Heya friendos! I’ve been playing tabletop roleplaying games for a little over a decade now. They’ve phased in and out of my life, but for the past two years, I’ve been pretty consistently playing and running campaigns. Naturally, this affects the way I think about games. Let’s get into it!

How Am I Doing?

I’m doing pretty great still! As you read in my intro there, tabletop roleplaying games have been on my mind lately. There are a couple of reasons why it’s suddenly on the forefront, however.

First, the campaign I’m running had its first player death. They got destroyed during what I thought to be a relatively benign combat situation. The character’s death is a cool narrative turn in the story, but the lead-up to it was a bit anti-climactic. You see, D&D 5e combat is just kind of… bad? It’s a lot of waiting on your turn, checking rules and edge cases until you decide to just hit the bad guy with a regular attack anyway and still end up missing. There was quite a lot of that involved when suddenly one of the player’s characters just… died.

The second big reason is that Critical Role announced that their own system, Daggerheart, is now in open beta. From a business perspective, this system is a direct competitor to D&D and Critical Role has the audience to pull off a strong early launch. Naturally, I took a look and liked how they patched up a bunch of problems I have with D&D, including combat.

The third reason is last week’s newsletter. I sat down to think about the role of violence in games and how to recontextualize combat for Clysmoids. This set me off on a path to analyze how and why I’m running combat in D&D. I’m not trying to run a pacifist’s game. I do like combat as a source of conflict in the context of the wacky, high-fantasy adventure we’re running.

What I don’t like is that our shared story, with interesting interactions and creative applications of rules from players, is suddenly thrust into a two-hour-long slog of moving digital pieces on a grid and watching a number go down. Don’t get me wrong, my players still try to bend the rules in interesting ways, but 5e combat is not designed to be used that way. But what happens if you take away combat? So many of the 5e character options are based around combat, that if you don’t run it the way it is intended, there’s only a handful of class features left for players to feel smart and cool about.

So I did a little digging into alternative systems, but everything I found was either too handwavey surrounding combat rules or suffered from similar problems. Also, I don’t think I could be arsed to read a 200-page rulebook to learn a new system anyway. But could I be arsed to write one myself?

What Am I Doing?

A few weeks back, I talked about starting a setting-agnostic roleplaying system without any math. In that newsletter I described being creatively antsy, the feeling of having all this inspiration and nowhere to point it at. Because I was so unfocused, I dropped the system almost immediately, but it reared its head ever so often. That is the first clear sign for me that a project is worth investing time in.

All the ideas I had for that system came washing back now that my TTRPG brain was engaged. This past week, I’ve been writing and testing the core mechanics and I really like how it’s shaping up. The pitch is that it’s super easy to borrow or remix rules and content from official and community modules, which allows you to dynamically generate a Player’s and Game Master’s Guide. You don’t have to have 6 different books and 3 websites on hand only 15% of which is the information you need.

If you change some rules or balance some content, you can just re-generate your guides and send them to your players again. That way, the game can be as basic or as complex as you need. Same for character sheets, you can easily trim out any information that isn’t relevant as a player.

Re-inventing the Wheel

The thing is, I made a TTRPG system before. I wanted to run a campaign on Magic: the Gathering’s Ravnica, which is one of my favorite settings. Back then, I played a lot of Call of Cthulhu and I believe D&D 5e wasn’t out yet, or still in its infancy. I decided to make my own system because I’m a masochist.

I went for a percentile die system, which I think is super elegant. Basically, you roll a d10 and a d100 (a d10 with multiples of 10 on each face) and you have to roll under your skill number to succeed a challenge. That’s cool because it means your skill number directly represents the chance of succeeding, instead of having to do a bunch of arithmetic in your head. Players don’t like rolling low though. We tend to think high is good, and here it’s the opposite.

The system wasn’t particularly great, but it did the trick for a few sessions. When I leaf through it now, it’s full of glaring design flaws and stickler mechanics. What I still like about it, however, is that the character options are evocative, with rules that allow for a wide range of creative applications. The creation process in general was really free-form too.

I’m not aching to create another 55-page rulebook though. This time around, it will be rules-light, but with a strong foundation for Game Masters to build their own rules and content on top of. If you’re interested in helping me out with the core rules and official modules, let me know! I intend it to be free, open-source and community-run.

Funny enough, D&D came out with their own Ravnica module many years later. I didn’t check it out yet, but I heard it wasn’t that interesting. Also, completely unrelated, but I finally finished that Heroes of Might and Magic 5 map I was working on for a few weeks. In the microscopically off-chance you want to give it a try, you can download it here!

Why Am I Doing? (this)

I love roleplaying games. I spent a significant chunk of my time playing them, running them, designing them and watching them. I see otherwise reserved people glow up in this social context. Timid people become boisterous or charismatic. People with no other creative outlet become fantastic actors and storytellers. Emotionally constipated people learn to be vulnerable.

Rules for roleplaying games should only exist to enable those outlets. Limitations should only exist if they help players get used to their roles or grounded in the setting. Character options should give players inspiration and context to expand their character, not push them into a mold.

If I can somehow instill these principles into this system, maybe we can finally move past the confines of dungeons and find whatever beautiful thing soars in the skies beyond…