Creating a game (Part 1)

Let's start this year off with the idea of creating a brand new RPG from scratch.

I've done this a few times, but there are a couple of students in my high school roleplaying club who have started developing some games of their own, and I figure it might be a good idea to have somewhere to direct them to. There will be some practical examples in this sequence as we work through the development process, and there will be a bit of the theory to back up some of the ideas.

Some of those students only have a decent level of familiarity with D&D, but I've tried showing them that other game mechnisms work as well, if ot better for different styles of play...but then again, a lot of those players only really understanding the murderhobo play style, so they view every other game through that lens. One particular student I'm thinking of even calls every game a "homebrew" if it isn't run specfically verbatim from a book with a "Dungeons and Dragons" logo.

I'm not going to try and make the perfect game... I've come to the conclusion tat there is no perfect game. There are just games that are better tools for facilitating different play experiences, and different mechanisms of play that work together to build a style of play. I'll probably look at a few existing games, because it's impossible to make informed design choices without looking at some of the product that have already made design decisions for better or worse.

Under the Vulpinoid Studios imprint, I've created dozens of games. Some of those have been single pages of text, many have been short games of 16 or 32 pages, and some have been longer or have seen a range of supplements produced. As indicated on one of the previous posts, none of these games has been a commercial success, but they've been used to create fun play expriences in homes, in gaming clubs, and at conventions.

I've done similar series in the past, especially when I've tried to develop a game in real-time in 24 hours, or during a NaGaDeMon month


For this series, I'll focus on my unfinished game "Bustle in your Hedgerow", based on scarecrows, fey magic, and the lyrics of Led Zeppelin songs. I really wanted to finish this for last year's NaGaDeMon in November, but life threw too much in the way.

It's half done, maybe more than half, so it will make a good example for finishing as a part of this series.

I'll try to add something here every couple of days,

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