Creating a new Tabletop RPG...

[Mikael]

Nate

Generally, talking publishing at this point is putting the horse before the applecart.
System is Important Step #1. Once thats laid down, the rest can follow.

Please re-read forum policy and consider the effect that target segments and ambition level might have on design. Besides, I´m just curious.

Cheers,
+ Mikael

[EllePepper]

I admire the curiosity, umm, as to publication, my friends and I have been dorking around with it for years, I would love for other people to be able to play it.  I've had so many people over the last two or three years look at some of the related storyline and say 'this would be a great RPG"  or 'is there a game?"  And I would sadly tell them no.  As to adapting another game, that was where I started, but most of the ones i had access to were too rigid.

[EllePepper]

Back to the topic before I got sidetracked by my coffee swilling friend...

I am considering, for now, leaving the Mystic storyline 'open' and not doing anything with it.  possibly adding it in once I have the Mistics done.  Just so you guys know.  MISTIC is an acronym, Manufactured, intelligent, Shifting Tactical Infiltration Corps.  Mystic is the company that created them.  It was a sort of play on words.

[Sydney Freedberg]

As long as we're discussing your setting, let me recommend that you don't have to elaborate every last detail of the company, the city, the various factions and forces, etc. etc. ad nauseam: In fact, even if you could do that much work, it'd be a bad idea, because then there'd be no room left for anyone else (GM or player) to be creative. One interesting suggestion on Vincent Baker's blog Anyway (www.lumpley.com) was to start with a few basic principles and then use those almost like algorithms to generate new details whenever the game/story ran into something previously undefined, be it a political faction or a coat closet -- an idea I summarized in this thread (in case the link breaks, that's http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=16425.msg175442#msg175442) and discussed at length in the original Anyway thread (http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=73).

[EllePepper]

Actually, I was going to leave them open so that the why's and wherefores would be generated by the people playing the characters.  That would, essentially give infinate playability.

[EllePepper]

I was also thinking about putting a little character info in about each race, so they can 'listen' to them, and understand the way they think.  So that I don't have to say this race hates that race, I can let the character say, never trust a lycan or what have you.

[Sydney Freedberg]

The White Wolf/World of Darkness books do that very nicely -- there's a little in-character quote from each race/clan/whatever on what it thinks of each of the others -- and it has its uses. But, a big caveat: If you put in the rules "here's what group x thinks of group y," people will tend to read that as a rule, with no exceptions, when often the real fun of such "rules" is in the breaking of them. There should be room to play, say, the vampire in love with a werewolf (Underworld, anyone?).

Indeed, the general problem with defining "races" is that it's easy to fall into the assumption that every member of a given group is alike, and (besides the disguised racism thing), that just gets boring. So as you write up your groups, I'd urge you to make it very clear that there's variety within each, and indeed that (just like real life) the same individual may believe two things that contradict each other.

[EllePepper]

Of course, and i am keeping that in mind.  In fact one of the speakers directly contradicts his superior in whose behalf he is speaking.  But then he goes on to explain his difference in opinion.

And of course, 'race' is probably a bad term to use, and yet it does fit because there is a lot of I don't like them because they aren't like me.  and especially from the older ones among the races who have lived long enough to be cranky.