Weekly Update - 224 - 6/24/24

Comic this week? Yeah I think so! Page 200 celebration time! Let's goooo!

Art Queue: Page 200

Art Stack: Frey, Snowball

Playing: WoW

Ramble:

Just kidding! It's not a ramble at all, but rather, a formal introduction to the God Slayers: TTRPG! That also just happens to be a ton of rambling... I thought about doing this in a separate post, but nah. It's not really all that formal of an announcement. These are just yet more meandering thoughts of an indie creator.

Introducing the God Slayers: TTRPG

It's time to talk about this thing in way more detail! I've been working on it for quite a while, and I've been hammering on it in earnest since probably about November. The rough draft sits at about 160 pages, but it's still missing a some stuff, and it's probably also got a lot of redundancy in it. I think, though, it's at a point now where I'm finally ready to begin sharing it, at least in parts, starting with the Patrons at the $10 tier and above, and opening it up to more of you as I get more feedback/feel more confident in what it is that I've created.

So far I think I've decided that everything in regards to this system will eventually be posted here on Patreon, shared to the GS: TTRPG tag. Initially releasing it in parts, to get targeted feedback on its components. I'll probably post the first section... this week I hope. Explaining the core ruleset around which everything else is based.

Here I'll start with sharing the core goals and ideas I've come up with to base nearly everything in the game around. I've only shared some of my ideas with a few people so far, and this is me sharing them with only a few more (with some overlap). I'm admittedly scared my ideas are bad, but please, don't YOU be scared to tell me if you think they are bad! I'd rather return to the drawing board and try something else than commit to a mistake.

Reinventing the Wheel

I often tell myself that's basically what I'm doing with this, just reinventing the wheel, which for me also answers the question of "why do it at all?" Some of you have suggested I just use an open license preexisting ruleset to save time, but... that really defeats the whole purpose for me. I play a lot of games, I spent ten years working in the games industry, and I have a great deal of thoughts and opinions on game design, soooo, I've been designing this system from the ground up. It took me a very long time before I was able to set aside some of the concrete, established rules we associate most closely with tabletop games and come up with something that I think is finally kind of unique. I know some people don't like changes to the Tried and True, and I think a lot of game designers tend to lean heavily on the things most gamers find familiar because they are the easier and also the safer option. When the end goal is to sell as many copies as possible, you don't want to alienate potential buyers by being weird.

However, if the success of indie games is any indication, gamers like new ideas too, and I can take the risk of trying something entirely new and seeing if it works. If it doesn't work, oh well. I've invested nothing into it but my own time. Maybe someone else can then take my ideas and use them as inspiration to make something better. I'd still count that as a win, for sure. At the end of it all I am just... so bored with the standard tabletop RPG model. I don't know if I'm the person that can do better, but I firmly believe we, collectively as a species, can do better, and I think it's important that we at least try.

Gameplay vs Roleplay

I guess the issue I have with so many old game systems is their mechanics often seem to exist in spite of the roleplay, rather than as a supplement to it. Nothing takes me out of the action more than a clunky game mechanic. Games are fun when players are constantly making interesting choices, and in a lot of systems, as soon as you toss a dice, you lose all choice entirely while you wait for the little plastic polyhedron to decide the outcome for you. I will die on this hill when I say that rolling dice is not gameplay. Rolling dice is no more compelling than pulling the lever at a slot machine. The dice are an element of chaos that is required to keep things fresh and exciting. I kind of hate that so many TTRPGs seem to have forgotten that, to the extent that, at any given time, the badass character that you adore and spent all this time creating can just randomly roll a 1 and suddenly and momentarily become a slobbering clumsy idiot for that turn because you're not really roleplaying when your character is just a slot machine.

Now I know that experienced players and good GMs can smooth over these problems. Rolling a 1 doesn't mean your character trips over their own feet, if you can describe a better, more natural-seeming outcome for that narrative encounter. The GM and the players have a responsibility to make their own fun in a social tabletop gameplay system, via their storytelling and customizing the rules as written to fit their own preferences. But I feel like it shouldn't be the responsibility of the GM and the players to fix the whole game. Sometimes game mechanics are outdated, out of place, or they've simply been misapplied, losing their original intended purpose. There's no reason to keep them if they aren't actually adding anything to the fun.

It's very interesting to me the more I look into it, the more I discover that a lot of "standard" rules I have issues with are things that have simply been carried over from an archaic version of a grand strategy wargame, not a roleplaying game. Apparently one developed by a certain H.G. Wells, of all things! I know, it surprised me too! Look up "Little Wars" by H.G. Wells from 1913. I'm guessing this is probably why I so strongly feel as though our tabletop games are kind of overdue for some major updating. We see this a lot though in video games too, where a lot of game devs just borrowing game mechanics from other games in their chosen genre without really understanding or questioning what benefit, if any, it brings to their game.

Reinventing but not Redefining

Now, I talk the big talk, but it's not like I've tried to reinvent everything with the God Slayers TTRPG. I may teeter on the edge of madness but I'm not THAT crazy. It still has to be a Tabletop RPG, after all, and there's certain elements of that that must be preserved in order for it to be approachable by anyone. Ergo a lot of the terminology I use for the GS: TTRPG and a lot of my systems and designs will probably sound familiar to veteran tabletop enjoyers. We'll still have GMs, PCs, NPCs, sessions and campaigns and scenes and dice tests and combat and BYO snacks! Players will still go through character creation, the GMs will still spin a narrative tale for the players to work through, there'll be encounters, enemies, dangerous places to explore, equipment to find or buy, the whole of Kuserra is laid bare for the players to explore in this game.

I've tried really hard to shift the focus over to the players, above all things. Particularly in a furry post apocalypse, I wanted my game to emphasize the themes of survival, struggle, and loss. I wanted players to customize their avatars as much or as little as they wanted. I wanted the consequences of their choices to be both forgiving and impactful. Characters can lose limbs, but it'll be the player's choice. Characters can gain weird mutations, but the player should get to decide what those look like. All the while everything happening to your characters will slowly march them towards death, and the goal is for the players to delay that as much as possible.

I also wanted my game to have non-linear uncapped progression, consistent criticals, and to lean a little in favor of the players rather than the opposition. I want the focus of the game to be on the players and what their characters are doing, and step away from mechanics that just kinda happen automatically. I want the players to be active participants in the game, rather than spending a majority of their time just waiting for their next turn.

So... hopefully this... THING I've made isn't just a huge waste of everyone's time! And hopefully I didn't set anyone off, talking all this crap about anyone's favorite game systems. The only reason I wanted to make my own in the first place is because I love TTRPGs so much. Again, I don't know if I can actually do any better, but I do want to try. So look for the first updates soon, in some days or so, where I explain in great depth about this thing I'm making!