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[Sean Mirrsen]

Nice.

I still can't quite accept calling what are essentially "races", "classes". There's just a very different meaning behind "class". Maybe you can find a better alternative? "Species"? Even "nation" would sound better in more cases than "class", in my opinion.

[MaximumZero]

I know I should change it, but...I don't know. I don't really know what to change it to, and I dislike the word "race" so much. I don't like it to mean anything because people divide themselves so readily into groups over such meaningless things as skin colors. If everyone saw things the way I do...well, I guess they'd just find other reasons to hate each other.

Species doesn't really work in a fantasy game, and Nation would wind up being very politically incorrect, considering that Native Americans group themselves/ourselves into Nations.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, there has to be some sort of acceptable middle ground. I think I'll go fire up the thesaurus...

edit:

   blood, breed, clan, color, cultural  group,  culture, family, folk,  house, issue, kin, kind, kindred, line, lineage, nation, nationality,  offspring, people, progeny, seed, species, stock, strain, tribe, type, variety

See anything usable?

[MaximumZero]

I like lineage, and I think I'm changing it to that.

Edit: SEE! THINGS LIKE THIS ARE WHY I'M TRYING TO GET INPUT! I really need to go sleep now.

[G-Flex]

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!

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.

You described several different genres there, all with different requirements; expecting a single system to cover them all, and adequately, would be extraordinarily difficult.

Quite frankly, it sounds like you don't actually have any particular paradigms in mind for this. Why are certain parts of the game more rules-heavy than others? What sort of operational paradigm are you using there? You need to establish a common foundation for your game. It needs a base. You're essentially telling me differences between aspects of the game without establishing any sort of gameplay/design philosophy paradigms common to the whole project; if you can't establish those, then you do not have a cohesive product.

If anything, it sounds like you're describing multiple different games in the same setting with a few commonalities between them.

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.

Honestly, it's less the setting and more what the game is actually like, and you haven't seemed to nail that down very much. And as far as setting is concerned, theme and tone are more important than specifics.


I would be willing to give you more the benefit of the doubt if you had a product ready to show, or at least significant portions thereof.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, since he intends to earn something off of this, and information is infinitely replicatable at no cost, "showing" the product would somewhat devalue it.

The system he describes is what I aspired to create at one point, albeit in a space-4x environment as a PC game. Never got anywhere with it though.

The key is to use only as many rules as required by the ongoing game. I'll pick a related existing case, IL-2 Sturmovik, the flight simulator. You can toggle each and every realism rule that the simulator can provide, tuning the game to your desires. You can fly in full-arcade mode with invulnerability, but with realistic bullet trajectories and blackouts. Or in full-sim mode with unlimited ammo and fuel. In this system, if I understand it right, it's largely the same.

There may be systems in place for easy logistics of every mentioned level - military, economy, trade, and individual combat and adventure. These systems may be made to mesh together, allowing to only use as much of them as you require. Say, you're an adventurer and you suddenly waltz into a cave and defeat a big guy who turns out to be the leader of a large tribe, which promptly makes you its new leader. You'll be able to keep the individual adventure aspect, but a new system will be layered on top of that should you choose to issue orders to your subordinates. Conversely, you'll be able to omit the adventure aspect and just play by the governing rules, establishing trade routes and dealing with wars on a larger level. A single system encompassing everything is indeed a very big, and very good investment. In a way, Dwarf Fortress will become that someday. Adventurer skills, making an own fort, rising to power... it's all there in dev_next.

[Level_8_Mudcrab]

Looks like you've put alot of work into this, it would be good to see you finish it. I like the stories of the various races and the campaign setting.

[MaximumZero]

@G-Flex: I'm not sure exactly what you're asking me to describe, as far as the paradigms goes. Think of the gameplay styles as points on a map that are all connected by roads. If you want to start out at one point, and one point only, you can. You don't have to, however. See, if you want to play a campaign that has elements of each point on the map, you can. The thing is, it's not like Spore, where each time you travel to a new point on the map, the rules change. The rules stay consistent over the whole map. What I've done with the gameplay styles is break down the larger overall game into smaller, more easily understood chunks, whereupon you can reassemble the whole thing and play it all as one game.

You described several different genres there, all with different requirements; expecting a single system to cover them all, and adequately, would be extraordinarily difficult.

Yes, quite difficult. I've been working on this monster off and on for over a decade. ^_^

@Sean: You really nailed it.

@Level-8_Mudcrab: Thanks for your time, I hope to put a little more up soon, as soon as someone tells me what to put up.

[G-Flex]

@G-Flex: I'm not sure exactly what you're asking me to describe, as far as the paradigms goes. Think of the gameplay styles as points on a map that are all connected by roads. If you want to start out at one point, and one point only, you can. You don't have to, however. See, if you want to play a campaign that has elements of each point on the map, you can. The thing is, it's not like Spore, where each time you travel to a new point on the map, the rules change. The rules stay consistent over the whole map. What I've done with the gameplay styles is break down the larger overall game into smaller, more easily understood chunks, whereupon you can reassemble the whole thing and play it all as one game.

Again, I understand that you can have a game with different sub-systems of sorts for handling very different gameplay scenarios. But the whole thing needs to have a common foundation (besides just the dry facts of the setting) and gaming philosphy behind it, and I'm not sure what yours is here.

[MaximumZero]

Still not quite sure what you're looking for, G-Flex, as far as foundations and paradigms and gaming philosophy goes. Either those are all very vague things, or I'm just not getting what you're asking for.

[Robsoie]

Back in the eighties, when i was young and practiced many "paper" RPG, we often wrote our own expansions, as the various expanding and campaign sets were not that cheap in that time.

But it got our interest so much that we decided to write our own system that would fit our needs and our own background and universe setup to fit our visions.
It never went out of my friend circle but we enjoyed playing it.

The most important things i learned were :
-making a system that flow naturally for the players, even if it is complex or simple, the system must never be a pain to use for the player, the game master having already the bulk of the work, adding unecessary pauses to check dozen of tables, find the sub-rules is adding annoyances.

-more important than the game system is the background and universe.
That's what really makes all the difference between a setup that will interest the players, and will catch the game master inspiration to build his campaigns.
Making an universe that is too generic will not work, you need to focus on what will make it apart from the usual mainstream definition of your rpg genre (scifi/medieval/fantasy/horror/etc...)

But in the end it is a very interesting experience, every successfull "paper" RPG developers began like this, building their own system and worlds.

[MaximumZero]

That's pretty much how it started.
-I pride myself on my game's ability to flow freely.
-I'm pretty sure I have a good background. I really like the setting, anyway.

Making an universe that is too generic will not work, you need to focus on what will make it apart from the usual mainstream definition of your rpg genre (scifi/medieval/fantasy/horror/etc...)

Wait, what about GURPS?

Ah, I'm just messin' with you. Thank you for your input. Every piece of input I gather here is very valuable, and I appreciate it.

[Daywalkah]

This project looks awesome. I am mainly posting to keep track of this thread, since I never really look at this part of the forum.

[MaximumZero]

Wow, I didn't think anyone was still interested. Thank you for your interest. I only work on it bits and pieces at a time (new job, looking for a house, married with a young child, addiction to DF...time is at a premium.)

If anyone has any further input, I'd be glad to hear it.

[Vertigon]

Purifying a unit of raw material requires 10 Manna and 1 hour, per level of purification.
Example: Purifying a material for the third time consumes 30 Manna and 3 hours.

Successfully purifying a unit of raw material modifies it to a state above normal.
Example: A unit of unpurified bronze would make a longsword with a power of 4. A unit of once purified bronze would make a longsword with a power of 5. That same unit of bronze, purified twice, would produce a longsword with a power of 6.

Alchemical purification has a different difficulty for each type of material. Alchemy can be performed up to three times on any one piece of material.

Purification is seen by all as extremely beneficial, however, it can be excessively expensive. Purified materials, however, sell for

Oh hell yes. I have to mod this into mah DF.

EDIT: Ontopic, I really think this is awesome. Keep at it, OP.