Welcome, adventurers!

This blog will be focused on game design for Tabletop RPGs. My friend Austin and I have been playing RPGs together for many years. Our exchanges of Gamemaster tips-and-tricks have slowly morphed into game design discussions. The obvious conclusion of this journey is developing an RPG system of our very own.

While this system is nothing more than idea at the time of this post, we thought it'd be helpful for us to harness these nebulous ideas - and what better way to do that than to get it into written form. So, essentially, this blog will mainly be musings and random ideas for the sake for formulating concepts, bouncing ideas off of (digital) paper, and a vehicle to get them out of our brains and into the universe. The hope is that we can begin this chronicle from the inception of the idea to (fingers crossed) a released system. The greatest part of doing this with my friend Austin, is that we have very different (And very similar at times) playstyles and DMing styles, so having two different perspectives has been really fun for me.

Some may ask, "why build your own system? I'm sure it's already been done before". You are right. No ideas are unique anymore and whatever I think of I'm sure has already been done. But eh, who cares. It's a fun way to spend my time. Also, the benefit of the TTRPG scene is that, if a system doesn't fit your playstyle you can hack it! And if that doesn't work... you can find a new system! Or if you're really bored, you can create one of your own. (Guess which part I'm at).

My main ideas for my system would be something along these lines.

1. Less is More - I'm hoping to have a "rules light" system. My wish is that the system is sufficient for any session/campaign/game, and any extra content is completely modular.
2. Horizontal Progression - I plan to write a separate blog post on what this means to me, but the TL;DR would be that all content is always relevant. I honestly think this might be the hardest part of the design.
3. Real life in mind - We all know how it goes... "X couldn't make it to tonight's game because of Y, so we either play without them or don't play at all" (hint: it's usually don't play at all... especially if the group isn't already together). This is obviously biased towards my own experience in gaming but I'd like to make a game that can be more... west-marches, hop in hop out, maybe one-shot focused-ish type of rules. Does this problem have to be solved by the system itself? Probably not, this seems more like a group-by-group meta decision. However, why not see if we can think of ways to make it work systematically??
4. Low requirements - Narrative dice are cool, miniatures are rad, big maps and lots of books are super neat... but I'd like to be as little of a barrier as possible to get a game going (somewhat related to the point above as well). If you have some people all in discord one evening and are bored?... well, let's play a quick session! This also borrows from 'rules-light' in the sense of "I want to play a game and I want to play right now". The faster you can get into a game, the faster you can start having fun. No rules based around maps, or miniatures or proprietary dice. Hopefully even open-source the system itself so anyone can play for free.
5. Digital Tools - I'm a software engineer who likes to play RPGs in my free time. I also really enjoy my field of work and find it fun to build little tools or apps to help with whatever. It'd be kind of cool if there were some digital things that I can help create to make others enjoy the game more. This is EXTRA. I do NOT want to create a problem just to solve with an app. If it arises organically, then sure, I'll be happy to do something for it.
6. No stress - I don't want to make a career out of game design. I don't need this to work. It's just for fun, so my goal is to have fun making it. "Journey before destination."

If you've made it this far, you can tell that this is all very off-the-cuff and rambly. The rest of the posts may end up this way as well. It's just how I get my ideas out and how I like to write. Thanks for taking the time to read.

Until next time, Michael