TTRPG Design

[_ghost_]

I've been looking to get more into designing my own TTRPGs as a hobby, and was curious if anyone here has written any and/or has advice, suggestions, or just wants to discuss.

What I'm working on currently is a PbtA game and also my first game; a lot of PbtA games end up just being reskinning games like Monster of the Week, but I'm specifically going out of my way to try and expand on different mechanics I like from various games. I want to incorporate the social mechanics from Monsterhearts, the combat moves from Ironsworn, and a system of harm and stress like the one from Ghost Lines, for example. Mechanically, the game should encourage long-term play characterized by tense character interactions that escalate over time, as well as providing harsh consequences.

What I'm having difficulty with is actually writing the playbooks, because the thing about a good PbtA playbook is that it's often exploring specific themes, and I'm not sure exactly what those are, yet. And I also need to figure out how to keep things balanced; players should have a lot of conflict with each other, as well, and I need to make sure that no playbooks are overly disadvantaged if and when they go up against any others.

How did y'all get started designing TTRPGs? Have you published any? Do you have any favorite systems to hack?

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

I've written and hosted a few campaigns, usually for DnD 5, but also for the much more exotic "Legends of the Wulin" and "Mean Streets". In some cases I went rather far away from the core gameplay. The group I play with (and were I myself am active - much more often than as DM - as player) is very stable, we are more or less the same few people for many, many years.

And this is an important factor for what I do. For what I do like about TTRPGs is that they give the players much more freedom to shape the games world. My ideal when it comes to them is a form of collaborative storytelling - and so I moved from rounds that were largely improvised by me to rounds that were largely improvised by the group. There were quite some pitfalls on the way (as, even in this confident frame and knowing my style, it is still a challenge to the players!), but I'm really satisfied with the way it currently turned out :).

I'm working on a own system for nearly 10 years  . Atm, I'm again at the point were I scrapped almost everything, but I'm - yet again - positive about my current concept.

[villain]

I also made a PBTA hack! I already had a decent knowledge of various PBTA systems but hadn't had the chance to play them myself. The final straw that pushed me to homebrew my own was reading the official GI Joe TTRPG book - its incredibly dense and boring with lots of weapon and gear stats, making a setting that thrives in its cartoony absurdity much more focused on the strategy. Because I was going flavour-first it was easy to pick out what systems to crib from - 'Joe World' is a combination of Action Movie World, Masks, and the original Apocalypse World, with some of the more exciting bits of character building text pinched from the official Joes TTRPG and edited down. Even with plenty of resources to pull from I will say this took a lot of work!!! I've been running a campaign with a rotating cast of players for a few months now (irregularly) and have made one major patch that involved sprucing up the combat to be more forgiving as the stuff I brought over from Apocalypse World there was a bit too violent and gritty for the setting.
That all is to say, I think choosing an existing franchise to base your theme/flavouring on is the way to go - even if it's not something your players are immediately familiar with. The only other person out of my 6 players who cares as much about the source material as me is my partner, everyone else just came over watched three episodes I picked out and jumped in. The original GI Joe cartoon from the 80s is a completely absurd setting that's sci-fi, spy fiction, and just barely military action, with really wild varied characters and no single protagonist, rather desperately trying to sell the viewer as many toys as possible  so it translated really well into a tabletop setting in my opinion. Are there any tv shows, films, games, books etc you like that would work as a 'sandbox' setting? I'm not familiar with the games you mentioned in your original post, but it would of course be ideal if the mechanics complemented your theme as well!

[haumeaGeth]

Are there any tv shows, films, games, books etc you like that would work as a 'sandbox' setting?

I don't know why it never occurred to me to make fan game hacks. Especially with PBTA, it'd work so so well for that! This immediately got my brain chugging. My mind immediately goes to various books I really like, like the Silverwing Saga or the Howl's Moving Castle trilogy. Oh gods, or Homestuck. That'd be epic and chaotic.

For games, maybe Cult of the Lamb or Undertale...

[villain]

I'm glad that was a good seed for inspiration! You can definitely get far by just going 'well its like xyz but its own thing' and expanding the parts you love best of that world!

[Symberzite]

What I'm working on currently is a PbtA game and also my first game; a lot of PbtA games end up just being reskinning games like Monster of the Week, but I'm specifically going out of my way to try and expand on different mechanics I like from various games. I want to incorporate the social mechanics from Monsterhearts, the combat moves from Ironsworn, and a system of harm and stress like the one from Ghost Lines, for example. Mechanically, the game should encourage long-term play characterized by tense character interactions that escalate over time, as well as providing harsh consequences.

How did y'all get started designing TTRPGs? Have you published any? Do you have any favorite systems to hack?

As someone who designed and published a handful of RPGs, my honest advise - try out a bunch of different systems. WAY too many designers play nothing except PbtA and DnD5e or other d20 games. Here's a small list to get the ball rolling:

• Cairn
• Blackhack
• Whitehack
• FATE (Core + Accelerated)
• GURPS
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying
• Vampire: The Masquerade (20, V5)
• Mage: The Ascention (M20)
• F.I.S.T.
• Thirsty Sword Lesbians
• Mothership
• His Majesty the Worm
• Veins of the Earth (LotFP)
• Cyberpunk RED
• Dune 2d20
• Call of Cthulhu
• Traveler
• Paranoia
• Game of Thrones RPG
• Honey Heist
• Lasers and Feelings
• Zaibatsu

I'm not saying you can't make a good PbtA game, but it's just way too many designers thought of making quick reskins of it, which lead to the brand feeling tarnished. If it's your first project, try making a one-page RPG and pass it around your players. It doesn't have to be anything complicated, just a character creator and a basic resolution mechanic.

[OkayRelax]

man it really just happened.. idk, I was around 13 or so and I had played dnd with my cousins step dad a couple times and I wanted to do something similar but more freedom focused with friends in my neighborhood, but none of us had money or a way to play official ttrpg's so we started simple basically just using our imagination and some regular board game dice. started as a choose your own adventure type experience with some dice rolls every once in a while. after a while I started coming up with a character sheet based on what I had seen in video games like fallout new Vegas and Skyrim and stuff. and the game became more interesting with rules and systems (which were horribly unbalanced and bad) I didn't start actually writing things down til a couple years later when I was in high school, and I started playing with friends from school and we kind of collaborated with ideas, but most all of it was from me. eventually friends just started playing dnd but I never really was interested in learning the dnd system and playing it because I was focused on my own, I definitely think dnd is cool but I just don't care for the way the system works and the class system annoys me. so I just kept writing, I think I probably scrapped everything I had written and reformatted and re wrote the whole thing like 3 times, each time its gotten better. at the point now where iv gotten good at formatting and layout and enough of the games system is finished that im close to finished with a bare bones set of books that people theoretically could use to play, but really im just doing it because I want to create my own perfect game to share with people who would be interested in playing with me.

I think the best way to do it if your interested in it is to just start writing, don't worry about people telling you its bad, or that there's already a million games that people can choose from that are complete and have good production value. its definitely hard work, iv spent so much time working on this and im not even close to a point where I could make any money off of it really, its defiantly plain looking (hardly any pictures or graphical elements except a few place holder AI images). if you want to do it do it. if your doing home-brew stuff for an existing system that's even easier, you just need to know the system your setting or home made campaign or items etc needs to work with.

 

The biggest help for me has been just playing around with ideas with friends and family and my fiancé and sister in law, they aren't into DND or Pathfinder or anything is it gives me a look at how people who are totally new to tarps react to information, mechanics, and gameplay. hell even testing your stuff by yourself can be helpful. if your writing home-brew classes, write down a character sheet for that class and solo some encounters with other characters ran by you, see if its balanced or if there's anything that needs to be changed.

for the fiction aspect of it all, writing interesting lore etc, you gotta lean into fantasy tropes. all the best fantasy or sci fi and in-between plays off one an another, there's not allot of ideas left that haven't already been done, watch movies and tv shows and play games and find stuff that speaks to you and would fit into your perfect fantasy world. I think allot of fantasy writing is based on what someone wishes the world was like, or what someone thinks a more interesting world would be. I started writing lore pretty far into actually making the game system, and I realized allot of stuff that "happened" when playing the game with friends didn't need lore, it sparked it. the world was just imagination at one point, and since I have a good memory and im a bit older and maybe a bit smarter than I was, I can turn that imaginary world into a written world.

don't be afraid of changing things later either. the biggest struggle over time in continuity I think, I changed to much too quickly a couple times and realized id have to edit like everything iv written to match new ideas, and my perfectionism hated that so I started over a couple times. probably would be a bit closer to finishing if I had just sat through and edited back then. but iv gotten much better at editing since.

proof read often and fix mistakes early.

but idk man, im just some fool with a laptop and a big imagination.

found a cool thing that could be useful for anyone looking to make their TTRPG available as a page on their website, a cool tutorial/template for html downloadable html file tutorial/ template combo