Since I was 14, my best friend and I have been talking about the video games we would design. I'd develop a story board. He'd talk about coding it. I'd develop a combat system. He'd talk about coding it. I'd work. He'd talk. Easy to see where this is going? Sadly, I wasn't as astute, and it took ten years for me to try to involve other people on the project. In the time he spent shirking the need to actually code anything, I spent some time game-mastering various systems, and decided to develop my computer system into a table top RPG as a means of testing the math (a pre-beta if you will) while I develop the relevant coding skills and connections to do it my damn self. The plan is basically this - I want to develop 3 low-resource free-to-play RPGs that use a very similar interface and game system. Only the "flavor" (IE zombies, vampires, space aliens) will differ, so that in theory, a character from one universe could be dropped into another with no changes to his format - (which I think would make for some kick ass special events...)
The purpose of this blog will be to record thoughts on my existing system as I modify what are basically arbitrary values that I set out with in my combat system and tweak them to be more balanced. Keep in mind that since my introduction to both MMOs and table-top games my definition of balance has felt a little isolated. I'm sick of systems that try to balance so that players by means of level and tiered gear. This leads to MMO servers full of people who got to the top by ignoring what was best for their group or guild and snatching up whatever loot they could find, and RPGs where the mage and the paladin are roughly evenly matched, despite the fact the mage took an hour to make his character and the paladin took two weeks. The only way to break this mold is by spending months breaking the game, to develop a method of min/maxing.
To protect myself and the system I've spent months creating, I'm not sure how many details about the system I can divulge before my eventual release, but suffice it to say, it's going to take concessions to run this as a table top game, as the number multiplication at increasing rates, rather than a simple numerical stats. My PCs will have to have a laptop or tablet handy to keep up.
This blog should be seen as journalistic rather than "teaching" or "advertising" anything. I bounce from computer to computer and this is the most convenient medium to have my thoughts on the developing system ready to access.
Sci-fi game is in combat system 1.4, zombie game is in 1.1, vampire game is in 1.1
