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[MrWiggles]

DnD requires just the handbook. It also needs you to match any handbook additions and extra sourcebooks that the other players have. Meaning that unless you're playing the very first version of a given edition, you're going to purchase about five to ten different books, to keep informed of all the mechanics introduced to the game.

None sense. You only need to match it if you feel you need your to own your copy. A GM would be a total asshat if he required you to buy the books in order to play. (Not to say they don't exist.) Most gaming groups dont mind sharing resources, including rp books. You may not be able to burrow them, but reference them during play shouldnt be an issue.

As far as I understood, MaximumZero is aiming to create a well and truly final version of his game, included in just one book, which is why he seeks input and tries to gather as much feedback as possible.

This isn't unique, and is standard practice.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Unique or not, this "standard practice" isn't actually practiced by some. DnD 4 already had three "player's handbooks" last time I was interested in it. I just wanted to emphasize that I think MaximumZero here is doing this thing the right way.

[MrWiggles]

Unique or not, this "standard practice" isn't actually practiced by some. DnD 4 already had three "player's handbooks" last time I was interested in it. I just wanted to emphasize that I think MaximumZero here is doing this thing the right way.

And DnD is unique in this, and the those PHB are optional and exclusive. I dont need PHB 1 to use PHB2. They have different focuses. As the first PHB was martial, the second was wilds the third is devine, I believe. They also don't require others players to have copies of them. If I am running a class out of PHB1, and someone else is using a class from PHB2, it doesn't affect my character. As we're played by the same rules and the players and GM know what their class can do.

Heck, with how dnd 4 is set up, its easier to share rp books, You get small selection of abilities that are meant to be on index cards.

I still like my 3.5 over 4, but 4 has some nifty design choices.

[Blacken]

Much of the appeal of these games comes from having quality prose for fluff text that people can read when not at the table. No offense intended, but you desperately need an editor for style and flow.

And, were I you, I'd talk up your game much less. There are professionals who've been in the industry twenty years who don't pimp their games the way you are, and they've actually shipped.

[MaximumZero]

@Sean Mirsen: Thank you for your support! I'm glad to hear your opinion!

@MrWiggles: The reason I talk up having a self contained game is because the mainstream games on the market right now are made by Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf. Those companies are all about churning out as many books as possible. If you don't believe me, please try to read something like Rokugan  or Planescape from WotC, or Pimp: The Backhanding from WW (no, I'm serious.)  Furthermore, I'm mostly familiar with D&D 3.5, and while you can play the game with just the PHB, it's not even remotely a complete system. You need at least a DMG (to explain more obscure rules) and a MM (because you can't play just "Dungeons") to play a completed system. Look up the feat "Leadership" if you don't believe me.

The innumerable expansion thing? The roping players into buying a slew of books just to have a little fun? Yeah, I'm trying not to do those things.

Thank you for the criticism and time.

@Blacken: I have a professional editor lined up because I know that my writing is jittery and imperfect. Also, I have a pack of hyenas at the waiting to tear me to pieces over things like that (did you miss the post about my English major friends and their big red pens?)

Furthermore, were you me, you wouldn't be proud of about 2000 pages of notes? You wouldn't be proud of making something from nothing? Sure, I may not be the most humble person in the world, but this is the internet: if I'm not at least a little brash and loud, no one's going to hear me.

[G-Flex]

Just from the OP here, I know virtually nothing about the game. That's just a feature checklist, and that's not how P&P games should be described. That's akin to saying a videogame has "20 weapons" without saying whether it's an FPS or a JRPG or a point-and-click adventure.

What's important are fundamentals. Is it heavy on the rules? Light? What kinds of rules (Okay, you said that it uses d10s, but that's not much)? What sort of thematic elements do those rules and the setting carry across? For that matter, what IS the setting? All we know is that it's "high fantasy", and there you might as well be saying "I'm selling bread, and the bread is sort of white and has crust".

The fact that you mention weird random stuff like a number of stone types (this content is really easy to make and says virtually nothing about the game) kind of says something about your priorities, to be honest. Nobody cares about number of spells, or weapons, or animals, or whatever. Well... it's not that it doesn't matter at all, but quantity isn't the most important thing, and that sort of content is usually added pretty easily to begin with.

What matters is how the system is designed, how good the setting/fluff is, whether or not it's interesting enough to fill its own niche within the genre, and so on. It's easy to say fluff isn't important, but if setting or theme is at all important, that stuff really helps to get players into the game. A few well-written bits of fluff can say more about the gameworld and its mood/setting/themes than even an extremely large amount of descriptive text, and is more effective at doing it.


One thing I'd like to ask, in all honesty: What does your game bring to the table that other available games don't? I'm not implying that there's no answer to this question; it's just a very important thing to ask.

@MrWiggles: The reason I talk up having a self contained game is because the mainstream games on the market right now are made by Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf. Those companies are all about churning out as many books as possible. If you don't believe me, please try to read something like Rokugan  or Planescape from WotC, or Pimp: The Backhanding from WW (no, I'm serious.)

Planescape is a completely optional setting, and "Pimp: The Backhanding" is a complete joke game. I have no idea why you're even using that latter one as an example of anything; you're essentially complaining about a game they wrote that you can completely ignore to no ill effect (no effect at all, really).

Furthermore, were you me, you wouldn't be proud of about 2000 pages of notes? You wouldn't be proud of making something from nothing? Sure, I may not be the most humble person in the world, but this is the internet: if I'm not at least a little brash and loud, no one's going to hear me.

Being brash and loud on the Internet is the best way to set yourself for disaster or even commit social suicide if what you wind up bringing to the table does not meet your own self-generated hype.

Lots of notes are good, but that's just a number. That's quantity. If you think quantity is a decent metric of anything (see my prior comments), check out F.A.T.A.L. (seriously, don't check out F.A.T.A.L.) as an example why not.

[Blacken]

Furthermore, were you me, you wouldn't be proud of about 2000 pages of notes? You wouldn't be proud of making something from nothing? Sure, I may not be the most humble person in the world, but this is the internet: if I'm not at least a little brash and loud, no one's going to hear me.

Steve Jobs says one really good thing: "great artists ship." I've written three novels containing a total of almost half a million words. But I don't hype them because I'm not shipping them. Brag after you ship something. Until then, you're Byron Hall. Just food for thought.

EDIT: wrong Hall. Aaron Hall's good people.

[MaximumZero]

Why haven't you shipped? Are you not confident in your work? And who's bragging? I'm gauging interest in my content to see if it will sell amongst people I respect the opinion of because they hold interests similar to my own. I know not of this Aaron Hall of whom you speak, although I'm aware that my IRL name is just as unimpressive.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Pah, don't listen to them. Keeping the work in shadows until it's done yields FATAL results. It's always better to get opinions on a work before you ask money for it, to avoid all sorts of problems.

[Labs]

Looks great. I would buy it when it gets published if I ahd any RL friends who were into this stuff. It seems very ambitious and ambition can easily get out of hand but you seem to have this one by the neck. Keep it up. I'll be watching this.

[Blacken]

Why haven't you shipped? Are you not confident in your work? And who's bragging? I'm gauging interest in my content to see if it will sell amongst people I respect the opinion of because they hold interests similar to my own. I know not of this Aaron Hall of whom you speak, although I'm aware that my IRL name is just as unimpressive.

Sorry, wrong Hall. Byron Hall. The FATAL guy, who spent more time pimping than developing.

And I haven't shipped them because they're not done. Time constraints. They need polish and editing before I go proclaiming that they're the shit. Not coincidental.

[MaximumZero]

@Sean and Labs: Thanks for the encouragement. I appreciate it greatly.

@Blacken: Does roughly 12 years devving my little homebrew game count toward more time spent developing than pimping? The only reason I released each version to my friends is because they saw what I was working on and demanded to play it, or that I had expanded my content and demanded more. They admitted that it's always been rough in places and that certain things needed to be worked out, but it wasn't horrible, and that was good enough to get it rewritten from me, and that's what I'm doing now. I hope to have it done by Origins 2012, and that may be pushing it, realizing my limitations.

I realize that my game isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread, that would be DF, which is why we're all here.

[MaximumZero]

@G-Flex: I'm really not sure how I missed your post earlier. I need to sleep more often, I suppose.

Fundamentals of the game change significantly based on how you're playing it. You can play it in my setting and use the meta-plot and have fun with my story. You can play the game and dungeon crawl and not worry about the meta-plot at all and it works great. You can play it as a 4x/Resource Management/Trading game. You can play it as a Political/Military game. You can mix all of those elements and play them all at once. You can even play by yourself!

A synopsis of my setting is as follows: A high fantasy, magical, colorful world built on top of an ancient civilization that suffered a worldwide total devastation of life somehow. This ancient civ went about ensuring that there was an afterlife, and voted in 10 physical Gods to ensure that a cataclysm would never happen again. The Gods revived the world, and fulfilled their goal by blocking technologies that the world would not be ready to use responsibly. Even the Gods, however, could not keep people from finding what may have been left behind by the first era of mankind.

No, that's not how I wrote it in the book. I sped up some of the terminology for those of you familiar with things like the internetz and TvTropes.

As far as it being light/heavy on rules, it's all depending on how a player wants to play. If they want to dungeon crawl, it's pretty light on rules. If they want to craft items, then it gets a bit heavier. If they want to train animals, then it gets a bit heavier. If they want to build a castle or a ship, then it gets a bit heavier. If they want thousands of mercenaries and ownership of land, well...that's pretty rules heavy by necessity. It really panders well to both sides of the base, from what I see, and does so without compromising structural integrity.

The reason I mentioned the lists of features is because I honestly didn't think people would be interested in hearing setting first. My mistake.

Finally, what my game brings to the table: A fluid experience that can cater to the needs of many different gamer-phenotypes all in one book that's easy to pick up and play and inexpensive.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I like the setting. Very much. Actually, as far as settings go, the "classic fantasy with sci-fi elements" setting that you can see in Phantasy Star games (the 3rd and 4th, specifically) is more or less my favorite kind of setting.

[MaximumZero]

The big difference between Phantasy Star and this is that most of the technology that still works hasn't been figured out, and Gnomes regularly make it explode tinkering with it. So, given the right storyteller, you may stumble upon some ridiculous miniature deathtrap device without knowing what it is, only to find out later that it's a food processor. As a rule, I try to get storytellers to play the "Blind Man and Elephant" game when describing relics.

Each Class has its own way of interacting with the world: Humans are bastards who exploit everything and everyone in their path, Mer are playful and carefree, Doppelgangers are cunning and slick (and shapeshifters!), Dwarves are industrious and stodgy and have a whole race of fanboys that they rescued the remnants of early in the setting, Elves are bloodthirsty monsters hell bent on dominating everything (the Elves waged an Elf only war, and the Dark Elves won, so they took over the moniker of Elf,) Halflings are mercantile and studious to the core, Gnomes are exploratory and eccentric, Goblins are tribal, Fae are tricksters and powerful magi, Treefolk (I call them Daemonflowers after the tree they come from, and I really need a new name for them that's more powerful,) are solitary observers and Beastmen are constantly paranoid because they were hunted to near extinction by the Humans.