Dreaming it up

What I want from an RPG is the following:

1. SIMPLE character creation.
2. Interesting character advancement and customization.
3. Clear cut rules and simple encounter design.
4. Quick and lethal, but not too lethal, combat.
5. Easy system customization, modification, and expansion...mostly expansion.

When I started writing this I knew I wanted things, but I figured the list would be longer. Then I wrote it down I was shocked that this was all I thought of.

I'm kinda disappointed with myself.

Player Records

I love d20.
I love the "old school revolution".
I love d6.
I love Savage Worlds.

I don't really believe 'system' has anything to do with fun at the table. Well, not as much as some people believe it does anyway.

I've bemoaned the parts of RPGs that I don't like. I hate feats, I hate goofy system mechanics, I hate easily broken mechanics, I hate confusing subsystems. But, I've noticed something about my problems with systems.

The parts that erk me and cause problems at the table come in 2 flavors.
The first is badly designed mechanics. (3.0 grappling is the go-to example) That's usually an easy house-rule fix.

The second is character creation. This is the big one that I find commonly problematic in most systems.

d20 is a particularly bad offender. My belief is that character creation should take a 1st time player no more than say, 15 minutes to be up and ready to go with at least a marginal idea of what they can do well.

if only it was this easy

Now, that's not just me being lazy. I have several good reasons to want (very) easy character creation.

1. Character Creation needs to be fun, but quick because it rarely stays fun very long.

3e character creation is just too complex. If you don't do a few things right, right from the start, and plan things out well, you will not be getting into that prestige class later on. (we'll talk about advancement in a minute).  4e character creation is just...it's just horrid. It's everything 3e was but with more searching through pages and pages of unrelenting crap for that one good power. God forbid having to learn the dozens of powers.

Elf paladin.

2. If character creation is not fun, or takes a long time, the death (or even injury) of the character in-game is hard to swallow.

You ask the player to put time and energy into a character. Then, you kill them.

why did I play a bard!?

I'm not saying a GM should not kill and maim characters. Quite the contrary. The problem is that the investment to make the character is so high that losing the character is a hard pill to swallow and some players have a hard time dealing with that. If the GM decides to not kill characters (or allow them to die) then the player may lose interest in the same way that 'god mode' is only fun for a while.

3. The more complex character creation is, the more complex character advancement is.

This means that every few sessions, you get the joy of redoing the same kind of stuff you did during character creation. While gaining new powers is cool, if you gain too much from too many sources (race, class, level, prestige class, etc.) then it gets to be a lot of bookkeeping.

Thanks to the interaction of my character's race, class, and feat selection, my taxes will rock this year.

I could go on, but my point is that the player's end of the rules (especially character creation) needs to be relatively simple. 4e did a great job of making the GMs job easy, but made the player's side of things a bit nightmarish.

My goal in the future is to make sure whatever system I use requires very little in the way of character creation. I want the bookkeeping and such to me almost invisible and automatic. Not without options, but a careful balance between options and over-complication.

Sandbox: The Map, part 2

So I was working on the Map some more. I've come to a few specific decisions.

1. I don't want the islands to be too big. Each hex is about 5 miles or so. Irony games wanted them to be much larger so that each island was about the size of the British isles. That's too big for my needs. I'm good with many, small, islands.

2. Rather than the rigid 10 x10 grid, I am going to arrange them a little more chaotically. This is more aesthetically pleasing, but, that's not the main reason. The main reason is because I love world maps more than I thought. Originally, I figured this huge archipelago was in the middle of some sea and there was a main land somewhere. But, as if my mind simply rejected such a notion, a thought burst to my mind in a spray of flowers and sunshine. "What if these islands are the only land masses on the entire planet."

Do. Not. Compare. 

3. Doing a world map in Hexographer is doable, but not easy. Nor is arranging the islands from the one picture I have. I can do it, but I think I need to move it into fractal mapper to make it work. Making larger, hexographer based island maps (as opposed to maps of island chains or the world map) will be better. So in the end I want one ("pretty") world map, seven ("pretty") chain maps, and 100 or so maps of the individual islands. For now, I will focus on the world map, and then chain and island maps as they become necessary.

4. I'm going arrange the island into 7 chains plus another "group" of islands known (for now) as the "wild islands". The chains are geographic, not political, and have names familiar to people I've played with before. They are Aesir (northern), Eden (east-central), Mageddon (western), Nod (eastern), Sheol (south-central), Shinto (southern), and Zion (west-central). The wild islands are scattered all over the place. This arrangement puts Aesir, Nod, Shinto, and Mageddon in the cardinal directions and Sheol, Eden, and Zion in the middle.

5. The original Irony maps are already pre-set up with 3 nations per map. Quick math will tell you that means right at 303 nations. I may not need that many, some 'nations' may exist on more than one map, but I like the pre-set borders. Especially because several of them have 'contested' areas. In other words, areas where active wars are taking place. I need to have an easy framework to build nations, and I think I do, but more on that in another post. I am going to ignore the names of cities and towns from the original Irony maps. The maps were good, but the random name generator was horrid.