Designing an RPG? You Need to Consider D&D First!

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How convenient i was just reading my copy of the AD&D players handbook and was thinking about how i was going to assemble my tabletop roleplaying game system.

tabletopgamingwithwolfphototec
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I'm running L&D tomorrow at the local game shop. I've picked Hecate's Tomb from RPGPundit Presents as the first game. I'll give you a review on DriveThru after I've played it, but I'm pretty stoked!

Vesuya
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IMO, the OSR oeuvre is such a fertile creative landscape because of a simple principle.

Limitation enhances creativity. It may seem counterintuitive at first, but having too much freedom will tend to paralyze one's creativity. Limiting the paradigm to early DnD based systems has allowed the creativity of the OSR's contributors to flourish.

Any successful artist will agree.

sequoyahwright
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I sometimes watch D&D Beyond/Todd Talks. I find it interesting that often during their hour chat that many of them will ask for something that used to be in older D&D's. This week it was MORALE for Monsters, which made me laugh because it's something I used to harp about when D&D still had Comments. Initiative has been brought up, as has Alignment.

FlyingAxblade_D
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It's like I've said over and again: "Don't reinvent the wheel."

flashfloodninja
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OSR is D&D
Wotc is the Seattle Renaissance fair with nothing but lesbian tieflings and half orc "nice guys"

PP_
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I've shifted focus to a D&D 5E OGL/SRD based game and campaign setting. There are plenty of things about the system that aren't exactly what I want, but sharing the fundamentals with one of the most popular RPGs ever is just too powerful to pass up.

PoxikFrostbite
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I bought his setting book dark Albion and his lion and dragon rpg, really great products, I really recommend them.

superbeast
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An exceptionally good video and a wonderful exercise! I deeply appreciate this one.

ShellPrestoDiBaggio
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A few years after D&D came out, there was a game called Chivalry & Sorcery. Some of us liked it better because it was D&D in a historical Medieval setting.

leonardkrol
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Thank you for the video, Kasimir, you make a good point.

There is a crucial qualifier that you make which some people are bound to miss: your metric for success. You provide sound advice that is common-sense for any business: refer to the successful examples in the industry and use the comparison to your advantage. To cut through the competition, you have to differentiate, but the basis of any differentiation is referring to what works and what doesn't for the industry.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that people who tend to disagree with you need to understand that (1) one needs to start with a clear goal when making a game (or pretty much anything), and (2) approach any comparison from the basis of that goal. A useful but imperfect analogy would be literature. People who want to make a bestseller need to look at writing differently from the person who wants to express their views on suicide and morality. However, the fact that Stephen King outsells Dostoyevsky does not mean that Stephen King is "better" than Dostoyevsky. By specific metrics he is, by others - he isn't. (On a somewhat related note, I would urge any person who really thinks they are writing a work of art when designing a game to choose a different medium).


However, to return to the writing example, to be a good writer you need to be an avid reader. I would guess that you are good at what you do in large part because you are familiar with many games. And we are not talking about passing familiarity. The aspiring designers who do not share your goals still need to understand the industry and what came before them. Any good creator, including game designers, needs to climb onto the shoulders of giants that came before them - only rarest of geniuses can elevate themselves to those heights without reference to those who came before. Of course, a lot of people who disagree with you fancy themselves geniuses, but I am interested in your thoughts, not theirs.

Would you agree with that commentary to your position?

Mike-meou
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I agree you should consider D&D first but with a big caveat...


I played B/X D&D starting in 1982 and AD&D for almost a decade after that. When I wanted to get out of the "everything goes in the stew" brand of fantasy no good novelist would ever have created, I found it a straitjacket. Once I started serious world building it just could not be changed to model that well. My friend moved out of town and joined a D&D group and recently told me that even 5E, which I consider MUCH more clearly explained and cohesive than 1E, was WAY too limiting and confining for him.



Pundit helped me articulate why I found the FATE RPG derailed me in play as much as I loved it from reading and thinking about it. FATE does have a big metagame element that does derail immersion. If immersion is not your emphasis, and for a lot of gamers it seems not to be, that is cool too. I always wanted immersion traditionally. AD&D 1E was derailing my immersion. Not only that, but if you notice how the OSR overwhelmingly is spun off from B/X and BECMI and not usually 1E or 2E, it seems clear B/X is much more old school in feel than 1E even though 1E is the iconic poster child for old school D&D. I think 1E abandoned half of the old school virtues. Gary Gygax, who seemed to have been chasing the very lucrative convention tournament games, needed a codified game. You can run BECMI at a con but if people are going to compete in tournaments you cannot have arbitrary and maybe inconsistent rulings on the fly govern everything. Also, recently GMing for 12-14 year olds has shown me that structure is much better than sandbox (or at least proactive investigation) for boys that age. I think once 1E shows up, D&D is on the cusp of moving from a college freak audience to a high school and middle school geek audience. Junior high school boys are creative and imaginative but they do not necessarily have a habit of making rulings on the fly. Maybe it is just a lack of confidence. Maybe I had that skill at 13 and it has been lost due to the way games are now.



Once the 1990s came along I found the game stores just had AD&D 2E, Vampire, RIFTS, and GURPS. You could get a bit of Shadowrun, but back then it mas mechanially pretty broken. I admired GURPS but it is a prep game and I am a low-prep GM. The game store wner culture where I am is such that you cannot get them to order something for you if you wave cash and beg them. For a decade or more, gaming was in a dark age. Then the OGL and D&D SRD came out alongside 3E and that was great but flooded the market with a huge mix of good and bad products. I hated the one ring to rule them all attitude. Anyone that wants that is about as freedom loving as Sauron. (That is for drama, not an insult). When the Forge you disdain so much came along it was nice to see SOMETHING ELSE. I went through the 1980s. Then the huge variety of music became "you can listen to anything you want as long as it is fake alternative." Gaming went from a huge variety to "you can play what you want as long as it is 2E or Vampire."



I suspect the Forge was a reaction against that total lack of choice that was out there. I applauded seeing the explosion of variety, passion, enthusiasm, and an attempt at freshness and reasoning through game design. If you value a free market concept it is best to have choice. I do not want my choice to be between lemon OR lime Jello. Because I am not into top 40 pop music I WANT access to a wide variety of bands and musical genres. When I went to record stores they did not stock what I wanted then complained they did not make money. Once online shopping came along I could actually buy what I wanted to listen to. The internet opened up games. I could buy the Tunnels & Trolls, RuneQuest and other games I loved but was unable to buy in the 1990s and and found almost impossible to find in the 1980s.



I think it is logically self-evident that you are a success if you set coherent goals and achieve them. No other definition makes sense. I think those Forge guys did accomplish all but their loftiest goals, and so a bunch of them were objectively a success. Now, I agree that, unless you want to make a fantasy heartbreaker for your own group, it is necessary for other people to see it but it was so hard to do that before. The game market did not support variety in the past. Alongside 3E there did arise middle man companies that would go between game companies and lift them to distributors because distributors had olost their old engagement. Those rose and fell. Then it was extremely hard to get your game in brick and mortar stores. www.drivethrurpg.com opened up a lot but it is recent. A community IS needed but the height of the Forge is before the DriveThru becomes a strong force. I want lots of vibrant communities and I do not care if I agrfee with them all. I think you succeed as a designer if your game design does what you design it to do. You succeed as a consumer if you can accomplish the goal of buying a game that gives you what you want and need. I agree you cannot be a COMMERCIAL success if you do not sell. If you want to start a game company or have a career as a full time pro game designer then you need to make enough profit to sustain that. If you want to make a labour of love that you hope others like you will love then you need to find that niche and plug into it. The Forge people did that. I never played Dogs in the Vineyard or My Life with Master but they were more successful than Sinnabar and Lords of creation and longer lived than Arduin Adventure or Powers & Perils.



When a few games succeeded so much in choking everything out of stores, I could not succeed as a consumer. Weeds are more successful than flowers but my mom wants flowers in her garden and so as a consumer the weeds do not help her succeed at HER goals. As a game buyer the success of a game seller that kills my ability to succeed as a game buyer just infuriates me. Call me selfish. If people want to make games about pretending they are lazy cats doing nothing, I salute them as long as they are one of many choices. I would rather see 100 games on the shelf, 90% of which I hate than 2 games on the shelf, neither of which I enjoy.



Sorry for the long post but there is a lot of nuance here. Keep up the engaging videos.

tbb
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Why the hell would anyone want to play in a game where you play a teenage girl on a smoke break? What happens? What's the point? I got roped into creating a character for one of the White Wolf games (Changeling I think) and the whole time I was asking the person running it "What is this game about? What are the objectives?" They could never tell me so I didn't bother to actually play.

I had a friend (my main DM) who actually created a game, way back in the '80s, when we were kids, where you basically played yourself but stuff happened. Like in the main game I played myself and won the lottery (despite the fact that I was a minor and we didn't have the lottery back then), then various stuff happened. I remember I got kidnapped by people trying to get money and escaping and a bunch of other stuff.


It was actually a pretty cool concept and a nice thing we did to clear are pallets between D&D games.

LibraGamesUnlimited
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It seems to me that Lion and Dragon is similar to Chivalry and Sorcery.

captainnolan
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After working off and on for four years I decided just to write my own version of d&d. I picked the stuff I liked and wrote it down very simply. Added public domain art, formatted it, had LuLu make me a few copies.

It’s just what I wanted.

By the way I’m one of the people who will attempt to point out that d&d doesn’t actually require role playing.

For people with this monkey on our back that’s kind of hackneyed but even for people who play editions 2e+ it’s a revelation.

Congratulations on your basketball team beating the Americans in the NBA finals

scottanderson
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You can say that all D20 games are based off d&d that’s fair, it is not fair to associate every game that is classified as an RPG that uses dice and has attributes as being D&D like or copying d&d. The fantasy trip for instance, started as a combat war game in the same way that Chainmail did, it didn’t copy DND at all.

mattm
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I would ask what makes the potential player, or designer want to engage in this "role_play" thing?
If the answer is something that D&D actually provides (which it probably is), then the 2nd question would be why not just play D&D? If they have a good answer to that, then this is where they start looking for/ or designing a "not D&D" RPG.
Interesting video topic. Thanks.

freddaniel
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This thing looks really cool and looks like, regardless of the author's thoughts on the matter, it really *does* look like it would be awesome for adventure hooks. But, yeah, you'll have to be creative. (If you're not creative you're probably not a really good DM anyway. LOL! Being old, I have a hard time being really creative. I know too much about how things happen in the real world to really get crazy.)

MyName-tboz
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I'm glad you like D&D/D20 but it's not the end-all be-all. Some of its popularity is by name recognition alone, as well as trying to find other players that know the same system. My personal favorite is/was Interlock/Cyberpunk 2020.

luckygreentiger
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I would use some BRP variation or maybe something with D6 dice pools if I ever get off my butt writing down my own RPG ideas. I have never played D&D and I never will.

CycoSven
welcome to shbcf.ru