Comments | kerin: hgrph

kerin

hgrph

Aug 15, 2008 18:37

Sometimes I wonder what the fuck I was thinking about, building my own game

This is driving me insane.

Ironically, what's giving me the most trouble is the classes and spells - which I'd need to come up with for D20, anyway. erg.

I'm having pretty severe attention span issues, as well; I think I've touched on the subject here, but to sum up I tend to ( Read more... )

Comments 6

corduroybard August 16 2008, 22:13:26 UTC

I said it before and I'll say it again. I love you like a brother, but the classes, spells, and combat system is the game. Short of that you're just designing a world. This is not a bad thing. Really, it isn't. I tried to design my own game, stopped and realized that systems benefit from collaborative creation whereas worlds can be developed independently with much more freedom and a greater degree of ease.

From the issues you seem to be having, I think you would very much benefit by finding an existing system to which you might apply your world, and work from there.

kerin August 17 2008, 00:01:23 UTC

but the classes, spells, and combat system is the game. Short of that you're just designing a world.The classes, spells and combat system are the part that is driving me mad - although the core combat rules are done. At this point I need to finish three classes (one of which is already started) and I'll be ready to move into playtesting ( ... )

corduroybard August 17 2008, 00:32:38 UTC

Well, the skills don't bother me so much as the way 3 and 3.5 stack them. Stick with d20 Modern, d20 Past, or d20 Future though (the original books written for the system) and you'll have a better time ( ... )

kerin August 18 2008, 01:25:27 UTC

My point was mostly that D&D3/d20 characters innately have several skills purpose-built to replace or bypass conversation and/or interaction, and neither D20 Modern nor D20 Past do away with that.

The rules I'm working on are - well, I'd describe them as minimalist. Maybe if I get lucky I can keep them that way.

corduroybard August 18 2008, 21:29:23 UTC

Good luck, everyone's tried. Hackmaster didn't. They just have rules for everything you can dream up. Minimalist ironically is what gave birth to d20 and its ilk and now to 4th. Trouble is the more minimal you try to make things, the more gray areas appear. Into this void steps house rules, rules lawyers, and loopholes. House rules is what gave birth to the plethora of first ed.'s children. The other two are non-beneficial.

kerin August 19 2008, 00:50:02 UTC

I think maybe you should turn that frown upside down, man. And you were always on my case for being too negative!

Three Point Five only gets broken-complicated when you start dealing with the clusterpile that is the combat maneuvers, grid mechanics, and status effects - oh, and the bonus-stacking gets a little bit crazy after a while because basically it meant as soon as your group hit third level you were recalculating applicable bonuses multiple times per round on twelve axes.

Axes as in... axis, plural.

Rules lawyers will lawyer if they are at the table: full stop. The rules are, in such cases, fully incidental to the lawyering process.

The only thing that works is making the people not want to lawyer, and the best way to do that is to make the game over sixty percent dialogue. (only partly kidding ( ... )