Diary of a Failed Game Designer

Had some ideas and want to  put them down here on the blog. If one were to use the labels to search that person would find that the very first time I ever mentioned the  "Shards of Thimbral" setting idea was back in  2013. What that means is I have had this idea bouncing around in my head for a solid four years with nothing to show for it. I do have a "game" sketched out in my "Things Unfinished" folder. By sketched out I mean very much undone. Yesterday I was kicking around a system to bolt my setting ideas onto. Here's my thought process. I would want something simple. I like a games main mechanic to be easy to remember. I don't necessarily need "innovation." In fact if I were strain for an innovative idea I know I would over complicate the game. Some Setting ideas (I have shared these before..in one form or another) A world torn apart by cataclysm. The world shattered into an countable number of  floating islands. The  world below rent...

A couple of posts ago , I wrote about  playing Basic D&D again for the first time in several a couple of decades. We are two short sessions in now playing exclusively on roll20 in the  evenings. Things are going well, the  players are exploring room by room, the game is going basicly as planned. For this post I'm going to  go back to my  other post and comment in RED  on how my original observations have stood up to actual play. Here it goes. Original Post starts here: _________________________________________________________________________ I have players who have never seen Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling presented as classes. It took them a few minutes to accept that as how it is. I always like Race as class. In my mind it lets an elf be an elf, and a dwarf be a dwarf  (halflings are a bit underwhelming but .. should be given their literary source.) A demihuman class is something a player will choose because they want to play that race on it's own meri...

In my past few posts I mentioned that I have been working on an RPG called "Shards of Thimbral." This has been kind of an endless project. (You can go back on this blog and look at the  tags if you like that sort of thing.) It's not that I have spent that much time on the project. I have read about people who work on a game for years and years before they are ready to present. What I can say is for all the time I have been kicking the idea of "Shards" around for a couple of years and have shockingly little to show for it. What I do have to show for it is a notebook with ideas, and sketches of bigger ideas. Part of those ideas has always been a very exploration, discovery based game that give the characters ample room to make their own story. It started as "Floating islands in the sky" however, it turns out someone already did that and my ideas were way too close to theirs for my comfort. So I have moved on to actual islands in the sea, which has it...

Continued from here: When I start working on Shards of Timbral again  this will be the  mechanic: Roll 1d20 + an attribute Vs  a difficulty number set by the  GM or by  the rules of the game depending on situation.  If the roll is equal to or higher then the  difficulty number the action succedes. If a skill can be applied to the action roll a skill die along with the  d20. If the skill die result is a 1 the roll automatically succeeds. That's it. Nothing  else mechanically to determine success or failure of an action. there is nothing  inherently new as far as the mechanic goes. What is new for me is the idea that I will not hang anything else off of that mechanic. It is simply pass fail. There are no critical failures for rolling badly, no critical success rules. My Hope: I hope (and again it's not new in game design for sure.) is that players will be liberated by this kind of fire and forget die system. Liberated in that the syst...

For the love of rolling dice: A quick note on a Shards of Thimbral design change and testing. For the next Shards of Thimbral play-test I plan on changing how the players use dice during an impasse. Once the difficulty of an impasse is set I plan on having the players build pools as they have been then rolling the die pools. (currently the players do not roll) Once the die pools are rolled the players may “roll back” (lower the value of) their dice as the system currently states to earn in game narrative control. So why? The biggest source of confusion and debate about the shards of Thimbral game as I had it laid out the first time is that players could unabashedly choose their own fate. Once the players built his or her die pool, that player could in effect not roll any dice back and always succeed. It would be a very safe, very passive, and likely not very satisfying way of playing, but it could happen. This was not some random oversight. Without going backward and defending t...

Those  of you who read this blog.. I’m talking to both of you… may have noticed it has been a kind of slow around here as of late. I have to blame that on end of the winter blahs. I have a very strong desire to suck up some sunlight as soon as I can and get back on track. I am SO pale. With that in mind I want to talk about a change in direction. Over the winter I worked on Shards of Thimbral, and play tested it a couple of times. I really like the game, everyone who played seemed to enjoy it.   Here are some of those posts: Post 1:  Play test 2 Post 2:  Stalled Progress I appreciate all of the fed back from these, if any of you see this, thank you. The feedback and comments, were not all positive, and I don’t think that’s because the people commenting would not enjoy the game if they played it. I think it’s as much if not more because I have had a hard time communicating my design goals. There is also the very real chance that it did suck and was broken, but to...

Recognizing ones influences and giving them due credit is something I think is really important, so you get this post. In a perfect world I would be working more on Shards of Thimbral right now, but alas for me I can't control my own motivation which is in truth why I am not a professional, and why not much is moving on Shards right now. Also in a VERY perfect world I would be able to afford to licence art of Roger Dean for Shards of Thimbral. His work is EXACTLY what I would like the game to look like, not close, not kinda , EXACTLY. I believe I started thinking about Shards of Thimbral when I bought the "Yessongs" album back in Highschool and his art was on the cover, I just didn't know it. I find his work inspiring every time I look at it. My only issue is that as I sketch ideas for Shards I keep hearing in my head, "That was already done, and done MUCH better." Here is an example, his site has a ton more. Image by Roger Dean (I don't know the title...

We play tested Shards of Thimbral once again this morning.  I feel that we made some good progress so lets break it down. We started with character creation, each player making a completely new character and a new party.  Character's were Edward a blacksmith whose goals were to expand his foundries and to reforge the hammer of Vulcan. And Blake who is a noir detective type whose goal is to find the murderer “Europe Malloy.” Their group connection was Blake is helping Edward find the parts of Vulcan’s hammer. The party connection is they are both members of tinkerers guild. As the Gm I choose reforge the hammer of Vulcan and find the murdered Europe Malloy as the starting goals to use as kickers. Edward's player had mentioned that he had a foundry on an island named DelFracked so we started there. This is the first time we had tried the new “chapter” system in-which the gm gets a pool of d6's called “response dice.” After a player rolls back a die to take an action, if the...

So why can’t my  Dwarf Ride a Bear again? Great question: Some of my most obvious answers: Because you're level 1 Because you don't have the animal empathy or animal handling, or anything like that. Because you don't have ride animal (Bear) Because bear would eat you. Your Druid buddy over there, the one giving you stink eye, would kill you in your sleep and release the bear. Because our campaign is set in the Darksun setting and there are no bears. why do I ask, here we go... I am working on stream lining the character creation and just the basic, “lets get started playing”  parts of my shards of Thimbral game. I start thinking about the flexibility of narrative games vs the stricter more traditional forms of Role playing games. I don’t want to project flexibility as better than traditional games. In fact I feel  having a very open character creation in an RPG necessitates all kinds of other processes that a more traditional game builds in. Here is what I mean: If you ta...

Hey! I'm going to post actual Physical shards of Thimbral Progress today ! Not just vapor theory mumbo jumbo like my usual.  This will be A quick view of a prototype starting character sheet or even character worksheet if you like, for the Shards of Thimbral R.P.G.   This sheet or one like it will be on the last page of the PDF when shards of Thimbral is complete. It will not meant to be the "forever" record of a player's character and the character's adventures. What I'm hoping for is this sheet functioning  more like a work sheet to help move character creation along. What I'm posting here is simply baby steps, nothing fancy, more of an attempted proof of concept. it's a start I know it is a bit hard to see on the blog, but it's a full sized 8 1/2" by 11" sheet containing not only spots to jot down initial character info but also the definitions of some of the  character terms and their uses in game. I think a tool like this would be v...

Shards of Thimbral, Laying out. Making some decisions. I have decided on the basic lay out for the shards of Thimbral game. I plan on opening the game with “Ten steps to playing this game NOW” which will pair the game down to the bare bones, and get players playing as quickly as possible. (cause Players gotta play.) After that section I will expand each part of the 10 ten steps in it's own chapter. Lastly there will be a fluff section expanding the setting framework that I posted earlier. My goal is to have people actually playing as quickly as I can. It sounds simple, but it's really not. considering one of the pillars of the game is the set up stage where characters are created and the foundations for the characters locations and relationships are set up, takes time. In our second play test the charter creation and set up phase took roughly two and a half hours. That was with some joking around and general B.S. But still it was a chunk of time. I want to at least half the tim...

RPG Games are like onions “they make you cry?” “yes” “they stink?” “sometimes....” Getting ready for the next Shards of Thimbral Playtests session. I have a few changes and additions to make based on the first two playtests, out line in these earlier posts. http://dustpangames.blogspot.com/2013/11/live-play-test-number-1-so-it-begins.html http://dustpangames.blogspot.com/2013/11/play-test-2-breaking-rules-of-playtests.html So I am starting to add layers to the  “Shards of Thimbral RPG.” I have what I feel is a decent enough  mechanic for the  telling of stories which I outlined it in  long winded detail here: http://dustpangames.blogspot.com/2013/11/nitty-gritty-open-hood-game-mechanics.html I still need to play-test the ever loving stuffing out of it, but I feel that it works and I think I can move forward with the layering of other system details. The first detail is structure. Each session is set up by the players looking at each others character sheets, and picki...

Setting Notes Setting / Game name Shards of Thimbral. Holy cow I actualy have name for this thing! Yes the game is now known as “Shards Of Thimbral” I hope that is evocative enough to hang my hat on as I move forward. My last post was all admittedly dry, mechanics and chance this and reward that ~!BAHHHHH!~ That side of game design is only a small percent of what makes a game fun. Today we get to put the meet in the proverbial sandwich . Setting is difficult, Time consuming and risky. A good setting can capture an audience's imagination and make people want to play a game. An uninspiring setting will turn players off and kill even the best designed game system. What I am offering up here is the original setting design document, the frame on which I'm going to hang the Shards of Thimbral game and fiction on. I have three goals: I want to make the setting evocative and fun, with a range of narrative possibilities to satisfy a range of players and play styles. Secondly, (Though th...