I want to make my own system.
Has anyone gone about doing this? Any tips.
Specifically, I want the balance of 4e, simplicity and adaptability of 5e, and parts of Apocalypse World like mixed succes.
I've only been learning about and playing RPGs for a year, so I may be missing other great systems to pull from.
To start with, have a strong design concept. Lots of systems to reference is good, but without a strong center you've got a very good chance of ending up with a mismatched mess of things cribbed from other games.
Then ask yourself, what does your game do to give it value? Why would anyone play that system when there are others available? What would you do that's better or distinct from the competition?
Answer those questions first and foremost, and you'll have a good place to start working from.
Playing loads of other systems first won't make your system good, but not playing loads of other systems first WILL make you system bad.
Don't do it.
Waste of time.
The market is already saturated.
Once upon a time we did this on Veeky Forums every couple months or more.
Making a system is more of a skill that you need to have than something you can do formulaicly, so we can't give you a lot of tips. Just... Do what you're doing and see how it turns out.
>I want the balance
Well you can't have it. Balance is like CG graphics, there are no shortcuts. You have to build something, playtest it, build something, playtest it, and on and on for ages. The more time invested, the better the balance. Your first system won't be balanced at all, there's no way around that.
He didn't say it was for market.
Sounds a lot like Strike!, actually.
Every time I think about doing this, I can't justify it. Would any players be even a fraction of as enthusiastic about my pet project as I am? Would the rest of the group be just as content with playing an existing system? GMing is already a time sink, do I want to compound that by building, testing, and tweaking the game on top of running it? Are my ideas even that damn good?
It's not the discussion you wanted, but I definitely think I'm better off settling on an existing system.
Just to expand on this; I'm not meme-ing, it honestly sounds a lot like it.
>I want the balance of 4e
It's arguably more balanced than 4e; player offense is a bit high, but there's less moving parts which means less balance hiccups overall.
>simplicity and adaptability of 5e
It's simpler than 5e, uses even less modifiers (no scaling modifiers at all) and advantage/disadvantage, and is inherently made to be universal
>and parts of Apocalypse World like mixed succes.
It uses this for the skill system and for some other subsystems, and even attack rolls have "grazing" to add another layer on top of the usual crit/hit/miss trio.
If anything, the challenge would be to introduce enough stuff to re-D&D-ify it. Probably grab some simplified OSR like The Black Hack and use that as base.
Awesome. Will check it out.
The problem is, that instead of chopping up 5e to fit what I want, and nerfing wizards into the ground so they're not broken and boring, it seems easier to just fit together a low level system.
If your knowledge of D&D goes no farther than WotC, check out TSR's warlier editions.
I feel like 5e wizards are not in a terribly OP state. What spells do you have problems with? There's a few high level ones, some rituals, and maybe hypnotic pattern, but overall, they are not as astonishingly OP as they once were. Making some ritual equivalent feature for other classes could work as a way to catch them up.
First you start with what your system wants to do.
Then you build your system to do that.
We regularly have Game Design General /gdg/ threads for discussing exactly this sort of thing. There's a bunch of us working on different games, swapping advice and ideas.
Read more games. Try more games. And when you think you have enough, try some more.
I know your pain, currently adapting Battletech for storyteller's d10 system and i still can't get the powerplants and mech speed mechanics to feel like a full port
Im familiar with some of the rules from 1st, like gold as the xp factor. It's partly why I don't love the current version.
For me, wizards can go two ways. Either slightly more useful in some situations than martials but without insane reality warping powers and fewer spells with ridiculous dmg dice or very powerful but with more severe consequences for spells. (Ex. Casting a 7th level spell should require a DC to cast correctly and on a fail something happens)
What's your setting you want to create for? Western? Standard fantasy? Modern? Space future? What's your setting?
It's a lot easier to build a game around a setting than it is to just make it for whatever.
>Any tips.
Several, the first, much like said, is don't. Creating a system is a lot of hard work for very little pay off. Even if you never intend to publish it or even make it public as a free pdf or the like it's still going to be many frustrating hours of your life lost.
Still interested? Sure, then we can move on to actual tips on how to do it. First would be to have a good idea about what you're trying to do that no other game does. If all you're doing amounts to some hombrew rules for 5e, then you should probably just write a few homebrew rules for 5e instead of reinventing the wheel.
Once you've concluded that what you're trying to do is sufficiently different from already existing games to warrant you making one from scratch, I'd highly suggest that you put your rules writing on a hold and instead start world building and then write down rules that fit your world and the tone you're going for with it and start with the rules that are most relevant to it. Probably the most common reason these types of projects end is because someone decides that he's going to write the best system ever, and start from Chapter I - What is a Role-Playing Game? And then they move on to Chapter II - How to Make a Character. Usually they stop somewhere in the middle of writing Chapter III - How to Kill Stuff because they grow detached and bored of the project. Sometimes they actually manage to start on Chapter IV - How to Cast Spells, but the result is still the same.
>He didn't say it was for market.
So it's even more pointless.
>creating shit for yourself is pointless
What a sad life you live.
>Someone has a hobby
>"You're not doing your hobby to make money? How pointless."
>On an anonymous Polish War Crime forum
Yeah, you really showed him.
>tfw working on a system that's based on an expanded version of another system that got a lot of popularity but died out due in part to being an unfinished game that the dev stopped working on
Well, it may have just been a fad.
Legend?
The Rule of Cool thing? Who would duplicate a fantasy heartbreaker?
Just sounded like a familiar story. Legend had a lot of hype and potential before it just suddenly died due to the main dev getting hired by a publisher with a non-compete clause.
Legend reached a pretty good playable state, I thought. I was talking about Magical Burst. I like what Legend did for item progression, and there were some nice little ideas in the class design, but outside of those areas it really didn't have a lot going for it. And those are nice, but not enough to beat the big guy when everything else is nothing much.
They completed a core book, but not a monster manual or a GM's guide, so running it required more investment than most GM's were willing to give a new, untested system.
Magical Burst died too? Damn.
There idea of monster design was "make it yourself" back when I followed them. Of course that's not going to be popular, but that doesn't make it not done.
Magical Burst hasn't been officially declared dead, but there's been no notice of any work done on it in more than two years (during which time other things have been done from beginning to completion) so I declared it "dead enough to work on my own successor" a while back.
I've got a lot done, but most of it was the fun stuff of improving and designing the game, not the tedious stuff of porting and balancing all the necessary options. And there's a lot to be done on in terms of monster manual and DM guide too, but monster manual is really just going to be a huge random table (because that's how MB works) with a worked example or five. DM's guide needs worldbuilding stuff but I think I can crib a lot from FATE beyond what's already in existing MB drafts and derivatives. There's more to do with making combat easy to adjust in terms of how long you want it to take, but that's something I'm not to yet.
You can have a link to my document if you're interested, feedback would be plenty welcome.
Have you tried Shadow of the Demon Lord? It seems like the best version of what d&d 5e wanted to be.
How so?
* d20 / d6 only
* gets rid of a lot of "legacy" concepts that are only still around because d&d needs to appease fans.
* Novice/Expert/Master class allows for fantastic customization.
* Boon/Bane is an elegant solution to adverse/beneficial conditions.
* Math is overall pretty tight. No +20 to attack rolls at higher level.
* Corruption/Insanity is great fun for the whole table.
* Low power/tight math makes for great balance among character customization.
I prefer this game to any edition of D&D (played 2e-5e)/PF. It's elegant without being too simple, and has enough depth for "power gamers" and snowflakes alongside people who just want to jump in and role play.
ewen is a fucking hack, why would you base anything on his shit, unless you could do it in such a way that it was NOTHING like his shit any more
>ewen is a fucking hack
Doesn't mean there's nothing good to take from his stuff. His tables are really evocative, for example. And the Overcharge thing is also good with a right load of house-rules, partly because of the tables.
Besides, I'm a hack too. Who isn't?
Do you have specific complaints though? They could potentially be useful to me.
better don't and just use Strike or something else someone is bound to suggest.
It's a fool's errand, unless you're making a very simple sub-10 page system, then it's a little fool's errand.
It'll never be done, you'll always tinker with it, you'll have fewer players then you would with any other more established system because people are rightly averse to playtesting, you'll never have enough time or energy to finish it, every next session will feel like you need to just edit a few lines of "code"... And you won't be able to stop thinking about it. You'll eat up other systems just to see what works and what you can steal to beef up your frankenstein-monster you've on your google drive. Of course you'll never publish or finish it, it's an everlasting pet project.
You'll know you've fucked up when players, close friends that bother playtesting the shitpile, say they've liked the last "edition" more than the current one. Waste of time, life, effort.
How to do it?
Write the base mechanic, then the base stats, skill system, combat rules, equipment rules, magic rules, magical equipment rules, monsters, traps, various GM shit such as travel and prices, bang, done.
You're wrong in the last paragraph.
Don't start with what is an rpg or how to make a character.
The first 2 things you need are how are the main things resolved, and what kind of theme you're going for.
It can be time-period, a specific setting, something weirdly specific like a game about being in prison or a game about being leaders of an organization. You can also go for things like brutal survival stuff, a feel of legend like in classical myths, something more about getting a certain type of desirable thing, etc.
Probably more important than that though is how you do things. If I wanna move, how does that work? What about convincing an animal or person to do something? Or if I want to find out if my character knows a useful piece of info? What happens if I get hit? How can I and what happens when I get hit alot?
You can leave things like leveling and classes until you figure that out.
Also OP, if you're not okay with your game being played for only 1 or 2 sessions before you lose your group or they wanna play something else then give-up as soon as it stops being fun.
If you have ideas that don't mesh well with what you have, then consider separating them into 2 documents.
The pdf has descriptions of different kind of mechanics, their pros and cons and what they mesh well with, and at the end has summaries of the mechanics of various different rpgs.
>How do i do thing?
>don't
xd so fucking funny and original. Truly the epitome of wit.
>Don't start with what is an rpg or how to make a character.
That's what I said.