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.

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. :)

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.

See The Point System for the work-in-progress mechanics of this system.

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 from 3rd party publishers and other game systems into the SpindleWorld campaign.

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