The Business: Making A Not-Crap RPG, Part One: Keep It Simple, Stupid

Your RPG needs to be a wargame at its core.

Let me spell that out a little more.

Your game needs:

• Players that control a specific figure, which act as a perception filter due to that figure having specific capacities.
• Players that work with limited material resources, from health to gear to special abilities- this includes time.
• Players that work with limited intelligence, meaning both Fog Of War and intelligence on the situation at hand.
• Players that work towards specific defined objectives, the acquistion of which creates a Win Condition for the scenario at hand.
• Players that have to negotiate both physical and social environments using their limited capacities and resources to achieve their objectives before some other party achieves theirs or a greater power inflicts a Loss Condition upon them that ends the present scenario.

Before you set about answering the challenges to each of these things, you need to answer this two-part question: what do your players do and how do they do it?

Let me summarize what your game needs to be at every step of answering that two-part question: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

What do your players actually need to do at the table? Are they going to be marching overland? Without the benefit of roads? Then you need a procedure for that. Are they going to get into combat with other parties? Then you need a procedure for that, along with one for injury and recovery. Are they going to be engaging in combat while using an animal or vehicle? Adjust your procedure to account for this, along with accounting for crafting and repair of vehicles (as animals will be accounted for with injury and recovery).

Note that I said "procedure" and not "mechanic".

This is because you do not need mechanics for everything, especially if you're drawing heavily from how things actually work. It is sufficient to, for example, say "A wounded man will need no less than (X) days to recovery from an injury of (Y) sort" and just crib from real world manuals and journals about how men injured in combat recovery from wounds.

What you need mechanics for are those things where the outcome is, for all practical purposes, uncertain.

This includes combat, which needs to be kept down to "Did you make contact? Did you inflict injury?" (Hit/Damage) The former matters if, and only if, it is possible to deliver status effects or similar negative outcomes without inflicting injury (e.g. touch attacks in D&D). The former matters if, and only if, the target can remain in the fight despite sustaining injury; if not, a simple Pass/Fail check will do- and can be rolled into the attack as a possible outcome for a successful attack.

You do not need to make this complicated. You can do this with a mechanic that takes one die roll and comparing the result to two static ratings--one to strike, one to injure--like we saw in the Revised & Expanded edition of TORG v1.

Then there's one more big decision to make: Character Progression.

Classes? Levels? If so, how does that go down? Make them go through mandatory training costs (gold sink) and time spent (downtime) like AD&D1e or just "DING!" like Globe of Gankcraft?

If not one or both, then is there progression at all? Skill training? Stat training? Age-based changes? Injury-based changes? Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, Champions, Mekton Zeta, d6 Star Wars, and TORG all have different answers- some differing between editions. Other games have other answers.

Pick the simplest answer that fits your gameplay loop.

You may need to tinker with it to make it work as intended, but you're making a RPG; you should expect that such work is neccessary.

Go ahead, answer all those questions. Come up with some answers, and from those answers some procedures and from those procedures some mechanics. Write that shit down. Then re-write it for clarity, because writing game manuals is technical writing so get used to it.

Are you ready to publish? HELL NO! But you are ready to test, and that means putting your design in contact with players.

That's a big can of worms, which I'll talk about tomorrow.