Designing Your RPG
There are a number of reasons why you should want to write something for your own
game. Generally you will either want to lend it to friends, have something nice to
put on your bookshelf, or try to persuade someone to market it for you. In any of
these cases you will probably be aiming for a facsimile of the games that you
can buy in your local gaming store. Ideally you would like to have it full of full
page images and fancy typesetting, but it is really more important that you think
out the sections of your game. When it comes right down to it, it is the
accessibility of the game and the conception of its background that will make it
worthwhile.
Sections of your Game
In most cases a person producing their own RPG will not feel in necessary
to do a full section on 'What is roleplaying' or to have one of the hilarious
'examples of roleplaying' since most individually produced games are destined
for circulation amongst people who already know full-well what roleplaying is.
If you do feel the need, however, you may want to look at our "
Introductions
to Roleplaying" section in the Encyclopedia GEAS.
It is important to carefully introduce your game. In most cases what will make,
in your opinion, your game worth using, will be the background. Whether you
intend to try and sell your game, to lend it to friends, or even just to use it
yourself, I think that it is vital to define your world properly. Even if no one
other than you ever reads the game a well defined background is what stops you
from going over the top when you have to improvise while running the game.
Exactly what you have to define depends on your game. In a real world setting
there will be little introduction to in terms of scene-setting (though see
The Strange below), while in a Fantasy or SF game you
will need to introduce your entire world or galaxy. You will need to describe the
terrain, the world, its creatures, monsters, cities, and Gods in a Fantasy game,
or its ships, empires, planets, and technology in an SF game.
This is surely the most
imposing part of writing a game, transferring your own conception of the background
to paper, but it is ultimately what makes an RPG interesting, not the rules.
Once the world has been introduced you need to define the role of the PC's in
the world of the game. What is it about your world that would make people want to
take part in it, and what would they be doing? Once you have answered these questions
the rest of the information that you need should be obvious. Just ask yourself
what the players need to know, and what knowledge you have that someone else would
need to run a game in your world.
It is not possible, or course, to go through all the possibilities of how a game
system can be made, there are almost as many ways as there have been games. The
important thing is that there should be some underlying mechanic, hopefully
explainable in a few lines, that all the rest of your system works on. For instance
the World of Darkness games have the mechanic that all rolls are made with one or
more D6's, with the player trying to get as many of the dice as possible equal to or
less than a specified target number. Once you have a basic mechanic its easy to
invent new rules for a given situation that go along with the feel of the rest.
In general most rules fall into three rough sections:
- A General Section explaining the Character Generation system, and how rolls
are made. This often contains a section on standard situations that may
come up, including:
- Stealth
- Healing and Injury
- Climbing and falling
- Effects of Light and darkness
- Poison
- A section on the combat system, I've yet to see an RPG with none at all.
- A section on the 'odd' bit of the world, be it Magic, Psionics, or Advanced
Technology.
Important elements of a combat system are some sort of timing, rules for hitting
and inflicting damage, and rules for healing it back again! It is also worth
remembering that you will probably need rules for cover, armour and
knockout/stun damage. Also highly recommended is an extended example of a combat
to clear up the use of the rules.
The combat system of a game is usually the easiest part to do.
If combat is the easiest section then the Magic/Psychics/Technology section is
usually the hardest. There is no greater difference between Fantasy games than
their Magic systems, and the same applies to Fantasy/SF Psychic systems and Hard
SF technology systems.
In each case, however the same general things are needed, an evocative description
of the Magic (I'll use the word for all three types of things), a detailed rationale
for why it is meant to work (e.g. 'its the spirits', 'we call on the Gods' etc.)
since most Players will want to know what their character's know about things and
what they believe, and a set of rules.
Magic
The main choices for magic are whether you are going to have a spell-based or
freeform system. A more detailed discussion of this argument is in the Encyclopedia,
but is basically a question of memorisation vs. rules. In a spell-based system people
have to remember huge lists of spells and what exactly they do, a chore if you are
new to the system, but the number of rules are usually quite small. In a freeform
system, however, there may well be 50 pages of rules, mostly showing by example
how things work. When the players finally grasp the principle of the magic, however,
they should be able to get by on instinct.
Psychics
The same two principles occur as with magic, but people are far more ready to accept
a limited number of psychic powers, since they find it easier to accept that it may
be hard to experiment with psychics. This makes a spell-based system very attractive.
You may also want to consider how psychics are treated in your world, are they Gods
or are they mutant outcasts?
Advanced Technology
In most cases what is wanted from Advanced Tech. rules is descriptions of actual
things that will turn up in games, space craft, weapons, computers, robots etc. As
well as some idea of the principles behind it all. Does all tech. depend on a
certain mineral, or from the discoveries of one man, or does one company or
organisation have a stranglehold on it all. It is also common to have some sort of
vehicle/spacecraft combat system.
In games set in the modern day world the attractive element is often some sort of
supernatural or alien element, thus Chill, Nephilim, Vampire, Call of Cthulhu etc.
In place of the Magic section you may instead have a section on the strange world
beyond what we know, what the government is hiding etc. In this case it may well be
that Magic of some kind still exists, but only in the hands of the NPC monsters.
Finally, as the last part of the main rules, you will need some sort of Bestiary,
either of monsters or of groups of antagonists. Monsters are an essential part
of most games, and should be well described. However there is mostly little use for
the AD&D style ecological discussions for every monster! What you want is
something half way between this and the CoC 1 paragraph sketches, which seldom
contain enough information.
As well as the obvious list of monsters it is also good to produce a set of indices,
such as by environment, by frequency, by Experience Point values and so forth.
The value of an example Adventure in the rule book is highly dubious. In a published
game such adventures quickly become too well known to use, and in a game intended
just for your friends it is obviously rather pointless. However if your game is
rather unusual, in philosophy or system (such as Everway), then an example adventure
just to show a potential GM what the game is about. If the unusual thing about your
game is the background then you may well be better off with a short story running
through the rules than an example adventure, depending on your writing skills.
- Other useful things to include are:
- Example names of characters in your world
- Example NPC's
- Maps of the world and places
- An Index!
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