a new GM and instead of bogging the game down to look up a rule you just make something up to keep the fun going. Then at some point you might look up that rule and realise whatever it was that you made up on the fly actually makes way more sense than what it says in the book.

Or maybe you have been playing by the book for awhile, but one rule in particular is just getting out of hand, or not working correctly, or negatively impacting your fun or the players fun. And so you toss that shit right out of the window. And suddenly the game is so much fun again. You get a sudden reinvigoration for the game and everything feels fresh. Until some other dirty rule comes along and drags you down again. And so you shed that rule as well, or modify it for simplicity or time or balance. And before you know it you are chatting with your friends who also play the same game system and realise that they game they play with their group is intensely different to the game you play with yours. Even though you have the same books on the table.

This kind of slow shifting and changing of the rules (or perhaps ignoring of the rules entirely, I’m looking at you grapple rules) is entirely the normal way to play the game. It barely even warrants a mention. Other than to segue into how a person can arrive at the game table one day bringing their players hand book with them and realise that, for their game at least, there are actually no rules from that whole book that are even being played at your table anymore.

It might be just because you have shifted from D&D to Pathfinder, or visa versa. Or it could be the gradual removal and modification of little rules here and there that culminate in one or more rule books becoming entirely obsolete. But one way or the other, in our hobby one can come to realise just how much the rules can be shifted with very little to no impact of the level of fun we are having when we play.

By that I don’t mean rules themselves have no impact on fun, quite the opposite in fact. What I mean to say is that you can play any system you want, and still have fun with it. You will naturally gravitate towards certain rules and away from other rules, but ultimately, the rules aren’t what make the game fun. The people you are playing with make it fun. The story you are creating makes it fun. Rolling a critical hit makes it fun. If some rule gets in the way of that, it is the natural instinct of almost every player and GM out there to strike that rule down with great vengeance and furious anger. Which is the way it should be in my opinion.

At some point though, (and this point is less common I imagine), I realised that I had struck down so many rules that there were very few rules left. This first happened for me as a teen when a bunch of friends wanted to play some D&D at school on a day where no classes where being held for some reason. I said hell yeah and volunteered to DM since I assumed no one else would. But we didn’t have the rules with us, nor did we have smartphones or good internet back then, so I just ran the game to the best of memory using only six sided dice since we couldn’t find any other dice at the time. And it was fine.

It never seemed odd, or awkward, or like we didn’t have enough rules. We had plenty. Roll the dice, if its a good role then whatever you said you wanted to do works well, if the dice comes up with a one, then it fails etc. We just played by whatever rules made sense. I gave the wizard less HP, the fighter a bit more. The wizard got some spells. The fighter got a sword and armour. The tropes of fantasy gaming are so ingrained in us that I think any given fan could be an art director, or a game designer on an rpg straight off the street and perform the job to an acceptable level.

Later on I returned to using the full rule book many times. I actually have a surprising ability to store vast amounts of the rules in my head at any one time, so it isn’t all that much of a struggle for me in that regard. But I always found some rule or other just being a bother at the time, not adding much to a scene, certainly not adding much to the drama of what was going on, let alone detracting from it. And so rules were removed, games moved to rules-light systems, more rules were removed, some rules I found in other systems were added in that actually reinforce the drama of a scene, some rules were modified, some rules were made up on the spot, and at the end of the day I looked at what I had and it looked like an entirely new thing. Not a cobbled together thing, but more like a sculpture that was sitting inside the marble all along. I mean it was a fugly sculpture that didn’t make much sense. But it was my sculpture. :)

It was for the start of my more recent campaign in a setting I called Industrial Fantasy (high fantasy, mixed with an industrial revolution) that I just told my players that we are now playing with my own system that I am creating. They were basically my play testers for that system. Like with any new thing, some bits went very well and some went poorly. But the overall feeling was one of lots of fun and it seemed like my players really engaged with the drama that I was putting in front of them, and managed to come up with tons of awesome creative and dramatic moments themselves.

One thing I’ve learned about this game is that you really do want the players to be adding to the game. And putting creative pressure on them is one of the best ways to tie them to the game, since parts of it are their direct creation, and also to ensure that no one ends up in a rut, just coming to the game because that’s what they do on the weekend. Everyone needs to be excited for an rpg to truly be awesome. And putting consistent creative demands on the players means that if they can’t be bothered to engage and focus they know ahead of time that the group may as well play a board game.

In the system that I am putting together, players being able to take control of the story and the world is a big focus. To that end I have mechanics like Montages and Moments. Montages are scenes that we as a group don’t feel we need to get into the nitty gritty of, so we just go around the table, with each person adding a scene to the Montage, narrating it up to a certain point, then passing it off to the next player to resolve. Then after that player has resolved it, they set up a new shot in our scene, pass it off the next player and so forth until we rotate back to the GM or until we are up to a point in which, we as a group, want to dive into and explore in more detail.

Moments are kind of like player character super weapons. The main Moment, called a Spotlight Moment is basically a silver bullet that can take out a whole obstacle in one shot, but can only be used once per session. It is a great way to get players into the idea of narrating their character, and controlling the whole narrative, bad guys and environment included. Some players find those kinds of concepts difficult to engage with at first, and Spotlight Moments are a great way to get them involved. There are other Moments as well, like Off-Screen Moments and Narration Steals, and there are some specific different types of Montages too. But let’s be honest what you are really wanting to hear about is how you make a character in this system right? So let’s get into it. It won’t take long to explain. But I mean… I’ll still write a couple thousand words on it just because that’s what I do. But really I promise you it is about as simple as making a character could possibly be.


Is My Character Just a Collection of Rules?

Not everyone sees it this way. I’ll admit that up front. But in my opinion, it doesn’t matter whether or not I am playing a paladin or a fighter when I start an rpg. I told you my guy has a sword and armour and she has made a life as a soldier fighting orcs in the mountains. Isn’t that enough for us to get started? It’s not? Why the hell not?

If I was watching a movie and it opened on a woman in armour fighting a band of orcs in the mountains would I be asking what class she was playing? I suppose that’s an unfair example since a film isn’t a game but even in a video game I don’t necessarily care what class I am playing. What class is Geralt in the Witcher series? Well yeah, sure you are correct, he is a Witcher. But do we have any fucking clue what a Witcher is when we start playing? Even looking at the game on the shelf you probably wouldn’t guess that in those games the word Witcher basically means mutant monster hunter. But does it matter? We see he has swords, some armour, lots of scars. We get the gist! We can dive right in and slay some monsters and not even notice that Geralt’s special something is that he makes and drinks decoctions to augment his bodily mutations. We don’t need all that detail up front. If those games made me understand every complicated game system up front I would tune out immediately. I want to know that my character is a cool badass in an interesting and satisfyingly dramatic story before I want to know how many spells he can cast before he needs to have a lay down ‘cos he is tired.

I fundamentally question the very Idea of classes in an rpg. And not in a ‘let’s deconstruct them all into abstract game systems and make the player buy them with points’ kind of way. I question whether or not they are a complete red herring. I wonder if they just seem like a great idea and a source of fun, when in fact there might be some simpler facet of our hobby that is the real source of this fun and classes are just another set of complications that we don’t really need.

If you ask a current player of D&D Fifth what their favourite part of the game is, they would likely say the classes and the options those classes have. But is that because classes are actually awesome? Or is it because in that system, classes represent 95% of the meaningful choices players get to make about their characters. I would argue the later. In truth any veteran player of that system would probably tell you that background selection has a deeper impact on your character than class does. Yet backgrounds are something that can be considered and decided upon very quickly whereas class choice seems to take forever when you are starting a new game. Why is that?

You might think it is because people place less importance on their background and are more interested in what lies ahead. And to some degree that is true. But I would argue that people take so goddamn long to pick a class firstly because they know that this choice might affect a year or more of their favourite hobby but also because, to really know whether you want to be a fighter, or a blade focused warlock or a melee bard, or a barbarian who wears armour or whatever the hell else that can constitute ‘guy with sword and armour’ you have to read pages upon pages of rules and compare them to one another. And I’m not even considering power gamers here who of course would be so paralysed by choice at this point that they would just google what an optimal build is for the weapons or spells they like and go with that. I’m talking about regular role players who just want to know what is going to fit with their playstyle.

I could rant for a long time about the way D&D does everything so let me cut off my own ramblings of the concept of rpg classes here and tell you what the system that I am working on does instead of classes. Actually this part of my system replaces a lot, if not all of the normal rpg character creation choices. I call it the Heart of an Adventurer and it is just four choices, none of which are chosen from a list, you just choose them based on the kind of game you are playing in and the kind of character you want to play.

The Heart of an Adventurer contains a characters Concept, Twist, Struggle and Destiny. These four choices outline who and what your character is, and what they are heading towards. Literally that is all the info you could give your players and within ten minutes you could start playing. Perhaps it would help the players out to know a bit about how each of those parts of their characters Heart are meant to change their game experience. But a quick run down is all that is needed. The idea here is to keep every part of the system, including character creation, conversational. Since role playing games are by definition, conversations. I want to eliminate the difference between character creation and actual play that many players report as jarring and awkward.

Following our ‘guy with sword and armour’ example from above I could create a character with the following Heart:

  • Concept - Blond, stocky, female, mountain folk, who wields a sword and wears heavy plated armour.
  • Twist - Her armour is magical, she found it deep inside the mountain and doesn’t know much about it.
  • Struggle - Dark beasts continually rise up from within the mountain and plague the land. Only she has the power to deal with them.
  • Destiny - To pass on the mantle of her role beating back the forces of darkness. To make the ultimate sacrifice.

And now I am ready to start playing. Literally every other rule in the system is optional and can be introduced later on in the game. I think writing four simple sentences about your character and thinking about why they are cool, but also why they are dramatic and interesting is all you really need to get started playing an rpg. (Ok yes in the example above I wrote six sentences. What do you expect this me we are talking about!)

The rules in any tabletop rpg should be simple enough that the GM can explain them as you go along. And the complexity should build up as you go. The less overhead there is to creating a character the more actual games we all get to play. Rolling up characters is a fun pastime in and of itself, which is why another reason I think the concept of class choices has persisted for so long. Those choices work well enough in video games, but at the tabletop, personally speaking, I want drama, I want action, I want an awesome story filled with cool character moments. I don’t give a shit about whether or not I get +2 to my grapple attempt because of a feat I chose last week that I can’t remember the name of anymore.

That’s not say I want to shit all over the old school players who want to play simulations. I don’t. Not at all. It is more to say that I want to show them how a narrative simulation can be more fun than a physics simulation. In terms of actual tactical combat choices to make, don’t worry, there are plenty here and they are deep and interesting. But yes, simple. Simplicity is one of the hardest things to design for, any designer will tell you that. Any kind of experiential design can be enhanced by simplicity. If hunting animals before we could talk as a species was not simple we would not have survived, but if it was not in essence deep and complex and hard to master we would not have evolved such amazing brains and tools. I want emergent complexity in my rpg games, depth people, not breadth. I want a short rule book for a game that takes years to master, not a long rule book for a game that gets boring immediately.

So! With the simple character we created above we can venture forth into the world, knowing everything we need to know to react genuinely to events and people, to get involved in some fun adventures and hopefully, based on what we have written, the GM will know where we want our character to end up and what kind of things we want to her to struggle through. The details on exactly what she can do with her sword and her interesting magic armour are things better worked out when they come up. It might happen straight away, or we might spend a session just role playing and getting to know each other’s characters and the world we inhabit.


Getting to the Action

I don’t want to bore you with every detail of my new system, and actually I’m not sure I want to give away all the details at this point, because a small part of me still thinks maybe I could offer it as an official product some day. Personally I think it’s that good. But I will go over the main mechanic that will come up pretty much whenever a character goes to do something. Since without that info your mental picture of how creating a character and then diving into play straight away won’t be perfect. You might think that I am just skipping a bunch of rules that really we will need to go over at some point just to get to the action, much like Fate Core encourages you to do if you are new player. And to some degree you are right. That is a big part of why I designed the system that way.

But we aren’t skipping anything as players by doing it this way, it’s more like the system itself skips these steps to get you into the action right away. By just writing those four sentences for your character (and choosing a name as well I suppose) you are officially ready to play, no further action on the players part is required. There might be some games where something else is done in character creation, like Bonds between players are worked out before play starts, or your character might start off with a Duty or a Boon. But under normal circumstances you would be ready to go. The question then I guess, is how the hell does the whole rest of what D&D’s class and race and background systems gives us even end up in the game? How do you just tack on all of that in-depth information?

It’s simpler than you would think: If you want your character to do something, you just say what they are going to do and roll to see if they are successful. (Currently my roll is 4dF, because I just love Fate Dice, but basically any d6 based roll will work). The defence will also say what they are going to do and roll as well. Everything is defended, even if it’s just a door rolling to see if it can avoid having it’s lock picked. Now comes the interesting part, this part is inspired by a mini-rpg called Roll for Shoes, which has a hilarious name that I love. Whichever side is successful in their roll gets a new Talent named after whatever it was that they did.

So if my woman with her sword is going to attack the forces of darkness and makes a powerful downward slash against a monster, and the dice say it succeeds, then she gets a level one Talent called Power Slash (or whatever else she wants to call it). The same is true if the defence succeeds, they might get a level one Talent called Dodge. In later rolls, if what I say my character does is the same (or very similar) to one of my Talents then I add my Talent level to my roll. For rolls where we are using an existing Talent we don’t earn a new Talent if we succeed we just get to apply our bonus. That encourages us to try new things! But of course any Talent we use regularly will level up and allow us to become very powerful in our areas of expertise.

And that’s basically it! I mean there are rules for cashing in Talents you no longer want in order to upgrade the Talents that you do want and a few other progression and levelling rules for Talents, but in terms of what the players need to play the game right now? That’s it mate.


Combat. Plus lots of Other Stuff I Guess.

I guess I should give you a clue as to how combat works as well. I know you won’t just take my word for it that there is any depth there. There barely manages to be real tactical depth in even D&D combat and that system is 99% combat rules. So here goes, as much detail as is necessary for you to see how deep the system can be:

At the beginning of a combat round, all players and NPC’s roll all their dice for actions and defence. (Currently I play this 8dF, the players get to choose which four dice are used for each either when they take their action, or when they need to defend.) Then someone goes first. Who goes first depends on the genera you are playing more than anything, and to be honest I need to do a bit more playtesting for this rule as it affects the combat a lot as you will see below. The first player gets to take an action using the Action Test rules, as I explain above in my downward slash against a monster example. Once that action is resolved, consequences are doled out, any new Talents are awarded, and then the current player chooses a character to go next. That part is so important it bears repeating. The current player chooses who goes next. That continues all the way down the line until all players have acted once in that round.

These two small rules, being able to do basically anything on your turn, and choosing exactly which character gets to go next create an amazingly deep game. The choice of when to pass the turn to the enemy is massive. And remember you can see all the dice that have been rolled for the whole round. You don’t know which ones will be used for defence and which will be used for attack, and you don’t know what Talents and other powers the enemy might have. But you can see a lot about how the rest of the round will go down, and you have a ton of information to inform your decision. All of that, plus the fact that the enemy might choose to do something that you had never even considered, because they can do literally anything they want with a decent chance of success, creates an awesome sense of tension and tactical play. But the whole time everything feels very visceral and dramatic, just like it should in a narrative focused game.

There are a bunch more rules than that of course. Like what happens when someone gets hurt (Consequences, which work a little bit like they do in Fate Core), special powers or items that the characters may discover through play (Boons), things to work on that allow our characters to grow both as people and in terms of power (Bonds and Duties), and a bunch of rules that help us keep things dramatic and engaging (Moments, Montages and one of my favourite mechanics: Getting in Trouble). I even have a couple of variant rule systems for those that prefer a more crunchy experience that make Talents work more like D&D’s Skills and Class Features, although they are variants for a reason, they just aren’t as fun in my opinion!

But this post is already a little over five thousand words and I swore I would try to keep them short (short for me is under five thousand, so I have failed, but not by much). If this system sounds intriguing to you please let me know, either on Facebook, twitter (which I rarely use but if someone messaged me on there I might start using more), in the comments section below or hell send an email to vorpal@[theurlofthiswebsite-duh]. I am currently looking for more play-testers, but would require this to be face-to-face play so you would need to be physically present in Canberra, ACT, Australia, Earth, This joke got old real fast, why am I still comma separating everything, oh well, bye.