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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 over 30 years. Why? The influences that drove me toward this idea are explored in in separate sections below.
A 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.
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.
Magic items are another area where I love to unveil the mystery: letting players figure out what they due 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 section, “it's a Pearl of Wisdom I bet!” Mystery killed, DM sad.
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. :)
Personal Aside From beginning the game playing the 1st edition rule system to, 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, the same campaign and story 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 adopting new powers and skills provided by the rule systems. As the rules systems gradually 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, reading material intended for the DM rather than the players…
Player Character Options
Another core design philosophy of this game system is that character creation and development should be a 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 from 3rd party publishers and other game systems into the SpindleWorld campaign.
Personal Aside From beginning the game playing the 1st edition rule system to, 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, the same campaign and story 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 adopting new powers and skills provided by the rule systems. As the rules systems gradually 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.