Inventing a PnP RPG game?

[Saner]

ya you know those pencil and paper RPG manuals?

the popular ones are the fantasy PnP game (Dungeons and Dragons)

and superhero PnP game (Champions)

and others.

but ya, I have an idea for a PnP game since it only requires writing and no programming.
plus who knows, maybe some good company will turn it into a good mmorpg or TESIV/Fallout 3 style rpg someday (without the lousy design decisions.) :p

it might require dice. It might require cards. but anyways, has anyone considered inventing a PnP game? like you know ,actually make the book/manual and test it and stuff? ^^;

[Nitro Vordex]

You DO realize how much writing you'll have to do?

So many loopholes in your rules. So many conflicting classes.

Just go be a cubicle worker and be done with it.

[Shiroyu]

There really is a crapload of work and effort put into something like this. You'll need COMPLETE dedication and other people that also have the same complete dedication. Something like this is almost impossible solo.

I tried to make a Disgaea d20 system and gave up. Then I wanted to make a Monster Hunter d20 system and gave up before I started.

[Saner]

ohhh. then maybe a collectible card game? ^^;

[Kent]

I had to do one for a class project once - it was fun.

But yes, you will need absolute amounts of dedication to devise a comprehensive ruleset to any of this. Designing games and/or game systems is not trivial work, in the least (and to all that think it is trivial: I hate you, DIAF, etc.), and it's not something easily done by one person. If you have a group of people interested in doing this, things will be easier, because you'll have multiple takes on every thing that gets implemented or considered, and you'll have people with which to playtest.

TCG/CCGs are no different in the aspect of how much work is involved - in fact, one could argue that they're even more complex, due to the sheer number of variables involved in having such a wide variety of options to consider.

[Shiroyu]

Not to mention balancing.

[Outrider]

I've started a few simpler ones based off of random properties*, but only one or two of them were complete enough to be playable. Even then, they died in the water without a dedicated group of people who were willing to play test them.

To do something on the same level as Dungeons & Dragons or the like is, like everybody has been saying, a ridiculously involved undertaking.

*From what I can remember, the list included: Dragonball, Resident Evil, Chrono Trigger, Rainbow 6, and one or two others. The Dragonball one was surprisingly balanced and relatively deep, but it needed a few more months to test. The Resident Evil one was very simple and was set up for short, hour-long campaigns. I'm somewhat tempted to try and recreate that into a board game. Chrono Trigger was modified from d20 rules and was... ok. The Rainbow Six one was kind of awesome in that you would be responsible for an entire team of people, including operatives, negotiators, snipers, etc, but I only ever ran one 1-on-1 game of it.

Actually, all that crap I just wrote made me think of something - Saner, if you're so dedicated to try and make games even though you have no experience or background or real basis for it, why don't you try making a simple board game first? It'll be less complex than a pen and paper or CCG and you should be able to create everything you need for it.

[Rust]

Rather than creating my own tabletop RPG, I prefered taking an already existing one and modify it.

As I'm on D&D 3.0 (well, now 3.5) since its release, that was the best option to go ; especially since we had already taken on starting a campaign at that time and aren't finished yet.

So I modified the classes and races a bit, added a huge amount of both as starting choices (now around 30 basic classes and 80 basic races). I changed how prestige and favored classes worked with a "class tree" system rather than the various requirements and some other few tweaks (would be too long to explain that here in depths).
Added a calendar with special days on which the playstyle is affected (like a one-day long eclipse once a year making all types of undead more powerful for that length of time), even though it isn't finished at all yet.
Added a crafting and drop system, which might sound completely off for a tabletop RPG, but actually works without it looking too unrealistic.
Changed the death, fumble and critical hit system in battles.

And also changed the campaign world. Mine mixes a lot of influences, borrowing gods from various campaign settings as well as other major creatures which can be worshipped by clerics or other divine casters. I have magic, psionics, steampunk and technology all coexisting in the same world as well (even though the technology is for the most part vestiges of a disused civilization destroyed by the gods long ago because it was becoming too much of a potential threat for them).

In the end, the game is more brutal, action-paced and prone to omgwtf scenes, but we can hold an all-night game with my players about only once every two or three months by now, because of our various occupations, so yeah, having wizards making up items through arcane manipulation and experts crafting their items from materials they can drop on monsters was way more convenient than RPing the whole materials collecting and the full-week spent in a laboratory to make a crappy flask of acid. We seriously don't have time for that anymore if we want to progress through the story.

But yeah, all what I talked about there is way easier than making your own tabletop RPG rulebook, still it consumes a shit load of time ; I've been working on this when I have spare time for about two or three years now and I have barely finished races and classes complete in-depths description a few months ago.
But eventually, I'd like to end up being paid for doing about the same thing, and not having to take it as a whole spare time consumer, although I very well know it wouldn't be for my personal convenience in that case.

I've done a quick Silent Hill RPG for a one-shot scenario with some of my D&D players also, but wasn't much like doing a whole game. The longest was writing the plot and events. The game itself was only played with 6-sided dice when an action really required a roll in order to determine whether it would fail or not. All four characters were already pre-generated by me and done with a specific player in mind (I knew beforehand who would be playing), and most of the stuff was about RP rather than character stats. All four characters wouldn't stand a chance in a direct confrontation with most of the creatures of the scenario, anyways.

[Wyndham]

I'm working on a pnp rpg with my own set of rules, how math and dice effect the rules, my own monsters, magic, items, equipment, etc.
I've been working on it for months.

[HUnewearl_Meira]

I began working on such an RPG back in High School. 11 years later or so, my system has become fairly solid.

The first thing to do, is to piece a system together that you *think* may work, then get a group together to try it out. Via play testing, you'll find what's missing, what needs to change, and what's useless. Add in the stuff that's missing, change what needs to change, get rid of what's useless, and play test some more.

Possibly more important than building your system is building your game world. You need to have a culture, some sort of geography, some opposing forces in the world, and so on. What are the principle problems that your world faces? What is causing them? What is trying to solve them? What tools do they have to work with? You'll have to build your system to facilitate all these factors, and articulate them in a satisfactory manner.

Don't expect system building to be any easier than programming. Building a functional stat system requires the precise set of skills that programming requires (as opposed to "coding", mind you-- the former is the task of determining how the application will work, while the latter is the task of committing it to a language). There's a great deal of logic and creativity at stake, here.

If you have any further questions about the subject, I'd be happy to further share my expertise.

[Outrider]

Right, but the important thing is that you don't need to learn a programming language to build the system. English (or your language of choice) works just fine.

[HUnewearl_Meira]

Learning a programming language is the easy part, though. Go download a Visual Studio Express (http://www.microsoft.com/Express/) package, and all the documentation you'll need to stumble your way through it is included, made all the more convenient by Intellisense. The difficult part is learning to string together the tools present in all programming languages (Assignment operators, flow-control statements such as If and Select, object declarations, etc), all of which exist in one form or another in designing any system. For example, If you roll below 10, Then... And so on. It's conceptually the same process.

Here's what is important, though: no matter what you're building, you need to go into it with the understanding that you will not have any sort of immediate success. Any well-built project that can be accomplished in under an hour is, by its nature, an exceptionally simple project. Anything that's fairly elaborate may take months, if not years to perfect. Until you've resigned yourself to completing the project, it will inevitably go indefinitely as an unfinished, half-baked idea. Without that commitment there, you'll never finish your stories, you'll never finish your system, you'll never finish your battleship model, you'll never finish your wood carving, you'll never finish your forum post, and so on and so forth. So whatever it is that you have to do or learn, that's not nearly as important as having the desire to see the project through. That desire is the specific difference between genius and the common person.

[zandra117]

Is there such a thing as a pen and paper RPG that uses a deck of playing cards instead of dice?

[Shiroyu]

Lost Worlds, sorta.

[HUnewearl_Meira]

Is there such a thing as a pen and paper RPG that uses a deck of playing cards instead of dice?

I've seen systems that use playing cards, though not as a primary means of generating random values. There's no reason why it can't be done, though. A system I developed (which I no longer use), required the use of a random integer generator (conveniently available on the TI-83 and TI-86 graphics calculators). As a general rule, you need to have some sort of mechanism for generating random values, and if your mechanism of choice is a deck of standard playing cards, then you can creatively use the number values as well as the color and suit values of the cards. I've also seen a free-form RP system that required specific phrasing to succeed an attempt (we called this "SIMMing", though I have no idea what it stood for, or if it was, in fact, an acronym), though that seemed like a rather poor mode of operation.

Simply enough, any mechanism, around which, you can come to a conclusion of success or failure (or possibly some clear quality between the two), is a viable system for making a decision in an RPG.

[NPCMook]

Why not just use the simplest system, the d100/2d10 system, Its possibly the easiest dice system to use. Sure you still have to do some balancing, but other than that its pretty simple.

Or just use one of the general systems like GURPS, FUDGE, CORPS, EABA, HEROES System(same system being used for Champions)

[HUnewearl_Meira]

I'd say that it really depends on whether or not you want a unique system for your game. The advantage in making your own system, is that you can tailor it to your game world's quirks. If your game world's population includes some characters that are freakishly faster than the others, then you may want a combat system that allows for variable numbers of attacks per round. If you want some measure of distinction between strength and damage done, then you'll want a system that compensates for that, as well. Maybe there's an existing system that does everything you want in your world, or maybe there's not.

Another consideration, is that a system's quirks determine what's really important in the game world. A friend of mine, for example, developed a monetary system for his game, that doesn't keep track of the specific quantity of currency that one might have. Instead of stating that an item costs a dollar, it might instead state that it costs, "a trivial amount", or an item might be "expensive", at which point, if your money state doesn't indicate that you have some copious amount of cash, you simply can't afford it. This system, by its nature, makes money rather unimportant, and thus, has an impact on the game's atmosphere. The same sort of thing can be done with other attributes, such as strength, speed, constitution, skills, and so on.

So really, it's at your own discretion to determine whether or not your game would be to your satisfaction with an existing system, or with a custom system.

[MetaZedlen]

Hmm, I'm actually trying this right now, but unfortunately I slowed down quite a bit in the work ethic...

What I am trying to do is merge PSO ep.3 play style (the play boards) and Shining Force (character style and play), while incorporating the characters from my story into it, but the thing that's confusing me is I'm not sure as to whether or not I'm going to make this as though you only have a small amount of characters to use (like Shining Force) or using decent sized armies like a more complicated RTS.

I think that if I were to play the game out quite a bit then I would be able to see what would work out in choosing a play style.

EDIT: I would also like to add that each of the steps of game play (movement, attack, defense, etc.) would all be done by a d6 roll, such as roll a d6 +character movement to determine how many spaces the character can move, if said character is next to an enemy, then you can attack him by declaring so, your opponent can either choose to attack back or block, and the fight phase would be attacker rolls however many atk dice he has (d6's) and the defender rolls however many defense die they have (double if they are defending).

Magic and spellcasting is going to be the VERY HARD part...

[HUnewearl_Meira]

It seems to me that the biggest difference there will be on the amount of detail given to each character involved. It's the difference between treating characters as individuals with stats, or as groups with a unified set of stats. This is, of course, all a matter of what you want from your game world. Do you want your players to play as individual members of a party of adventurers, or as generals of armies?