I've had this roleplaying game idea in my head since 2010 and after twelve years it's become clear I'm never going to do anything with it, so I want to just share it here in case anyone else is inspired to run with it.
It's a core mechanic for a paranormal investigation game.
The party is contending with a haunted house, possessed person, or other spooky phenomenon. Each character has their unique lens through which to understand the phenomenon: psychic, priest, skeptic scientist, detective, resident, and such.
The story starts before the sun sets.
Characters are defined not by a shared set of stats, but by their unique talents. Every talented is tied to the hours.
When the sun is up, talents tied to skepticism, logic, and fact-finding are strongest.
At darkest midnight, they are useless.
As the game proceeds through sunset, dusk, evening, pitch black night, and a return to daybreak, the talents that can help contend with the paranormal phenomenon shift. Everyone feels their hours of weakness and their hours of strength.
The hours dictate what is possible.
It's a mechanic that creates shifting teamwork dynamics and a rotating spotlight, which is always exciting. I think it would work well in a system that cared about linked or cumulative successes.
You're welcome to design this game! After a dozen years, I've realized I won't.
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Imagine stumbling into a fairy ring that belongs to the fairy mafia. An enchanting being appears, smile wide enough to reveal rows of sharp and glistening teeth, and it remarks, "Why, traveler, you look positively destitute! I have just the thing!"
It turns its palms up, revealing fistfuls of gold coins. Gold coins falling to the moss below. Gold coins all around you.
"Borrow whatever you'd like! Just bring it back by the next full moon, alright, my sweet?"
That's when you notice its necklace of withered human fingers.
You take a handful of gold coins, because you really do need the money. As long as you pay this strange creature back before the next full moon, nothing bad will come of it.
Now, obviously the fairy is trying to trick you. You know that! But you're confident you can outwit it.
Another thread in my series of game design threads:
I want to talk about what The Forge meant for me, as a new roleplaying game designer getting started in 2005.
I don't think it was perfect, but it definitely shaped my career and life. This thread is mostly autobiography!
At its core, The Forge was a site that hosted game design theory articles and a community forum for analyzing play and design, and it was live from 1999-2012. It was dedicated to independent, creator-owned RPGs. It also organized projects that spilled out into the real world.
While in high school, my friend group spent the better part of a year trying to start a D&D campaign. It kept crashing and burning. We would have arguments about the rules, about how beholden we were supposed to be to existing lore, and about how the game was supposed to feel.
🎲✏️✨ Making an Income as an Independent Tabletop Roleplaying Game Designer 📚💸📈
I've been designing/self-publishing tabletop roleplaying games for 14 years. I've experimented a lot with design approaches, publishing formats, & funding strategies. I've learned from mistakes.
I started as a teen who was barely covering costs, but now my game design work is the primary income source for my family. I've had a lot of privilege and luck in my corner, which partially accounts for my success, but I've also developed a lot of knowledge I can share with you.
I want to open with a piece of advice, and I encourage aspiring designers to really sit with it for a while, and to re-visit it often: know why you're designing games.
Is it to make cool things to share with friends? To become a career writer? To give back to your community?
I want to talk a little bit about the tools I use to do tabletop roleplaying game design, and the process by which I use them.
I know that everyone's process is different, but maybe learning more about mine will be inspiring or helpful for how you approach your next project!
For me, the thing that kills my love for a project the quickest is feeling stuck and tired, and I encounter this ever time I sit down in front of a blank page and try to just *force* writing out of myself.
As a result, I work really hard to avoid the dreaded blank page.
The first phase of a design, for me, is always a mixture of idle musing in my own brain + two-way exploratory conversations over tea with loved ones.
Even if I have specific mechanics forming in my brain, I try not to put anything on paper until I have a vision, a desired feel.
When I was first getting into roleplaying games, @PaulCzege's My Life with Master (released 2003) was the first game to truly ignite my imagination. Its text was both atmospheric and conversational. Its design was spare and built upon emotional landscapes. It had an endgame!
Next, I discovered Shock: Social Science Fiction, released 2006 by @JoshuaACNewman. At first, I found the writing alien! I'd never seen neo-pronouns before! But Shock's setting matrix was fascinating - it enlisted the players in defining both the themes and verbs of their story.
My Life with Master invited players to think about, take ownership of, and extend its aesthetics. Shock invited the players to do the same with its material analysis of how technologies inevitably transform human relations. Those invitations both strike me as profound even today.