...is that I've been able to design character-specific games.

My new MO since coming here is that I get together with a friend, talk about a character, and we write a simple game system to accomodate that.

This has been really liberating.

One of them, Shifter, was essentially a Sorcerer ripoff, specifically designed to accomodate a shapeshifting character idea my friend had. We played the system together and had a lot of fun with it.

The second, Under the Azure Flame, combined some simple die pool mechanics along with a nifty freeform magic system written explicitly for a different friend's world, where there are four colors of magic with a fairly clear supernatural 'physics' behind them. We had four stats, one pegged to each color of magic, d10 die pool resolution with 1's contributing to fumbles and 10's giving you extra dice to your pool, and on top of it we put a really neat tarot card mechanic my friend wrote for broad-scale player and GM influence on the narrative as a whole. We played this system for my old character Calithena and had an absolutely wonderful time.

Anyway, I don't know about this world/character/game-specific game design strategy as a general one, but it's been wonderfully liberating for me. I have lots of setting stuff sitting around that I like to play with, but it's always hard to find a suitable system. Now it seems like I increasingly just get together with people and design a system on the fly when I want to play.

This has been a wonderful thing for my gaming, and I have all of you to thank for it. So, thanks. I wouldn't mind discussing this in this thread if anyone wants to. I also wouldn't mind if other people posted 'non-obvious' things the Forge has done for their gaming (I take it that helping with game design for publication and helping diagnose dysfunction in existing games are the two clear and obvious functions of the Forge, with the social one a third).

I've definitely gotten to the point where I've posited that I could write new designs for every game I play.

The problem is that you never get really good designs this way. Oh, sure, you can get really good parts of a design, and really meet your goals. It's just that to have a really good game requires playtesting. And I don't want all of my play to be playtesting quality.

So while I could, I've kept it down to the occasional design for one shots and the like. For instance I made up a game for a session of Cthulhu I ran a while back, not liking the original game, nor any substitute that I came up with.

I think that's viable.

Mike

That's a good point, Mike. Both of those games were one-on-one games with people I knew really well and had gamed with in more structured systems before. Under the Azure Flame worked really well, because Del had already playtested the tarot card system as an add-on to both his old homebrew and 3e, and the main mechanics just happened to come together in a good way. The Shifter session was fun for Shawn and I, but had more problems, mostly because my combat modifications were all disimprovements.

I wouldn't advocate designing a new game for every occasion as a general policy, I don't think, for the reasons you point out - but it's been really liberating for me, at this stage in my development, to be able to do this. The rut I was stuck in in my own design attempts before I found the Forge was so deep I'm embarrassed to even describe it. Whereas reading all the games here and putting together pieces of them haphazardly has enabled me to appreciate what y'all are doing and given me a much broader sense of the possibilities for design.

The great conceptual leap the Forge gave me was moving from the how of rules to the why of rules.

It happened here.

Jack Aidley wrote: The great conceptual leap the Forge gave me was moving from the how of rules to the why of rules.

It happened here.

For me, it's been the realization that mechanics really do make a difference. When I used to pick up a mainstream RPG, I'd ignore all the mechanics and just read the setting, because I always found that in practice, the mechanics had to be tinkered with anyway and I left that to people who like number-crunching. And what people would do, in my experience, was say, "Here's my setting, and this is what we're going to play, now I'm going to use X well-known system and revise it in Y way to make it sorta kinda fit the game I want." And then I get here and start reading all these funny little games that seem to be through-designed, if you will: the mechanics are designed around the setting, from top to bottom, and in an ideal world there's nothing in the mechanics that doesn't support the whole game shtick. It's like you practically can't play the game any way other than how it's designed. I never thought of that.

I also learned here that you can play a game in such a way that the system parts don't actually interfere with and slow down the actual events. I think of combat systems, for example, where you're telling this great story and then somebody pulls a gun, and suddenly it's like Star Fleet Battles for no particular reason. And then, slowly, agonizingly, back to the real game. I learned that it doesn't have to be that way.

And I also learned that I don't have to tolerate the naysayers who say, "No, people won't do that, people aren't that creative on the spot, you can't force them to make stuff up, you have to do most of the work yourself." Crap. If you set things up so that creativity is encouraged throughout, and you give people a little time to get used to it, you can have gaming where all the creativity doesn't happen outside the gameplay except for random, unusual moments.

Thanks, Forge!