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...