In a way, I suppose it was inevitable that 25 years of reading and tinkering with different systems would lead me to trying to put together one of my own. It's not that all the other systems are bad so much as that they don't quite scratch that itch for the game I'd like to play/run.
One of the things that really grabs me with RPGs is the whole exploration and discovery angle. I love being able to get together with a group of friends and enter a world where we can set out from our homeland and just experience a reality different from our own. Playing wet-behind-the-ears adventurers that stumble upon a den of thieves that spirals into a dark conspiracy stretching the Great City and beyond or delving into a long-forgotten crypt and finding that although the original "inhabitants" might be dead, it's far from abandoned (or maybe the original inhabitants aren't so dead after all...). But I've long been annoyed that the level curve in most fantasy games is so pronounced.
You start out as glorified city guards or scrappy apprentices, go on your first adventure and fight some suitably (comparatively) unintimidating monsters. You get a bit better at what you do and start working your way up the ladder, slowly passing beyond the low-level threats you cut your teeth on up to bigger and badder threats. That's well and good, but this trajectory always kind of made me sad, for a few reasons. First, it just makes for an implausible system...why is everything so easily stratified into gradations of danger? Why aren't traditionally (to RPGs) "minor" monsters like kobolds or goblins such a giant threat? If they're so easily eradicated, why don't cities just hire one set of experienced adventurers to just clear out the whole region? I also don't like the way this sort of thing gate-keeps the really cool monsters from new players. If you're playing a more traditional hex crawl exploration game, sometimes you find things you just can't really manage and that's not quite as much fun as it could be otherwise. Finally it makes for some really weird ecology in dungeons (I'm an ecologist, of course this would bother me).
I'll go over each of the main points in detail, laying out why a particular issue annoys me and what I think a suitable solution might be. I often find that writing things down helps to clarify things for myself, so hopefully getting this up in a coherent document will jump start some things in my brain and help me to better understand what my goals are and how to achieve them. And comments are always welcome--I love having additional perspectives on things and input on what seems fun to other people who love playing games (or who think that what I'm envisioning as fun might turn out to be less than thrilling).
No comments:
Post a Comment