Title says it all, but, anon, do you personally have any check-lists for a good/passing ttrpg? How'd you design your own RPG?
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How hard is it to design your own ttrpg?
Title says it all, but, anon, do you personally have any check-lists for a good/passing ttrpg? How'd you design your own RPG?
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Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
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Yes. Lessons I got from this experience:
> Good on paper doesn't mean fun during game
> Listen to your readers/playtesters, the rules you obsess over? They don't care
> Don't expect anyone to care about the finished product, there are thousands of those out there
> If you want to write a novel, write a fricking novel
So in short, don't do it. No need for a checklist because playtests are the only real test, no matter how good it sounds on paper.
but what If I want to? designed a couple of basic 1d6 RPGs in the past but they all sucked, want to make an RPG for me and my group to enjoy. Don't know where to start tho.
But you have some decent points, especially about playtesters.
Here's my game design advice
>talk to your friends and make sure they are interested first. This is very important. Do not skip this step before you do anything else. YOU MUST HAVE PLAYERS.
>slap together some fricking ideas. Nail down your core resolution mechanic at minimum, your stats, skills, basic concepts and the rough outline of stuff
>slap together a character sheet. It does not have to look pretty. It's probably better that it looks really plain and simple because you WILL be changing it a lot.
>start playtesting ASAP.
>"But I don't have hundreds of pages of content and all my exhaustive item tables and a full list of abilities for high level play!"
>Good news! You don't fricking need that right now! What you NEED is to make sure the basic bullshit of the game works and you can just make up and test the rest of the shit as you go!
>Keep playtesting as much as possible.
>if your game is worth a shit, you may find yourself continuing to work on it and naturally discovering which portions of the game require your attention and which ones work as intended.
>"BUT WHAT IF I WANT TO PUBLISH MY GAME?!"
>Shut the frick up and keep playtesting, jackass.
>Don't know where to start tho.
Start by determining why you need to make a new rule system instead of using one of the hundreds of playtested systems already in existence.
Are you trying to make an RPG because there aren't any other games available that model the kind of scenarios you want to be able to model with your RPG, or are you just doing it for fun?
To elaborate on this, if you have a specific game in mind then look at stuff that does SOME of what you want (even looking outside of existing RPGs into other games, stories, and activities), isolate the fun parts, and try to stitch them together into a cohesive shape. That’s called setting design goals.
Alternatively, if you’re just going it for the hell of it, start with a game you like and then modify it to hell and back, Youll get a similar experience without being completely overwhelmed by possibilities.
>8 sales
Impressive. I’m sitting at 1.5k+ downloads, but tactically getting paid is another level.
>I’m sitting at 1.5k+ downloads, but tactically getting paid is another level.
Make it between 2.49 to 4.49 bucks, depending on how big it is.
The trick is not to get one moron that's going throw at you 200 bucks and then everyone downloading for free, the trick is to make it cheap and accessible, so a whole lot of morons are going to download out of curiosity, offering good monetisation in the long run.
And having a good cover art really fricking helps - it makes it look professional and ten times better than whatever will be inside.
It honestly all depends on what type of game, genre and a whole lot of other factors. If you want something quick and dirty it isn't that difficult. If you want something expansive with lots of lore or rule details that is when it starts to become difficult and you have to know a few things about game design.
I also want to add to this
>Making a mechanic or tool that can only counter itself is a gameplay flaw
>Make it simple but in depth, everyone already has a system for their autism simulations
>Make it for yourself but also know that you might have to make some concessions if you want others to care about it
>Making a mechanic or tool that can only counter itself is a gameplay flaw
What do you mean?
He meant that you are a homosexual, anon.
No it’s a fair question, nta but I was lost as well. Does he mean like what you see if Exalted, where it becomes an arms race of perfect defences?
like in 3.5rd edition the skill that counters forgery is forgery so you can easily become the king of counterfeit because no one else bothered to put points in it
Sounds like a great way to give a character niche?
The difference between how moronic I envisioned this reasoning would be, and how moronic it turned out be, is approaching infinity.
a bad one? easy peasy
a good one that is commercially viable? very hard
moron
Actually, he’s not a moron
Source: you are very gay
so you're actually both morons
No. You are just very, very gay.
If you have to ask then you aren't capable of doing it.
Literally just modify GURPS.
It depends a bit on what qualifiers you want to add.
It's easy to come up with a resolution mechanic, some stats, some abilities, some monsters, and a setting and call that an RPG. It's generally harder to fit those into a cohesive whole that plays nicely without loopholes, odd interactions that need to be ironed out by the GM in play, and in a way that has the setting and rules at least not clash with each other.
A few things to keep in mind: your resolution mechanic is not your system. If you want to actually be designing a system, you should be thinking about how different tasks engage with it, character math, and the intended experience you want to generate.
As well, fiction is mechanics: you can go a long way by just letting people do what's natural until you hit the important things you want to codify mechanically. You don't need to tell your players they can wear a hat, they'll probably figure that out themselves.
If a rule followed logically (since your ruleset is essentially a worldmodel to some reasonable assumed accuracy) heavily contradicts your established setting, one of them needs to change to resolve the conflict.
Hey its array of champions anon from the game design thread, ive been designing for a year and 3 quarters, written a core rulebook (225k words) bestiary (205k words) and a narrative based expansion to the core rules (35k words) i have my GM Book & Magic item vault in progress (the end products likely going to be 200k+ words). I'm not going to claim my games 10/10 or that my short experience makes me a game design god but it does give me a lil experience i can share of a good way to proceed with making your game.
1) Figure out your objectives - This is the most important part and everything feeds from here. For example, mine were engaging tactical combat and a feeling of heroism - as i wanted to make a high fantasy ttrpg.
2) Figure out your tone and genre- heroic high fantasy, Gritty modern survival, your tone and genre should be something of personal interest that you feel fun from writing
3) Decide on mechanics - Codify what exactly you need to support your objectives and tone.
4) Write the game in a cohesive package - easier said than done, but a two column format word doc is a really easy formatting decision that should help.
5) Test, test and more testing - did i mention editing? Editing and testing go hand in hand your product benefits the more people play it.
As an example of what you can accomplish in under a year i attatched my core rulebook preview, it has only 12 of the 120 paths and 4 of the 24 races, missing the custom race rules as well but otherwise is a playable product when used in conjunction with the char sheet and bestiary
>a core rulebook (225k words) bestiary (205k words) and a narrative based expansion to the core rules (35k words) i have my GM Book & Magic item vault in progress (the end products likely going to be 200k+ words)
Nobody is going to read that shit, anon
No no, you don't understand. He's clearly going for quantity over quality. He knows his writing is shit so he's giving you a lot of it to make up for it.
>Lord of the rings length ruleset, all 3 of them.
That's kinda cringe, gz on the sales I guess.
What the other anon said already - your objective should be to trim the frick down of the word count. Because right now, you have 1300+ pages. That's the thickness of GURPS Basic Set, and something tells me you are not making an universal system with real-life physics in its rules, along with unified ruleset that can put in the same basket cybernetics, ritual magic and autistic landship combat and make it all still work despite assembled together in 30 seconds.
Yea i've had a wopping 8 sales (total of like 240 usd?), no marketing budget. I wasn't saying you need to go as large of a word count as me, just showing that hey you can do a lot in a relatively short time if you just sit down and write a few days of the week.
Most of the word count for the core rules is the 120 paths. You can see the preview version by missing 108 paths and 20 races (plus the custom race building rules) goes from 225k words to 38k. The Bestiary word count primarily comes from having 300 entries and monsters get more complicated as the level increases. Either way, the point wasn't "do a big word count anon!" it was follow steps 1-5 and you'll be on the right track for making your game.
I get that this is Ganker and its fun to throw vitriol so not holding anything against any of the posters, but hoping the OP got something useful out of having the basic process laid out.
Based anon, nta you're talking to but I'm designing some games too, gonna have a look at your pdf. Thanks for providing
You're welcome, i'm glad someone got some value!
Yea i think my preview version is maybe 250 downloads so got a pretty low conversion ratio, does make you wonder how many people download without reading though since as a preview its free and may make people go "why not download"
Don't take me too seriously since I am just a noob but this is super cool anon I like your dedication
Thanks
You should embrace your inner cringe anon!
Your game is gay as shit
Very.
Unless your goal is to make a half-assed clone/hack of pre-existing game, it's a nightmare. Even in supposed rule-light games.
Big part of the reason why so many games have so many glaring issues is due to both the task being hard by itself, and, more importantly, people not doing enough playtests with varied enough groups to spot them. And the last part is especially important, since the smaller the test base and more geared on "friends and colleague that won't say in my face this doesn't work", the worse the final results.
Its pretty easy to make a bad RPG. But I've never seen a good one so that must be pretty hard.
making your own game is easy. making a good game and getting people to play it is hard.
Depends. I had some of my most fun with homebrew games, both my own and others, and this was ages ago. We were all high school or early college age. One of those guys just shook an entire WH40K d20 supplement out of his ass. While I bet the systems were complete ass if you'd look at them, we had fun. I do still like the armor system I came up with for my own, though. I'd definitely carry that over, at least in part, if I were to do anything new.
Anyway, you'll probably want to answer a few simple questions to get yourself on the right track:
>What's the scope and purpose?
For instance, do you want OSR-like dungeon crawling, 80's coked up board room social politics, or a universal sci-fi system?
>What's your preferred resolution mechanic?
Which dice do you want to use, and why? Do you want players to roll quickly and work with modifiers, or do you want dice pools etc.
>Who is it for?
Are you writing for the market, or for your friends?
>What's your weird-ass part of the system and probably the reason why you're making your own in the first place, and how does it fit in the rules?
You're making your own shit for a reason, and it's probably because you want to do something that doesn't quite exist (to your satisfaction) in other systems. Think about how to integrate this in the rest of the rules.
Its difficulty depends on the creator's goals.
If you do what D&D and its imitators do, and throw together shit from media you like without cohesion in terms of both mechanics and fluff, make a set of rules that's vague for everything that isn't the special zappy magic and go full autism on every spell and caster class, and then expect the actual players to fix everything, it's easy.
If you do what PbtA does, and makes a set of vague guidelines while actively telling the arbiter to make shit up as they go along, and telling them how evil they are for not agreeing with the writer's San Francisco sentimentalities, it's super fricking easy.
If you make a Lasers and Feelings clone, where you literally have one stat between 1-6 and rolls going higher or lower depending on if they're social or combat, while the arbiter has to pull the entire mechanical weight out of his own ass, then that's pretty much effortless.
It's really hard if you actually care about making a game that functions out of the box, doesn't force the GM to fix shit or make shit up, and is consistent with itself. Especially so if you want all player options to be viable, to vary in a significant degree, and to remain reasonably challenged by opposing factors. The more crunch you have, the more work you need to put in to make everything fair.
I've done it a couple of times, some of them even still get talked about on /tg/.
The first step is understanding the purpose of your project. What do you want to make, and WHY? What is it that you are trying to do that needs a whole new RPG as opposed to running your game in an existing system? Lore or playing in a specific setting is not a good reason to make an RPG, a setting is system-agnostic. But certain style of play that go hand in hand with a specific setting might justify a unique creation. One of the things I made was a mecha game, and I made it because looking at the existing mecha RPGs of the time there wasn't anything that fit the tone and playstyle I was aiming for.
You start with that step both to set the goals for your endeavor, and give you a basis for comparison. What other RPGs are *similar* to what you want to do, or have mechanics that you feel are a good fit? Do your research, learn from the success and failures of those before you.
Then, map out your core resolution mechanic and choose it with INTENT. A d20 system, a d100 roll under, a fudge dice system, and a dicepool system all plan very differently and create different sorts of results and different player expectations. Your game's core resolution mechanic will directly shape how people engage with and play your game, even if they are not aware of it. You want to pick the right tool for the job.
After that things get kind of system specific so good advice is hard to generalize, save this: never include a mechanic because you think it is cool. Mechanics you include can BE cool, but they have to exist in the game for a reason beyond that. Keep your game laser focused on your initial design goal, and don't include anything that stretches beyond that goal. not every good idea you have will play well with the other good ideas, throwing everything into one system will make a convoluted mess. Stay on target.
>What type of TTRPG do you want? Something TSR/OSR adjacent where the focus is loot and dungeon delving? Something more white wolf where the focus is more narrative? Something in between? This will trickle down into your mechanics (ideally), so give it thought.
>Is this TTRPG based on or otherwise meant to be an existing franchise with the numbers filed off? If so, read up on the franchise you're ripping off.
>If it's an original setting baked in, that's gonna be a whole lot more work and possibly its own document; you need to establish the setting well enough for GMs to use it and players to understand it.
>If it's agnostic/generic, consider a genre or theme instead; generally, catch-all systems tend to be lacking in actual quality. If your system can do Cyberpunk AND medieval fantasy, it won't do either well at all.
>What's your system's big "Gimmick"? The selling point that tells people why they should play it over other games (even if you aren't selling it, it gives you something to use as a foundation)
>How many people make up the ideal play group? Is it meant for smaller groups of 2-3? Up to 5? This will determine a lot of your other stuff.
>Given the above, how much rules density and granularity do you really need? Keep it simple, stupid; if something is there because you think it's cool but it serves to be a pain in the ass or unsuited to the style of game in real play, you'll have to axe it.
>How will chargen work? Do you want full random chargen as the base rule, or do you want something more controlled like a point buy system? Do you want tiers of play, if so how many?
>What options are available to the players? Do you have classes, classless play, or something in between? Players tend to like having options.
>How much, if any, support will you give to character sheets and digital play? Will you only provide a print-out? PDF? Full on spreadsheets that make chargen and play a breeze? VTT integration?
>How hard is it to design your own ttrpg?
Not very hard since I did it when I was 9. All you need is a resolution mechanic and character creation rules and bang, you got an RPG. All the other shit is strictly optional.
My friend has his own system, but most of it is in his head and he simply tell us ad hoc what to roll.
I like his game, but mostly because of his world. The mechanics are only seviceable.
What am I trying to say is that if you don't aim for publishing your game in hardcover, but just want to build something for yourself and your group, the bar is by order of magnitude lower.
Depends on if you like it or not.
If you like making rpgs: Its fun and pleasant. Mentally rewarding and gives you unnatural powers.
If you dont like it: Horrible. You will question why you are doing it and, because you are pitiful and weak, you will break down and pay so done who likes to make it to make it for you. You will of course not list him because along with being pitiful you are also without morals.
here's some advice OP:
first know what type of game you want to make.
if you want to make a narrativist RPG like apocalypse world dont take any advice in here from people who play only D&D. or vice versa.
It cannot be done unless you stop caring and just do it.
>t. decades after procrastination
No check lists because I enjoy a variety of systems and gaming styles. I try a lot of what is published, but most of it doesn't keep my interest for long. A lot of retreads, a lot of stuff made worse, a lot of boring stuff.
I have designed a few systems as a kid and teenager, and worked on a few published, smaller RPGs as an adult. Won't say which because if I do you frickers will know who I am. Not interested in that on a Vietnamese basket weaving forum. The first I made as a kid and teen bad, and looking back on them, I cringe at myself. Hell, even most ideas I scribble down are bad, but never go anywhere because I realize this quickly. Some things just don't work. The only reason I keep the notes is to be better. But each was better than the last.
I've been working on an RPG for a theme I think is very underused in the RPG space for a while now. I'm not certain, but I think there's only a handful of RPGs with this theme. If everything goes well, and with a bit of art investment yet to come, it should be finished in a year or two. And when it does you have my permission to share it here. Some of you may actually buy it after testing it, and if not, you weren't going to anyways. So I don't really lose anything.