Designing a Tabletop Roleplaying Game - Part 1

I've always enjoyed both playing and designing roleplaying games. I'm starting to design a new very simple roleplaying system and in this video I talk about it with some Conan on the Commodore 64 playing in the background.

The text of the video:

Welcome friends, Retro Commodore Space Magic.

In this video I’m going to do something a little different. I’ve enjoyed roleplaying games for a long time, and in this video I’m going to talk about them. Enjoy some Conan gameplay on the Commodore 64 in the background.

I’ve always liked roleplaying games, both computer and tabletop. In fact, I have a collection of roleplaying books. When I was younger I liked complex roleplaying games with lots of rules, which was mostly what was available then. These days though I like simple and fast roleplaying games that let you tell the story you want to tell and give you a framework to play the game in but are easy and quick to play and easy to teach.

I’ve also written a number of different roleplaying systems of varying complexity. Lately I’ve been thinking about a system I want to create that’s very simple and fun and quick to play and would also be modular in the sense that new systems and features could be added onto the base system.

I’ve come up with such a system, though I don’t know what I’m going to call it yet. The basic idea is every character has two stats: Do Stuff and Fight Stuff. Anything important the character wants to do will have a difficult number assigned to it. The player will roll a d20 and add the appropriate stat and compare the result to the difficulty number. If they roll higher than the difficulty number, they succeed.

There will also be a simple skill system in place which can be expanded with further modules, where if the character has a skill, or for that matter a special item, which applies to the activity, then the skill bonus or item bonus will also add to the roll.

This is a really quick and simple system that’s easy to learn, easy to teach, and easy to play. It allows you to customize your character and have fun things to do while keeping the focus on the story.

I’ll release more videos talking about the details as I put them together, including a character sheet and things like that. After I get the basics in place the next thing I’m going to work on is a magic system module. I have a few ideas but magic systems can be tricky to implement. I wanted to create something that’s simple and streamlined that fits the rest of the system well.

I’d be interested to hear about your experiences in the roleplaying world. Do you have a favorite game or system? Let me know in the comments.

So, I hope you found this interesting, especially if you like roleplaying too. Remember to subscribe to be notified of whenever I post a new video. Liking is always a wonderful thing to do, and tune in again next time for more retro fun.