The first part of the project Adventures Buffo and I have been working on is complete. I originally approached Adventures Buffo after reading a great blogpost of his asking if he minded if I took a stab at the idea. Instead, he proposed we attempted something colleboratively and this is the result:
A staple of my recent design is to work with absolutes whenever possible. This is because to me, these are a lot easier to track. Examples of these are 'mortal steel cannot penetrate dragon scales' or 'fairy dust allows you to fly until you touch the ground'.
This, I feel, is the best way to deal with worldbuilding in tRPGs. Rather than fight against the given fact that people will alter your work based on the preferences and needs of their tables, you can learn to embrace it and actively make settings that do not have a canon, or at least very little canon. There are a number of ways I have seen folks embrace this idea: from sharing unfinished projects and incomplete thoughts to publishing material that deliberately leaves gaps that need to be filled in during prep or at the table.
Almost every day I am confronted with an annoying fact: I have more interests than I have time for. Add a job and a relationship to this and I have not nearly enough time to do all the things that interest me. In short: there is little time for me to run and prep tRPGs.
I am having a really hard time explaining people what I do when I run games. It is the next section I am trying to work on for FLoK, but even with the help of some folks who I have run games for, it is slow going.
To help the process along, I figured I would make some qualitative systems that sort of line up with how I tend to do things at the table. Mind you, this isn't what I actually consciously have in the back of my head while running, but I think using this will land you in a similar place.
To help understand where I am coming from it might be useful to keep in mind what my number one principle is when running games: Fluff = Crunch. Both for players, as well as for GMs.
With that out of the way, here's some systems:
Character generation in the original FLoK was deliberately sparse because I had no real idea of what the project was going to be yet.
It was also one of the areas my playtesters had the most feedback on. Especially the generation of the standard attributes (strength, dex, etc.) was contentious.
Some disliked that that these tags didn't really come into play, others liked how it informed their idea of their character and the way they roleplayed them.
This made me consider making some Maze Rats inspired d66 tables to help those who like that input in visualising and roleplaying their character, without suggesting that these are tags which are supposed to come into play.
I also tried to standardise the equipment you get from backgrounds a bit more, allow folks to simply roll up their background and provide some examples of those 'twist' items. All also in d66 tables.
Here's the current results:
Back when I initially started this blog I was working on a GLoG hack for the table I played with at the time. It is somewhat finished, but barely playtested and the few people that did play it seemed to hate it.
Moreover, this is from before I realised you don't actually need rules for everything, so despite aiming for 'elegant design' it is a rather convoluted mess of rules I thought I'd need because they were so prevalent in other systems, rules I wanted to add because I thought they were missing from 5e and a bunch of systems and mechanics stolen from other blogs merely because they looked interesting.
For these reasons, I don't like looking back at it, it makes me cringe. However, every once in a while when I need an example of something I like, I find myself returning to stuff I wrote for this game and finding that the thing I remembered liking still holds up decently well. So I figured I'd do myself a favour and try to extract everything I like about it, so I won't have to dig through that mess in the future anymore.
About half a year ago (shit, time flies) I cobbled something together in a flash of inspiration and hyperfocus:
It is the result of wanting to make something GLoG compatible, but more suited to my personal preferences. I warned during the announcement that I might very well never do anything with FLoK again, as the hyperfocus had ended and I was knee deep in Project Social which I wanted to finish first...
One of the first things I unlearned as a GM was the idea of thinking in terms of 'combat encounters', 'social encounters', 'puzzle encounters' etc.. In my experience, prepping my games in this way tended to lead to disappointment and frustration, as the epic battle I had planned was 'broken' by some player shenanigans.
I am not suggesting there is no place for thinking in these terms, but if your goal is to have players freely interact with a world I found it isn't a very useful way of categorizing your encounters. Personally, I encourage players to use the very underhanded tactics that some people compain 'break' their encounters, because to me coming up with those tactics is where a big part of the fun of the game lies.
However, I have found it useful to still 'categorize' my conflicts (I prefer this term over encounter). Not as a way to tell players how they ought to deal with particular kinds of obstacles, but as a way for the GM to create variety in their prep and consistently adjudicate the reactions of their NPCs.
In a flash of inspiration during a boring bus commute a few months ago I came up with the following distinction: Conflicts causes by misunderstanding, those caused by incompatible beliefs and those caused by resentment. When prepparing some adventures as playtesting material for FLoK, I found myself coming back to them as a way to help me think about the conflicts in these adventures. I found the draft for this on my blogger page with most of it already mostly written up, so I thought I might as well finish and publish it.