Make The Game You Want To Play

Something that I’ve heard before, maybe on Twitter, and maybe even from the same guy, is that instead of attempting to design a new game you should settle for choosing an existing game, something that is at the time “popular” by some arbitrary metric—because as we all know, to certain people, popular is somehow synonymous with quality—and then resign yourself to writing third-party material for it.

The genesis for this misguided, one might even say malicious advice, is that Matt believes there is a “glut” of RPG systems, and that “any new system is not likely to offer anything unique”.

I agree on both points, with some caveats.

I think that, yeah, there’s a glut of RPGs. Specifically bad ones, shallow derivatives of existing games, with perhaps a few houserules clumsily bolted on in a pathetic attempt to justify its existence and your purchase. Vapidware trash pinched out by lazy, untalented narcissists whose primary-if-not-only motivations are money and attention. Which, funnily enough, describes at the least most of the games that Matt pimps and simps for in his article.

But it also means that Matt is in fact perfectly fine buying and, perhaps, even playing a game that he essentially already owns, or a competent hobbyist could have produced over a somewhat busy weekend, and with superior results. He just for some reason doesn’t want…some people to do what others did. A common criticism is that Old School Essentials is merely 1st Edition AD&D, just with the content rearranged. DoubleDark is just 5th Edition with a fraction of the content and a retarded torch gimmick thrown in as an afterthought.

So…why is he fine with those? Why do they get a pass? It’s not like it’s difficult to copy an existing game, or take 5th Edition and ignore most of the material. Hell, you don’t even need to lift several of its pages, dump them into InDesign, slap a different name on the cover, and pretend it’s a new game: you can just do what the typical 5th Edition hobby tourist does and not even bother to read the book in between binge watching other hacks pretend to play the game.

Frankly, if Old School Essentials, Lamentations, or DarkityDarkDark is the best you can do then, yeah, why bother? Sure, maybe you’re fine with pretending that your godawful houserules, when stapled onto most of someone else’s game somehow necessitates its own book, but what if you have your sights set even slightly higher than less than the bare minimum?

Maybe you don’t want to play a game where the only difference between a 1st- and 5th-level fighter is some hit points and perhaps a (marginally?) higher attack bonus? Maybe you’ve realized that how armor works in typical d20 games is batshit retarded, or that clerics shouldn’t be touring around the wilderness channeling the divine power of a god solely or even mostly for personal gain.

Maybe you think that hit point inflation is absurd, and should be kinda sorta just maybe toned down a smidge (at least). Maybe you think pseudo-Vancian magic is utter nonsense and you should either try to at least somewhat accurately model how it works in The Dying Earth (if you like that sort of thing), or go with something else entirely. Maybe you read those stories in Appendix N and think, damn, it sure would be nice if you could run games like that even remotely accurately.

Maybe you don’t want boring-ass +1 “magic” weapons and armor. Maybe you’re tired of gorgons being called medusas, and gorgons for some reason being a metal bull that breathes poison gas. Maybe you think there should be a benefit for exceeding target numbers, instead of rolling like 10 points over a target’s Armor Class and it just being a normal hit/success. Maybe you think that potions don’t all need to be magic, because why should they?

Maybe you think poisons and venoms could be overhauled so that they are even somewhat more realistic, instead of, say, getting bit by a snake and somehow, instantly dying. Maybe you think magic shouldn’t be so commonplace, and that there’s also an overreliance on healing magic just to get by.

Maybe all of this and so much more culminates into something that far exceeds the threshold of being mere houserules, and needs its own book in order to avoid handing players two different 300+ page rulebooks and telling them that one supercedes the other, and that they’ll need to both figure it out and retain the differences. I imagine it would be like when 3rd Edition Revsied came out, just ten times worse (at the least).

I say, instead of settling for writing for lazy, untalented, greed-driven narcissists poorly larping as game designers, so long as your game is meaningfully different, more than “this game but with some houserules”, or “a fraction of that game but with a retarded name”, create it, and then ideally support it.

Otherwise, if your goal is merely money and attention, and you just want to push something out as fast as possible in the pitiful pursuit of both? I dunno: ask Matt what makes the shallow shit he simps for magically “acceptable” and just do all of that.