The Business: Do You Really Want To Roll Your Own? (Part One)

Let us pretend.

Let us pretend that, despite all the product on the shelves, there is nothing that you find to your liking. Yet you want to play such a game. Therefore you resolve to make your own.

Fine. Let's do this.

Getting Started

Long before you start getting into monsters, mecha, magic, machinations beyond mortal ken, and so on you ought to figure out how your product's core operations work.

You're not using an off-the-shelf game engine like a videogame project (formerly) just used Unity. You're not even deciding to code in Windows, Mac, or Linux. You're figuring out basic things like "How do I define the player character?", which is the tabletop version of "Coding the operating system".

You don't want to be the tabletop version of this. It exists.

What do you do?

See that question? That's the core of the hobby. The entire gameplay loop revolves around answering that question. The Referee tells the player what his man sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches, and (within reason) feels. This sensory input, coupled with what information the man knows and the tools he has, are what the player works with to answer that question time and again. This is straight out of Kriegspiel, decending down through Braunstein, and now it's staring at you demanding your response to the same design challenge- what do you do about "What do you do?"

The fundamentals of your product start by defining how the game recognizes the player's man- by what means does that man see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel, etc.--followed by how does the man navigate the environment.

"Wait, no, really?"

Yes, really. Long before you're talking about powers, perils, princesses, and palaces you're dealing in things this fundamental. This is not the sexy side of game design, which is why so many half-ass it by aping D&D and calling it a day- and why Ryan Dancey almost succeeded in putting an end to that stupidity over 20 years ago.

Failure to address these two things is how you get Theater Kid bullshit pushing itself as proper game products, and before that you had half-assed pseudo-games that didn't answer that challenge.

You don't want to add to the pile of failures, do you?

The Default Is Still A Fighting Man

"Okay, but that still sounds difficult."

No, it's not. There is a reason that the default adventuring character is this:

That's right, your default is a Man.

Specifically, he is a Man of Action- a Fighting Man. They are, and have always been, the primary seekers of adventure in history and legend alike.

Because you are dealing with a Man, you can define your core rules in terms of how to define a Man and his ability to navigate an environment. At this point, you are not even at the point of interactions with other mobile objects, but you will shortly so think of your definitions of a Man with those interactions in mind.

As that interaction includes combat, defining the Man means defining his capacity to act physically as well as mentally and socially.

You can see now why so many just copy someone one else and call it a day, but you're not that easily dissuaded.

Let's get into specifics tomorrow.