Thoughts on Game Design

I am an amateur (very amateur) game designer. For the last few years, I’ve been working on my “heartbreaker” (“Break Your Heart”, Matthew Colville) RPG. I don’t post a lot about it, because I’m not trying to sell anything on here, this is for fun. But in my struggles to refine and define the “perfect” combat system for my game, while making sure it falls in line smoothly with every other facet, I’ve realized something: it doesn’t have to. Combat and skill checks and things like that, don’t all have to be the same. That’s boring! 

I don’t want combat to feel the same as characters negotiating or jumping a chasm. That means the regular stuff is too intense or the combat is too “watered down” for what I want in my game. Things can be accessible without being exactly like every other check in the game. It took a lot of gaming and reading and stewing to finally realize this.

In Chainmail, there are separate rolls for most things. Missile fire uses 1d6, morale uses 2d6, and melee uses as many d6’s as you need to get your heavy horse to absolutely devastate that unit of armored foot! And guess what? It was still easy to learn, and FUN TO PLAY! That was my whole goal when I started writing my undisclosed RPG.

And there isn’t ever going to be a perfect system for everything or everyone. I love Scrabble, I love Yahtzee,  I love Carcassone, but each of those is a completely different game. Thanks for reading if you made it this far, more to follow with battle reports and the current project. And I still don’t think bows belong underground… except maybe latches like Tradgardmastare pointed out.