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rules:no-dice:why [2022/02/07 17:58] – [Preserving the Mystery] Jobrules:no-dice:why [Unknown date] (current) – removed - external edit (Unknown date) 127.0.0.1
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-====== Why a whole new game system? ====== 
  
-In February of 2022, long after we'd stopped playing this D&D campaign, I decided to embark on an experiment to design a new RPG system to adapt for use with my D&D campaign. Should I ever decide to resurrect my life-long D&D campaign, it would be my intent to transplant this rule system under the ongoing campaign that has spanned almost 40 years.  Why?  The influences that drove me toward this idea are explored in separate sections below. 
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-//**Personal Aside** I suppose this D&D campaign could be said to have started in 1981, when I was only 11 years old and my friends' father had introduced us kids to the game playing 1st edition with a run through one of the classic TSR adventures.  I was hooked, and it wasn't long before I was sketching maps on graph paper, jotting down notes of the room contents, drawing pictures, and the like in my alone hours after school in preparation for running a game of my own with friends.  Although, in reality, that wouldn't come until a few years later.  Meanwhile, my friend, Mike Lean, ran the game among us middle-schoolers, he was the son of the father who'd introduced us to the game, and I'll never forget my first character, a paladin named Chanti.  After a move from Olympia, Washington to Santa Monica, California, I found myself a bumpkin kid from the Pacific Northwest in the land of tinsel, glitter, in an alternative school with the sons and daughters of the entertainment business. I was a cultural fish out of water for sure with no friends, and so I spent my time after school in my own fantasy world imagining dungeons, adventures, reading lots of D&D books, and producing a fair bit of maps, and adventure notes that would eventually form the basis of my D&D campaign around about 1983 I'd say, when I found some friends willing to roll up characters and play the game: Paul Shoden, Atticus Rotoli, and Chris Kessler.// 
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-===== Preserving the Mystery ===== 
-As the DM, the number one joy I get from the game is unfolding the mystery: revealing some long held secret or plot hook, and the longer I've held onto it, or the more significance to the story, the better.  The problem I've experienced though, is that since D&D is the most widely known RGP in the world, almost every player you meet has read some of the books, adventures, etc. and so as a DM I adapt and change the classic campaign material, like Greyhawk, or the Forgotten Realms, to fit my own campaign and make irrelevant much of what the players may have read. But still, I love to adapt and run classic D&D modules, and with those all easily available online these days, unscrupulous players can easily read your playbook.   
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-Magic items are another area where I love to unveil the mystery: watching players figure out what they do through research or experimentation has provided hours of fun.  I personally hate it when a treasure item is found, and a player will immediately begin trying to guess what it is from having read the DMG Magic Items chapter, "it's a Pearl of Wisdom I bet!" Mystery killed, DM sad.   
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-So, one of the primary goals of crafting an all-new system, is to keep the secret DM stuff secret, so there is no online SRD that players can search to steal my fun. :)  
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-//**Personal Aside** As the successive D&D rule editions became more complex, players became more invested in game mechanics, character builds and theory crafting, and this inevitably led to them reading the wealth of printed material to find interesting feats and the like, and intentionally or not, read material intended for the DM rather than the players... // 
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-===== Why No Dice? ===== 
-A lot could be written on this topic, pros and cons, and in fact already is online. My own personal interest in converting my D&D campaign to a new system that doesn't use dice actually stems from being a player in Paul Shoden's RuneQuest game.  He pioneered an innovative concept of "play yourself," the premise of which was to create a RQ character sheet of yourself by analyzing what would be your actual stats and skills if you were magically transported to Glorantha.  While super-fun as a role playing experiment, I found myself frustrated when, as a player, I'd attempt to complete a task that I know I am capable of routinely in real life, only to fail at it in the game because of a bad dice roll.  That got me to thinking of a system where players can exert their own influence over the game, not through good or bad random rolls, with probability of success determined by the power level of their character, but by an economy of "Fate Points," or something similar.  The core idea is that a character has some reservoir of points to spend to succeed in tasks like combat actions, inventing things, having a successful parlay with an NPC, whatever.  The less powerful the character, such as with one newly created, the fewer points they would have to spend, with their pool gradually increasing as they grow in power.  Perhaps they have skill or talent-specific point pools in addition to an overall precious few floating points? Regardless of the form the play test mechanics actually take once created, players should be able to spend these points to achieve success in their endeavors, but not have so many points that they can automatically succeed in everything.  This is intended to allow the player the ability to choose which events in the game they will likely succeed in, and what failures they are willing to endure.  Another key element envisaged is that there is an opposing difficulty controlled by the DM, and a double-blind allocation of points.  For example, say a character has some number of points to spend on an action.  The DM secretly assigns a point level difficulty to the task.  Once this is set, the player "bids" how many points they are going to allocate towards succeeding in that action.  Once that's done, the DM reveals how many points success in that activity takes on a sliding scale like, "that turned out to be a difficult task and takes 3 points to succeed."  The number of points the player bid will determine success or failure.  In the same way the characters each have point reserve pools, so too do NPCs as a way to set their power level, and as well whole adventures, encounters or scenes that are only known to the DM.  
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-See [[rules:no-dice:point-system|The Point System]] for the work-in-progress mechanics of this system.  
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-===== Player Character Options ===== 
-Another core design philosophy of this game system is that character creation and development should be rich and enable players to create character concepts that are only limited by their imagination.  Generally speaking, and writing this before writing the actual rules of character creation, I envisage a point-buy system like the original Champions RPG, which featured the same point-pool to spend from, and stats and powers, each with assigned costs, and a system of disadvantages to provide additional points to spend for those willing to go over budget.   This system should also make it trivial to make an approximate conversion of an existing character from any D&D edition, or even another game system, to allow integrating personalities or other game material from 3rd party publishers and other game systems into the SpindleWorld campaign.  
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-//**Personal Aside** From beginning the game playing the 1st edition rule system, to adopting 2nd Edition, to a six-year long hiatus after my son was born, and then converting all the characters to 3.5 Edition, then another hiatus due to interpersonal conflicts, to resurrecting the game briefly using the 5th Edition rule system, then putting in on permanent pause again due to interpersonal conflicts, the same campaign and story has persisted throughout.  The player characters, some spanning decades of play, had underwent many changes through the conversions, from more powerful to less and back again, and adopted new powers and skills provided by the rule systems.  As the rule system editions each became more complex, players became more invested in game mechanics, character builds and theory crafting.  While in my own opinion this has had the potential to overshadow the actual story of the game, particularly while we played 3.5 Edition, on the positive side, it is the one area of the game where players have the same control of the game mechanics as the DM does for other aspects of the game, and it should feature prominently in the design of any new game system. // 
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