Tabletop RPGs [/stylebookinsistsIspellthisout] or “Role Playing Games” [/stylebook] are a popular format of ‘board’ game that one plays with pencil, paper, and dice. Or sometimes cards and dice. Or sometimes on an actual board, though that is rarer; though much less rare is a gridded game mat one sketches on with erasable markers, for make-do terrain, or a set of dungeon rooms and corridors, and usually populated with snack crumbs and small cast figures representing players & “monsters”. The miniatures are optional, as is most of the rest, dice included. There are a lot of variations, which only makes sense because Tabletop RPGs are 50 years old at this point, and draw from various wargaming traditions (simulating battles using representational miniatures) that can be dated to the 1780s and popular (within its niche) through the 19th century, along with “role play” parlor games that date back to at least the 1930s, if not further.
The basics that you absolutely need are one player to take the role of group facilitator and arbiter (a “Game Master”, also stylized “Dungeon Master”, as it is in perhaps the oldest and most popular RPG, Dungeons & Dragons), enough other players to take on the roles of the story characters (I recommend at least two, but no more than seven), and play sessions where these Player Characters join the Game Master in telling a developing narrative, over the course of a single session or several sessions.
Am I done with exposition yet? Has the stylebook been appeased? Y’all know what RPGs are, right?
I’ve been collecting rule books for various RPG systems since my teens. Other than D&D, I didn’t actually play many of them, though I was always the DM for my groups through middle school and high school, so I’d run several campaigns and knew 2nd edition inside & out. The group I started to DM during our freshman year at Tech played a half dozen or so sessions, then decided to migrate to a lab in the College of Computing basement where we’d telnet into Arctic MUD [wikipedia entry; see also mud.arctic.org] on amber-screened IBM terminals—which is still the best way to play an MMO, honestly, sitting in the same room with your friends while you do it (text-only and CRTs totally optional; some things are better now).
But even after moving largely to computer MMORPGs and sticking with those on and off (mostly off) ever since, I was still buying the core rules and various source books for a lot of different systems, and reading these RPG source books as what amounted to a small, but fun, game-adjacent hobby. I don’t think I’m the only person that does this, just based on how many books are sold vs how many people actually GM for a group on a somewhat regular basis.
The thing about reading a bunch of rule books, though, is that your game-brain gets stretched in a lot of different directions and you start meta-gaming the games. Thinking about similarities and differences, and even backfilling from computer RPGs, and you start to get ideas. If you already have “house rules” and homebrew parts of your preferred ruleset to suit player preference (or to “fix” “glaring errors” in the original) you’re halfway there already. At some point, dissatisfaction with available alternatives—or the need for a specific feature or mechanic that won’t quite fit otherwise—will lead many game enthusiasts to develop their own game system from scratch. Though I hadn’t really thought along these lines in a decade or more, or touched a rule book, quarantine gave me a lot of time to think—and to fill. I found myself feeling a pull, to get back to gaming, and while I was playing WoW Classic and enjoying that, it also didn’t quite scratch that specific gaming itch. So I dug up the old books (and bought more recent editions) and read and re-read and opened up a new folder and file on my computer and started writing down the ideas.
More than anything else, my initial seed for the system started with the idea that you shouldn’t have to rebuild everything if there were systems or settings you could just borrow wholesale. So it wasn’t so much about how to play any one type of RPG under a specific set of rules, but how to get different systems to talk to each other and play nice, or nicer, with each other. And that would be a very lightweight ruleset, basically defining one actual system mechanic with some sample translation tables (from 3d6,d20 to the “in-between” descriptive system, for example) to show how other games could all “talk” to each other. So if you like one character creation regime, but wanted to use a different combat resolution schema, and a world setting from a 3rd source, you could frankenstein those parts together using the ideas presented in what could probably be boiled down into a single page RPG “ruleset”[sic].
But then I thought, “Well OK but what if you wanted use this mechanic as is, without borrowing — what’s the minimum viable game look like?” and of course down that path lies madness
I am not sure where this will end up. The game system that started as a “lightweight” or even single-page idea is still in there somewhere but I have a whole system developing now. The worldbuilding bug decided to take a bite, too, while I had my whole ass hanging out, so now that Game System has it’s own World Setting (at least, the draft of one) and I’ll be working on things like character classes (or alternatives to classes) and character heritage & backgrounds (we prefer “background” to things like the classical fantasy “races”, because who’s to say a Elf raised by Dwarves wouldn’t be a whiskey-swilling blacksmith with a Why-Is-Scotland-in-Middle-Earth accent, a two-bit two-handed battleaxe they like to use called “Trollstumper”, and a perpetual hangup over not being able to grow a decent beard like a proper member of their people).
My fantasy world setting probably won’t have Elves or Dwarves anyway. I’m not even sure if there will be analogues for either, though I’ll include allowances. Though the rule set, separate from the setting, will have Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and whatever else lives in the public domain as backgrounds, both for the sake of being kind-of-generically-complete but also as the best way to introduce the game concepts to players (and new-to-this-setting GMs). We’ll start with what is familiar and ground things before taking off over the far horizons.
So that’s the scope of work for what will be likely months-to-years(?) of me fiddling with this thing and piling on and whittling away and whatever other metaphorically-used verbs can be applied to outlining, drafting, and writing. As for what it’s called?
I’m recycling “Amphithael” as the name of the fantasy world setting. I’m also recycling most of the world already built under that name as well, though that map will likely change and comprises only a fourth or so of what will be my new fantasy globe.
And: The rule set. I’m calling it “System15”—this is a placeholder name, and I borrowed that general idea and the numeral 15 from Randall Munroe and XKCD, “Standards”. We all know there are too many competing RPG systems already, we do not need another no matter what the author claims about the system being “comprehensive” “flexible” “genre neutral” “universal” and probably tasting minty fresh while leaving your kitchen surfaces gleaming. So System15.
