After spending a lot of time with my homebrew system, I have a newfound respect for the "with a twist" trend in current TTRPG. Like you can really blow the doors off a setting or subsystem if the frame is sturdy and/or familiar. If things are too alien everything is hard to learn and it's hard to get to the good stuff.

For me I read a lot more indy games than I get to the table, and I like to read the novel and innovative, but I'm actually not sure that something wholly new is what I want at the table most of the time.

Not that I dislike the game I made, it's just that maybe smaller iterative design has the potential to be stronger where it counts?

I wrote a bunch about the specifics here. With a special guest appearance by Mark Rosewater via his blog.

Curious about folks experiences with innovation, complexity, scope, and being "too original."

I wanted to run a horror game in October, so I'm trying an experiment to see if I bend my action narrative resolution mechanic to run a very different genre. The real simple version of the system is it's a skill check system where you roll once to represent an entire encounter, and then players take the lead on narrating the story to fill in all the details of the one giant dice roll. To try and do horror I changed all the supporting systems/skills/goals and replaced them with more genre appropriate ones.

I had a couple ideas I thought were clever and typed up a prototype today.

I don't know if it work, but I think this kind of experimentation is both fun and maybe it will teach me something.

Anybody here ever work on a full conversion? I created my game to begin with because converting d20 games wasn't giving me what I wanted. I never got a full conversion further than prototype for any system. Curious what other people learned from trying something like this.

If I were building a horror game from the ground up, I don't think I would use this resolution mechanic, I would probably aim for something that felt more reactive. Horror is really tough genre, and I think disempowerment and bad things happening to characters are tricky to make work in all games, and especially shared narrative. It's probably outright impossible to scare my friends sitting at a table as a group, but I'll settle for telling exciting stories with the horror tropes.

That's my hypothesis anyway, going to try it out and report back. Really want to hear about other peoples experience doing conversion design or any ground up horror design.

Crosspost from Reddit RPGdesign

Today I planned on writing about the cost of unique design (my game is pretty unintuitive in a lot of ways, because it's different) but figured out I couldn't really talk about how I made all those weird decisions until I talked about where/why I ended up with the core resolution mechanic I did. That is how I ended up with a very unique and therefore not very intuitive game.

Chronomutants has been many years in the making. Started with me hacking the hell out of Gamma World 7e back in 2010, circling back around to that system in 2018 and producing a lot of homebrew for it, becoming fully disillusioned with DnD (and other d20 games) by 2020, failing at hacking Gamma World into other systems from up until 2021, building a Forged in the Dark version, and then giving that up for a unique system based on me not remembering correctly how Warhammer Fantasy worked.

Here is the blog where I talk about my dissatisfaction with hacking leading me to a custom system locked behind proprietary dice (bad for sharing the game).

What the blog is kind of secretly about is about my choice to make the best playing game that meets my goals/needs being at odds with making something that I can share with strangers. My idiosyncratic design is one thing, actual hurdles are probably a bridge too far. It's a really big ask to get anyone to play a homemade game, it's a much bigger ask to get someone to use custom dice to do so.

Unfortunate, because it plays great, and is really weird and funny.

This kind of stuff gets into art for arts sake vs marketability (I'm not even selling anything). Anybody here have any stories or experience with choosing the best playing mechanics over more popular ones?

Wrote a new blog today about how much setting should go in a rulebook. It's different for every game, but I feel a lot of games put too much lore in with the rules.

I know it's really hip to have your setting lean on your mechanics and vice versa, so neither works great without another, but I am more of a fan of rules that support tone and play patterns that reinforce genre more than specific settings. Probably mostly because I am not big on learning a lot about a setting before I feel good about running a game.

I also like to have lots of room to improv and make a setting my own. I know you can do that with any setting, but I just feel more confident doing that with less definition in the setting.

I could probably drop a little something more into my rulebook as a stinger to get people excited about what kind of fiction the game presents. I guess that could be interpreted as setting, or at least adjacent.

Curious about what other think about this topic.

https://infantofatocha.itch.io/chronomutants/devlog/572397/whats-a-paradox-war-anyway

Today's blogpost is all about my flailing to refine and streamline my design docs into a coherent rulebook. I read enough of the d**** things you'd think I would know how to compile and order one. I understand the basics and where I went wrong, and have roadmap, but compared to design development is long and grindy.

Would really love if other folks have input on what makes a rulebook good? what have people done to make their projects easy to get? Which books are your favorite examples? What are your biggest hurdles?

For me I intellectually understand what needs to be there, but actually getting the writing clean and succinct to read is a challenge. I see a lot of DiY books for of background art and such trying to emulate a AAA book but they don't have the text and order of content hammered out 1st, I didn't want to move to layouts until my text was set, but maybe that's a mistake? Curious to see what people think.