Ygg setting - rebooting the thread

[contracycle]

I suggest you go over to RPG net and check out th Riddle Of Steal thread.  Thats your current competition - do you think Ygg can hack it?

Second thing: put your mechanics away, and concentrate on writing the setting until you, personally, have enough stuff to run a campaign in Ygg.  Then, try to write mechanics directly suitable for that setting - no influence from anywhere else.  Then compare this batch with your original batch.

[Ron Edwards]

PF,

I am going to try to re-state a previous point of mine, which I think did not get communicated well last time.

It does not matter what details a "new race" carries with it, original or not. At this late date in fantasy-game design, providing a range of "races to play, or creatures/races to see" at all is itself a same-old, same-old feature of a game. You have cat-type centaurs? Even if this were a totally original idea (which it's not), even if no one on this earth, ever, had conceived of such a race, much less published it, providing it is simply old hat.

To turn to a more limited element of game design, character creation, look at the most recent fantasy games (that are not open D&D imitators), and you will see a distinct absence of the typical "choose your race" step. In Hero Wars, for instance, playing (say) a troll is going to change a great deal about the whole premise of the game - one of the preparatory steps of play is deciding whether a nonhuman player-character is allowed at all, and the default answer is "No." In Orkworld, you play an ork, period. In Elfs and Trollbabe (upcoming), you play the title type of character, period. In The Riddle of Steel, nonhuman characters are possible, but highly under-represented. Going back a few years to Everway, you play a human or human-type person, period.

Again: I don't care if your nifty races are blue, furry, four-armed, or how many arms they have. Providing nifty races and creatures to "marvel at" is same-old, same-old setting design. Focusing instead on what a race or creature is about, in terms of the situation characters would face in dealing with them, is where your attention should be directed.

Best,
Ron

[Valamir]

I mean everything PF.  Setting, races, mechanics everything.  DON'T take anything anyone on this forum says as "the way to do it", and DON'T take your experience with whatever games you've already played as "the way to do it".

Instead, figure out what would make YOU happy.  Don't worry about whether or not it meets some mythical "standard".

Roy started an interesting thread that addresses the very thing I was trying to convey, here

I think this is exactly the sort of exercise you need to do.  It will help narrow down what aspects of your game are truely important (to you) and will encourage you to think at the small adventure level scale rather than the sweeping history scale.

[Walt Freitag]

Advice about what to design first should be taken with a grain of salt. Freitag's Paradoxical Law of Design is: "It's impossible to design any component of a system until all other components of the system have been designed." (System, here, doesn't mean specifically game system, it means any set of interdependent parts.)

This can be justification for: (a) total paralysis, (b) a breadth-first approach where you lay out broad strokes of each component and then fill in detail throughout the system in stages, (c) a depth-first approach where you design one component by itself, then another, then revise the first, then design a third, then revise the first two, etc. (d) mulling it all over in your mind until you have a complete mental model of the entire thing before writing anything down, (e) just about any other approach you can think of.

The important implication of this Law is that if the whole design isn't completed yet, then you shouldn't regard any part of it as completed. Whether you write down your setting first or your game system first doesn't matter nearly as much as that when you go to write the other one, you're not so committed to the first that you're unwilling to make changes to accomodate the second.

Ideally, in the end you shouldn't be able to tell which one was created "for" the other because neither was (or both were). For example, in my own homebrew fantasy game I have a transitional magic system in which player-characters start out with spells from spell lists, but those spells become less powerful over time, encouraging the spellcasters to invent new spells and eventually to switch to improvised magic based on fortune-in-the-middle resolution. The in-setting explanation is that over time, the universe becomes "immune" to spells that repeatedly break its physical laws. Much like a "formula" for television writing, the more a spell is used, the less potent it becomes, forcing the most effective mages to learn the difficult art of improvising spells. This also explains why the by-rote mages are so reluctant to disseminate their spells, even in exchange for others; the more people learn a spell, the less useful it becomes. The immunity slowly diminishes with time as a spell goes unused, though, so rediscovered lost ancient rote spells are still quite valuable.

Now, the point is: did I invent the mechanism in order to encourage player creativity, and then invent how it works in the setting to justify the mechanism? Or did I decide that I wanted mages in my setting to be secretive and have good reasons to poke around in ancient ruins and do lots of research, then invent the mechanism to fit the setting? I'm not telling. Because I honestly don't know. I'm not even sure the question is meaningful.

- Walt

[Christoffer Lernö]

I suggest you go over to RPG net and check out th Riddle Of Steal thread.  Thats your current competition - do you think Ygg can hack it?

Ok, I stopped watching about halfway through that thread (when it had on 6 pages or so of discussion), but enough to get the geist of the system.
Sure it's neat. But it's definately *not* the kind of combat mechanics I want.

Second thing: put your mechanics away, and concentrate on writing the setting until you, personally, have enough stuff to run a campaign in Ygg.

I played one session with the old draft a few months ago. But now I'm in a different country (Taiwan to be precise) without a group to play with, so it's not really an option. I mean "play and get a feel for it" style.

Designing my mechanics with my setting in mind s my guiding principle. If what I write fail to show that, then well ok I suck, I guess that's the consensus anyway ;)

Strange as it might sound I do have motivations for my design decisions. :) It might be argued that they are flawed, but I feel the problem sometimes in these discussions are that they become too theoretical for me to digest. Especially when the theory seems to run counter to my own experiences.

In general I had better times with more primitive systems than later generation ones. It was always easier to pick up one of the old systems with their huge numbers of well known flaws than to start playing one of the more sophisticated new ones. I don't know why, but that's the feeling.

When the free RPGs started popping up on the net, it was very very interesting at first. But after a while I got really fed up with seeing Yet Another Clever Mechanic. Instead I felt relief when the mechanics were as simple as "your stat is 1-6, roll under your stat with D6 to succeed on a task, no skill lists". Now "Shadows" has already been mentioned. I think that's an example of a great mechanic. Seriously. If I felt it could fulfill the other goals I have it would be perfect.

So anyway, I don't know. I keep hearing how retro (in a bad way) my game is. But if it's retro as in "not clever mechanics" then I don't know if that's a bad thing.

What I think I OUGHT to put in, is more freedom explicitly stated in the rules. What I don't think I ought to try to fit in is a "ONE RULE FITS ALL" thing to form the basis of my game. No clever mechanics in my game.

Please.

:)

[Ace]

Have you considered modifing the D&D rules to suit your needs?
Sometimes it is better to use an existing rule set rather than create a new one.

One way that might do what you want is to

A:Use the Grim N Gritty HP rules at http://www.sleepingimperium.rpghost.com/downloads/GrimNGrittyHitPointRules.pdf

These turns the heroic D&D combat system into a very dangerous almost realistic combat system


B: Use Sovereign Stone magic. This sytem based on 4 elements plus an "evil" void element. The system  is subtle, effective and ritual like.

C: Use action points from AEG's D20 game Spycraft for your fate point system, or if you like Force Points from D20 Starwars

After that all you need to do is create the races and you can concentrate on world building.

Also if you are not fond of Class/Level systems both D20 Cuthulu and Godike have varient systems that are essentially D20 but different.

As a nice bonus a great deal of this material is Open Content and available for your use.