Designing my own RPG
So, let’s get to it. I was thinking in the car a while ago (I’m not sure when; this was an idea that got put in my +5 Journal of Pretentiousness) about my propensity for rules tweaks.
Well, if I’m tweaking so much, I must not be satisfied. Clearly (he said sotto voce) I should design and write my own game.
Right?
What would it be?
Well, I can tell you. It would, first of all, be a lot like GURPS, in that it would definitely be a point-buy system of some sort.
It would have resolution separately for attacks and defenses. Like GURPS now. I like that, and would choose to retain it.
It would also make extensive use of some sort of scaling table. As I’ve said before, if the answer to your question in GURPS isn’t the Size-Speed/Range table, you’re probably asking the wrong thing. I would definitely do this for lifting ablity, so that each level of strength would be a constant multiple over the one before it. That would avoid the current quirk present in very high levels of GURPS ST being marginally inferior on a point-by-point basis.
And about that: the name for my tentatively considered game would be the dB System (decibel). I’d want to use ten steps for the range table, and likely d10 for the roll types. I like bell curves, though . . . more on that later.
While deliberating my dB-scaled version of the Scaling Table, it occurred to me that the GURPS version of this type of chart uses six steps per order of magnitude. Now, this could be a few things:
- Each step is roughly 50% more than the next one, chosen as a meaningful step and that worked out to roughly six steps per factor of 10 (1.47x, or the sixth-root of ten)
- GURPS uses d6’s, and thus it makes sense to have six steps per each order of magnitude
- It provided the right split of resolution and differentiation, and happened to land on six divisions.
But the real reason I wouldn’t do it is that I don’t have the skills required to bring what I’d think of as a NextGen RPG to market. Most of the gaming I do these days is on a Virtual Table Top of some sort. Roll20 or MapTool, to be precise.
One more advantage of the digital format would be the elimination of the requirement to roll multiple dice to get a satisfactory
Also . . . I’m having a pretty good time creating for GURPS Fourth Edition. I like the people I interact with, I understand what I’m doing, and I can do it on my own time. So when all is said and done, my nascent decimal/decibel scaling mechanic that allows butterflies and T-Rexes with equal ease will stay nascent. I’ll have fun playing and creating for the system I enjoy greatly. “Well . . . that’ll be an interesting day.”
-Jayne Cobb
Of course, you could convert that norminv(rand()) into a dice-based table. I've done this for some other games I'm working on.
When I think of what I want to do in RPGs that GURPS doesn't handle, though, it usually turns out to be easier to break GURPS and replace it with the thing I want to try than to write a whole new game.
Thumbs up man … and good luck.
In case you would need a tester or just brainstorming buddy, I would be happy to help ocasionaly…
Just please dont create some unshaped, hard to interpret and shy hybrid of GURPS, as happened to JAGS.
Don't worry – I won't be creating one at all, I suspect. I like GURPS, I like writing for it, and I like tinkering with it. It's such a fine framework from which to hang rules mods off of.
My 2011 idea notes have that one, except I declared the scale factor to be exactly 1.26, which is both sf^3 = 2 and sf^10 = 10, in order to simplify scaling rules. It went along with d10 replacing d6 and setting the attribute averages to 16 for better damage granularity and human/animal separation.
No fair– another reductio ad absurdum post! 🙂
If you're going to reducto, you might as well reducto in the general direction of absurdity.
My son is trying so hard to come up with his own system, but often comes up with Gurps mechanics. When I point it out, he backtracks and try something else. I'm going to send him this post so he gets to read the last part!