More Authentic Medievalism

The first Living Myth product is a medieval fantasy RPG. However, when designing it I didn’t want it to be a D&D clone with a different system, I have long felt there was a missed opportunity to have a fantasy medieval setting put more emphasis on the medieval and less on the fantasy.

Most medieval fantasy settings are actually closer to a Bronze Age setting with medieval window dressing. The shape of Swords & Sorcery evolved over the twentieth century, but they were heavily informed by early twentieth century pulp novels, which in turn were informed by a combination of Victorian romanticism and Victorian disdain for the medieval era.

Living Myth RPG (Update)

So… I haven’t updated this blog in a while. Someone brought this to my attention on Facebook, and that reminded me that people still come here and read this. So, since I’m feeling a little less motivated to work on the game I’m currently writing, updating this seemed like a way to pretend to be productive.

Design Decisions: Equipment and Economics

I think a lot of designers struggle with how to balance equipment in role-playing games. Designers aren’t economists, and being an economist isn’t really a requirement as the level of detail most games require would obscure the added “realism” from modelling based upon actual economic theory. However, many games also have weird (immersion breaking) artifacts from the designs they choose, because they’re not grounded in anything realistic. For this entry, I’m going to talk about what elements are involved in designing economic mechanics, the two most common systems, and how I’m deriving the system in Living Myth.

Design Decisions: The Core Mechanics

I really hoped to wrap up the rest of characters, but I realized that in order to understand the rest of the design decisions I made for characters you needed to understand the design of the core mechanics.

This comes up a lot when considering the layout of RPG books.  You want readers to only get concepts which have previously been defined, but you also want related things to stay together.  The character’s skills and attributes are referenced by the core mechanic but aren’t really understood until you understand the core mechanic.

Here, I’ll discuss what makes a mechanic “core” and what problems I was trying to solve in designing the core mechanic, and how I felt it wasn’t addressed by alternatives.

Design Decisions: Skills and Skill Lists

Part 2 of my Design Decisions series flows nicely from part 1.  In Part 1 I broke down how I chose the attributes to use for the Living Myth RPG system, and here I explain the choices I made regarding the skill list.

Design Advice: How do I choose my Dice Mechanic

So you’ve decided to design your own Role Playing Game.  You now want to figure out the best dice mechanic to use.  You ask yourself “Should I use a d20, or a dice pool?” or some variant of that question.

How do you decide?  I’m here to guide you through that decision process.

Let’s hack up Alignment a bit

Dungeons and Dragons has long used a morality system called “Alignment”.  It describes 2-axis, one axis is law-chaos, and the other is good-evil.  One problem with the system, through all 6 editions, is that alignment has been ambiguous with respect to characterization.  While it has successfully acted as a light guide to the general morality, it’s largely failed as a more specific guideline.  So, what we’re going to do here is we’re going to define these axis more explicitly, recalibrate them, and look at how they apply during play.

Marginalized people don’t exist for you to weaponize

For the most part this blog deals with RPG mechanics, but today we have to go down a slightly different path.

A recent Fail Forward blog post has seriously agitated the RPG world with a whole bunch of energy focusing on how RPG’s do or don’t remarginalize those already marginalized in our society.  This post is damning to rpgpundit and Zak Smith.  It focuses on how these two individuals were paid consultants for 5e Dungeons and Dragons, and supposedly engage in misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia.  I can’t speak to how accurate these claims are; in fact so far as I can tell, no one can since they all come from anonymous sources.  What we can do however, is see that this article is presenting these facts in a hyperbolic way with an agenda.  Which I will show later.

Why is that a problem?  Because it is an attempt to weaponize trans* people to forward a personal agenda.  Which means it’s the Fail Forward article, not Dungeons and Dragons, that is problematic.

Note

I’m going to mostly be looking at the accusations against Zak, because I know more about him, and it’s easier to get information about him than it is about RPG Pundit.

I first became aware of Zak through his series involving pornstars playing Dungeons and Dragons.  I was hugely impressed because the rights of Sex Workers is an important issue to me (Zak himself is a sex worker), and it was a hugely important in terms of humanizing Sex Workers (in this case pornstars).

As far as their RPG philosophies; word on the street is that they are both major proponents of Old School RPG’s (thus them being hired as 5e consultants) which is going to make me agree with them about as much as I agree with Ron Edwards; as in… not much.

Re-Examining Skills

Nearly every game has some sort of fixed list of things a character is capable of doing.  Sometimes that list is attributes, other times it is skills.  The design goal in these cases is to have a fixed point reference to make checks against to determine success.

So when I wrote up Constructing an Ability List I was working from the same premise.

Here were going to explore those assumption, deconstruct the idea, and investigate an alternative.

 

The Problem with Generic Systems

RPG Design is a particularly unrewarding endeavor for one to go into.  It’s unimpressive to tell someone you’ve designed your own game system, the market is over-saturated, and even if one successfully publishes and makes sales one is likely to face criticism from a fickle market.

Along with that, an RPG requires both the talents of a good game designer, and the talents of a good writer.  This combination is unfortunately rare, so designers tend to be substantially better at one of these things.  Naturally system designers are inclined toward generic systems, and writers toward genre games.  The writer in this scenario is the More Valuable Player; because a Genre Game will always beat a Generic System.

Why is this? Why are Genre Games better?  Why does D20 outsell GURPS?  The reason is that Generic Systems must always be too complex.  Genre Games, on the other hand, provide a User Interface that enables gamers to understand and utilize the system with ease.