So I’ve been spending many weekend nights working on my next tabletop roleplaying game, and frankly, it isn’t going well. My writing sucks. There’s no way I would release this to the public, even for free.
I would likely die from embarrassment.
But I still stand by the concept, and I feel the game has merit. But I do need to go back to the beginning, take a hard look at what I’m doing, and maybe just stick with the tried-&-true, rather than try to shove in my custom system tweaks.
What do I mean by that? Well, most “Powered by the Apocalypse” games use five attributes to describe their characters, while I was trying to cut that down to only three. I was also doing something different with character advancement than the usual system does. All of these changes were frankly unnecessary, and in the case of the attributes, more to bring my game in line with my flagship game that I designed back in the mid-1990’s.
None of these changes really brought anything new or innovative to the system, and are getting tossed.
So I’m going to break out my copy of “Simple World”, which is a framework and walkthrough for designing your own PbtA hacks, and I am going to build my game from there. This will allow me to focus on the setting, designing the playbooks (archetypes), and building the oracle tables, rather than “reinventing the wheel” with the core system elements.
Anyway, I still suck at this.
