What's Happened to December?

I realized that it's been ten days since my last column, and it's been a busy week and a half. The odd thing about working academic IT is that there really is no down time. When students and faculty are around, you're spending all your time supporting them and their classes. When students and faculty leave, you spend all your time doing the things you couldn't do because the students and faculty were in the way. Suffice to say, I've been busier this past week and a half than I have (work-wise) the previous month, so I'm not getting a lot of gaming work done.

I have pecked away at Grapeshot & Grognards some, however. I've written sections on a number of appropriate character archetype definitions, and the sorts of adventures they might find suitable. I've also been contemplating rules for, if not resolving mass combat, at least how to handle probably the most problematic of Napoleonic-era combat mechanics; dealing with PCs in a massed combat with regards to resolving musketry and cannon casualties. When I posted my first G&G column back in the day, a pointed comment was to the effect that, in such huge, impersonal battles, how do you handle PCs and their heroics when a blast of grapeshot or a volley of musket-fire can wipe out whole files of men? PCs can hardly be expected to lead Aragorn-esque heroic charges against a line of cannons when the most likely outcome will be getting cut in half by an eight-pound cannonball. And yet, these sorts of heroic acts are the basis of countless tales of heroism in the gunpowder age, right up through into modern times, with soldiers weathering machinegun and mortar fire to win the day when others all around them are being cut down.

I'll have more to post about this as the time comes. In other news, I've got several other good ideas for campaign settings to develop for the T&B RPG, and another "in the works" post will have to come some time down the road. I'm also taking a hard look at revitalizing my Castles & Crusades campaign, which has been dormant since the summer. My spring course work doesn't start up until almost the end of January, so I've got plenty of time to focus on getting some good gaming work accomplished before grad school rears it's ugly head again (although with my third class under my belt right now, I'm sporting a 4.0 GPA in my graduate coursework).

Anyhow, not a lot in the last few paragraphs, but I hope to get some more work (and more columns) up as soon as possible.

To Be or Not To Be, Another Lite Generic RPG

So, in last week's post (see below), I talked about the future of my own homebrew RPG system. As mentioned, after a conversation with Rob Lang (of Free RPG Blog infamy), I've come to face the inherent pitfalls and dangers in writing what is, in the end, Yet Another Generic Rules Lite Fantasy-esque RPG system.

This is a creature more common than your average cockroach, and just as underfoot if you spend any time digging around areas rife with DIY role-playing games. Rob's most astute and 100% true suggestion for finding some way to make one's creation more unique and noticeable is to forgo the generic-ness to a great degree and create a setting that will put the best elements of one's system on display.

There's just one problem with this.

I like the idea of creating a generic rules-lite fantasy-esque RPG system.

Such was the idea from the very get-go almost seven years ago, when I started writing a Sword & Sorcery homebrew as an alternative to the much crunchier RPG system I had written and used for a couple of years previously. And although the system went through numerous incarnations, the idea still remained the same, because light-to-mid crunch RPG systems are my gaming sweet spot, and the idea of having one system that I'm very familiar with, that I could apply to any genre that struck my fancy (historical, fantasy, light sci-fi) sounded great.

So now I find myself at a crossroads. On the one hand, I would find great utility and great satisfaction of writing for myself my own RPG system, and since this has been so long in the making, I'd like it to be finished some time this decade. On the other hand, I am aware of the fact that, as written, it is really just "another generic system" that really is nothing astounding or revolutionary; no one's going to stop playing their favorite system and leap to playing mine just because I publish it.

There is one middle ground that I have been considering for a while now, a sort of "eye of the needle" that I might be able to pass through and still make this work. I'd long considered releasing "campaign primers" for the game, essentially short supplements showing how to implement the RPG core rules into certain specific genres or settings. In one short column I had from last February I talk about the idea of creating a Napoleonic-Era RPG, and I've also had a number of other campaign ideas I'd like to explore.

The possible solution comes from a somewhat unlikely source: GURPS. While this pretty heavy-crunch RPG is almost the antithesis of what I'm trying to accomplish with my core rules, the GURPS Lite PDF is, I think, a marvel of RPG efficiency engineering. Every major element of GURPS that you'd need to run a basic campaign can be found in that one 32 page document. To boot, several of their product lines, such as GURPS WW2, GURPS Transhuman Space, and GURPS Prime Directive, are known as "Powered By GURPS" product lines. The idea being to make the product line less an addition to the GURPS core rules, and go the opposite direction - have the "core of the core" (GURPS Lite) be the additional material that powers the rest of the campaign setting.

So, here's what I'm thinking...

1. Take the Core Rules document that I've got currently in rough draft status. Polish it up, and perhaps remove a few of the more setting-specific optional rules (firearms, sci-fi weapons and armor, etc.).

2. Create one historical setting (probably Grapeshot & Grognards) as the test-bed for the validity of the campaign setting. I want to do a historical setting first, because it allows me to forego having to worry about magic or strange monsters or sci-fi elements, and focus on providing rules for real-world situations. Something set in or around the Napoleonic Wars also fits in well with the episodic campaign framework that the T&B RPG promotes.

3. If the first setting works out well enough, continue the trend with other "Powered by Tankards & Broadswords" settings. I've already got an idea for a fantasy setting rattling around my head, revisiting an old setting that I created a number of years ago that could use a face lift. After that, other settings in various genres can come along as they appeal to me (I list a few examples of genres or settings I'd like to look at in this post from back in July).

4. In conjunction with #3, work on expanding various semi-generic rules supplements such as the "magic book", the "monsters book", maybe even a "sci-fi book". Again, one of the big strengths of GURPS isn't, I think, their rules; it's the modularity of the system, the ability to cherry-pick from their sourcebooks and settings and rules additions to take what you want and leave the rest (and how many of us own GURPS sourcebooks while having never run a GURPS game?).

So, anyhow, that's the plan I've got rattling around in my head at the moment. Might work, might not. We shall have to see.

December is Back to Game Design Month

So yeah, I pretty much disappeared in November. However, I knocked my final project out of the ball park - so much so that I was waived from having to take the final exam, which makes me very happy. So now I've got six weeks grad school free. Oddly enough, this coincides with me wrapping up the first draft of the Tankards & Broadswords RPG core rules document, and also with me having a lot of miniatures lined up to be painted, so I hope it's going to be a busy six weeks for me.

One thing that has spurred a lot of work on my gaming agenda is a conversation I had via Google Wave with Rob Lang, who writes the Free RPG Blog. Rob had agreed to review the first draft of the T&B core rules for me, not for his blog but as a general informal friendly read-through so I could get some constructive feedback. While Rob thought that it was conceptually a solidly-designed game, he also felt that it didn't contain anything "catchy"; ultimately, it was Just Another Free Generic Rules-Light (pseudo)-Fantasy RPG. And I write that capitalized because, let's face it, there are probably hundreds of Free Generic Rules-Light Fantasy RPGs out there today, and if mine doesn't have something that will really kick a reader in the teeth and make them take notice, it will just languish in a bland, pablum-esque mediocrity for all time.

So Rob and I discussed this issue at some length, and next week I'll have another post dedicated to how I'll be looking at turning the T&B RPG around into something a little more exciting. In the meantime, I present to you this post from Rob's Blog on Tuesday about just this issue. I'm also re-posting the link to a column I wrote way back when about (ironically enough) my case against generic systems, and Rob's argument against making free rules lite generics holds very true to my own arguments (i.e., the rules-lite generic requires so much work to get to a suitable weight of campaign-specific information that you might as well just find a dedicated rules set that meets your needs). Taking my own advice? What's that?

While at first I will admit that I was a little disheartened, three things made me feel a lot better. First, Rob was able to point this out to me, and legitimize a sneaking suspicion that I didn't want to acknowledge for a long time about what I was working on. Second, while this means I'll have to take the game in a new direction, I'm doing that now, while the game is still in the first draft stages, rather than when I've got it completely written and laid out and have accumulated all the artwork. And third, my plan for breathing a little new life into this project will involve a campaign setting I made some time ago that I have always thought some of my best work, and I can't wait to get back to it and polish it up again.