Design Goals

This blog will collect my game design ideas. I gravitate toward OSR / D&D-like RPGs as well as narrative wargames. Basically the games my teenage self would have thought it would be super-cool to design and play. I know a little bit about probability theory, so I’ll probably discuss that along the way, and throw in some reviews too. 

I plan to develop some modular RPG systems, starting with a light-weight skill system. I know I could probably hunt down a hundred of these -- I think I have hunted down at least fifty... but it’s fun to design them.

My goals for the skill system are

• keep it modular and resist the temptation to make it a universal mechanic (else why not just use d20...); and
• simple and elegant; and
• promote rulings rather than detailed systematic rules.

I’m interested in a couple of design ideas at the moment: advantage-like mechanisms where you keep the highest of n dice, and dice-step mechanisms like DCC or Earthdawn (remember Earthdawn? It was great.).