Roleplaying Games Design

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Welcome to Roleplaying Games Design!

This community is for discussing all things related to designing roleplaying games.

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Enfors@lemm.ee

Community introduction (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by Enfors@lemm.ee to c/rpgdesign@lemm.ee

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Hello there, fellow RPG designer!

If you're anything like me, you too love to discuss roleplaying game mechanics, and how they affect gameplay. That is precisely the kind of thing we'll get to do in this community. Personally, I'm currently working on a roleplaying game that I'm so far calling Unified RPG which I sort of think of as a "rules-lite, GURPS-like" TTRPG. So don't be surprised if you see me creating posts about that here in the near future.

But what about you? What brought you to this community? What kind of game are you working on, or what do you want to make in the future? I'd love to hear all about it!

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[–] Mot 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah. A hack is usually a little more than just a modification, but there's no strict definition or anything.

I basically like the way Knave is, but there's a few things that I found didn't work well at my table.

Item choice paralysis. Do you buy/carry a hammer? Nails? Chalk? Ink? An hourglass? ... There's like 36 odds and ends in the game (100 in 2e.)
One use per day spell books. Knave 2e solves this with Int uses of spell books but I mixed it with:
Ability to lose items. A character built around a concept should retain the ability to use that.

So I changed some things.

We use item kits. These are quantum bags of items related to a purpose. Say a climbing kit or an alchemy kit.
Item kits can be tracked with item slots as they are, but most kits will be like 2-3 slots so it makes more sense to cut the number in half and stop varying size of items.
Having cut the number of things to track in half, Art slots are added back in. These represent proficiencies/abilities that can't be lost. Most of them literally are just kits but they can't be taken away. So a Climbing Art does what a climbing kit can do (save for things like pass an item around since this is a personal ability).
I use a standardized art point system so all arts consume these points to activate.

There's some knock on effects too. So I have different ability scores for instance.