DIYRPG Game Design

A while back I tried to work out a system that lets you track overland travel on a 6-mile hex map without getting any fractions for the number of hexes traveled in a day. I did come up with one that is very simple:

• Characters move with a light load, medium load, or heavy load. (6, 4, or 2 hexes per day)
• Each hex is on average either easy terrain (full speed) or difficult terrain (half speed).

This results in six possible combinations of progress in a day, each one a whole number. (Horses would make no difference because horses only run faster than humans but walk about the same speed, and except for a few special bred and trained horses have worse endurance than humans. Every single fantasy RPG gets this wrong.)

The one thing that bothers me a bit about this system is that the speed for travel with a light load through easy terrain comes out at 6 hexes per day. Which would mean 36 miles. (50km) Such progress is absolutely possible. Some people have managed to do 100 miles in a day, and there are reports of soldiers with their equipment doing over 30 miles in a day without roads. But this would be a very big ask even of most people who walk long distances as regular exercise. And those who can do it wouldn't be able to do it more than two or three days in a row at the most.

However, what kind of people actually travel long distances with a light load? In most RPGs with encumbrance, a light load is actually really light. It's often the limit for thieves silently climbing up castle walls. With just food, weapons, and armor most PCs in many games will end up with a medium load and then you add all the travel gear on top of that. And if just one character moves at medium load speed, then the whole party does. As I see it, overland travel with light load would be very rare, and it really only makes sense for messengers. And messengers in a world where all nonmagical long distance communication is done on foot would be the 0.1% of best long distance runners in their society.

So I think saying that travel with a light load on easy terrain comes out to 36 miles per day might still be "believable enough". Normal travel speed for marching armies or traveling adventurers would be 24 miles per day and by all accounts that really isn't anything unusual for soldiers who do daily marches for hundreds of miles as a regular part of their service.

What do you think about this?

I feel that over the course of this year, the ratio of RPG related posts on Dice Camp has increasingly be going down. (Not necessarily the actual number of RPG posts.)

Are there any people who mostly post about RPG homebrew and DIYRPG related stuff you think are worth following to have in your home feed?

Should we make our own blogroll on DIYRPG? Something like on /osr reddit or OSR discord?

Interesting review of dice systems.

Though the 3.5e revised edition of D&D 3rd edition was widely regarded as a huge improvement of the game when it came out, over time it became more apparent that it actually was the start of a much greater shift than had been immediately apparent.

I still have a very great fondness for the early 3rd edition books from 2000 to 2002 which I just don't have for those that came out after the revision. The original core rulebooks have never been available in pdf to my knowledge (and you can't even find bootleg scans anymore), but the original SRD files are still around. Unfortunately they are really badly organized and formatted, but there is one website still around that has the content in HTML format, and more recently someone went through the trouble of sorting and formatting all the content as pdf and odt (pay what you want, but it would save you many hours of painful work).

But I am the first to admit that the original 3rd edition rules had real issues and that doing a revised edition was a good call. I just don't agree that all of the 3.5e changes were actually improvements to the game. With the SRD now available as an organized and formatted odt file, it's now really easy to make your own customized version of a 3rd Edition rulebook by just editing whichever parts you don't like.

What things do you think are the most unfun or just broken about the original 3rd Edition rules and how would you fix them?

I’m studying some ideas for a future hard sci-fi adventure using Mongoose Traveller 2ed and Orbital 2100, with player characters landing in Europa (Jupiter’s moon) to study the chance of life in the ocean under the moon’s icy shell.

I’m thinking about giving them some kind of submarine vessels, like a bathyscaphe or armoured diving suits, and probably a mobile base. Have any of you thought about how to design a vehicle that can be at the same time a dropship and a terrestrial base/vehicle to travel over the surface of Europa and transport the bathyscaphe to a chosen site?

For a while now I've been occasionally thinking how cool it might be to run a campaign in which the players are the captains of their own mercenary companies which have all been hired to support an army defending a realm against the monstrous horde of an evil sorcerer or warlord.

Roaming the countryside looking for the enemy, following their paths of destruction, sending out scouts to detect enemy warbands and determine suitable battlefields to engage them, defend towns from raid, secure supplies to feed their own troops, and all of that. Battles would involve each player controlling dozens or hundreds of soldiers and sending messengers between each other to coordinate, with strategy meetings and the questioning of prisoners and locals making up the bulk of the roleplaying elements.

Since you don't really need character stats for this as in a regular RPG, and the main effect of the PCs being present on the battlefield would be to boost the units they are attached to, I think it would probably be a good idea to simply design a complete system from scratch.

Though having never even played a single wargame ever, I've been wondering if anyone knows about any resources I should be checking out to get some idea about what other people in the past have found to be working well for them or not. Anything to recommend?

When you buy a TTRPG, essentially, you're getting a bundle of two (or perhaps three) things.

I'm going to put aside the third one, for now, and just talk about what I think are the big two in terms of page count: System Mechanics, and Game World.

Lots of people who are keen on system mechanics seem to feel that game world can pretty much take care of itself.

As long as the game master has a rough idea of what they want to present ("Hey, generic fantasy medieval! D&D-ish. Warcraftish. Lord of the Ringsy. Sorta like The Witcher maybe. Man, you know what I mean!") then the main bulk of the game book is preoccupied with what dice to roll in what circumstances, refering to what game system. To make things simple, adventures are often geographically isolated—an underground complex, a mountain pass, an unexplored island, an abandoned fort. Aaaand with that, we're ready to roll!

In the opposite corner, there are folks who feel that background is vital. They're happy enough with a rules-light system, just as long as the game world adheres to a particular canon. That means EITHER that the game refers to other media—films or books or comics—that the GM really should be familiar with before they get started, OR the bulk of the game book will be dedicated to conveying game world lore.

Okay—so the proposition of many rules light systems is, "rulings not rules"—in other words, the GM can develop detailed or specific rules systems on the fly, to cope appropriately with the particular path the players take.

And the proposition of many open world, or "sandboxy" systems is that the GM can develop the game world as appropriate, often according to complex tables (AD&D wilderness amd random encounter tables, I'm looking at you!) responding both to what the player charaters do, and to the development of the players' skills and objectives.

I suggest that it's quite possible to have a great deal of RPG fun in either circumstance —rulings not rules, or exquisitely defined system mechanics… emergent game world, or fabulously detailed canon. Or anything in between.

Right then. So, if we buy that, we've just established that NEITHER system mechanics NOR game world is vital to a great game. In fact, games can do without either… so can they do without BOTH?

The very existence of one-page, ultra-light RPGs suggests the answer is yes!

Okay, so if that's the case, then why do we sometimes have disappointing game sessions? We can deduce that it must be the case that the disappointment of a poor game session is simply not addressed by EITHER the game world OR the system mechanics.

So what does address the problems that result in poor game sessions? And why isn't that the main focus of game books?

I‘d love to see a combination of osr style adventure gaming (AC, classes, levels, the whole deal) and a solid life path mechanic. How could that be achieved and game-mechanized? I own a supplement for the (IMO under appreciated) osr-y 5e hack Five Torches Deep. It works, but takes a pretty abstract approach. I think, a life path system could do magic for establishing a certain milieu for an osr campaign. Instead of dumping lore on the players („3000 years ago…that’s why all knights of the order of blabla..“), the setting would be established via A) the life path „mini game“ during character creation an B) through the exploration pillar of the game. What do you think?

It's probably not controversial to say that the Dungeons & Dragons game from 1974 was the most important and influential game in the whole genealogy of all RPGs. Every game that followed was either an attempt to make a game that improves on D&D or make a game that is different from D&D. They were either a direct response to D&D, or expanded on a game system that was.

The real question is, what other games can be considered hugely influential on how people design game systems today?

Personally, I've been bouncing between several projects like a mink on methamphetamine:

• A sword-and-sandal setting for Cepheus Engine, since that ruleset gets lots of Science Fiction love and a lot less for fantasy RPGs.
• A pulp SF setting based on ideas from Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air" (which I discovered some time ago was in the public domain due to the peculiarities of American copyright law when it was published in 1951).
• An "open source" take on a Third Imperium-like setting as a way of giving back to--yet again--the Cepheus Engine community.

This is also besides thinking hard about trying to break out of my comfort zone and write a novel. Two possibilities there....

Needless to say, I'm not actually making much progress on finishing anything.

I am a sucker for holiday -themed one shots, but I find myself without anything for labor day.

Joking with my local game group, I suggested we play as goblins, trying to unionize the mine.

But I have no idea what to use for the core mechanics of a game where the goals are not acquisition and conquest.

All I've got so far is a note to maybe repurpose BitD's gang rules for our union. But even that seems like phase two. I want to start at the start; how do you get a bunch of worn out and frightened goblins to act in their collective interest? How do you make an interesting and fun game out of it? How do you keep players coming back when private security hobgoblins are threatening their PC's family?

And this has started a big discussion in my group about the role of race and racism in our games. My thought was to use a full d&d race pallette, then reveal that the races are biologically the same, and the racial attributes are just common cultural prejudice. We all liked the idea for about a minute before it felt too real. And while I trust my players, I fear that some people would get really into it in a way that reveals too much about the player's character (and not just the players's character, if you follow). But if we're not leaning into the fantasy racism, what does the fantasy genre really bring to the table? The only answers we came up with are escapism and union-busting mind flayers.

And, of course, I have (history) books full of horrible things to throw at the PCs.

But the truth is I have never even questioned that all the rpgs I play are about taking stuff and doing violence, and I don't know how to support gameplay where those things are tangential to the characters' goals.

And what goals? My inclination is to let the players set them, but can the same set of rules support both "The Revolution" and "nights and weekends off" as victory conditions?

I enjoyed this post from Idle Cartulary on their blog, and I feel like the vibe is kinda one that would fit here, essentially 'there's design preferences and having them doesn't make you morally wrong'.

Can't count the number of times that I've bumped into people who've been convinced that There Is One Correct Way to play, which is really funny to me. Anyway, I thought it was a neat way to say 'people are going to want different things from different games', which I really wholeheartedly agree with, and wish more people would talk about with their groups. I swear this is why many groups end up fighting - because they're not clear about what they're expecting to get out of the game or the style of the game before they start playing, and when that tension is revealed later, it causes arguments.

I don't know if I agree with the assertion that there's no such thing as bad design, but my disagreement is more nitpicky than anything so can probably be ignored - I'd call it bad design if your DM book says 'this book will help the DM run games!' and then is layed out or written in such a way as to obscure that goal. I see that as 'game design' as much as 'this is the way that you make characters' but I think that's just a difference in term definitions more than it is a disagreement on fundamentals. Is 5e designed badly if combat takes forever? Nope, especially not if you're one of the people who enjoys it.

Any time I'm reading a new RPG and come to the section on skills, the one question that always comes up at some point is "But how does it want to handle the whole party sneaking past guards together?"

The most simple approach is that every PC makes a skill check to avoid being seen by all of the guards, and that every guard makes a skill check to notice any one of the PCs. If only one of the guards manages to roll better than only one of PCs, the whole thing is up and the players are discovered.

And when you have four to six PCs and four to six guards, even the PCs are all much better at sneaking than the guards are at noticing, it becomes statistically very rare for the players to ever get past guards unnoticed.

What other approaches to handling such a situation with skill checks have you come across or come up with that makes sneaking past guards with the whole party a more feasible option for the players with a decent chance for success?

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