SRDs

In my recent collaborations with Erin Gumiho, I've been digging though a range of System Reference Documents that folks have been putting out for their games. 

This idea excites me, and since both Walkabout and Familiar are being designed with a common game system driving them, it kind of makes sense for us to generate a common System Reference Document that underpins these games I've spent so long developing. That means I've looked at a the different ways that people have been presenting their SRDs, hoping to see some commonalities in their structure. Yet curiously, after looking at a dozen SRDs, the only things that they really share are the ways they reflect the thoughts of the designers and vary dramatically. Some are rigid, others are loose and informal, some are basically stripped back universal roleplaying games, others are ideological frameworks that need assembly before they can be played in any real sense. 

Erin and I are hoping to work out which of the SRDs we like,and which elements we can pick and choose from to create the SNAFU SRD.

(Photoshopped watercolour image based on photo references by Erin Gumiho)

At this stage, I'm thinking of pulling a whole heap of stuff from my "How to Run a Game" sequence of blog posts and adding it into the SRD and also including elements from the Vector Theory posts back in 2010 (since they informed the origins of the whole system). The question is how much of that context is actually useful for someone who might consider designing a game using this SRD, and how much might just be my vanity.

 (The SNAFU Team... AKA Stone Cold Fox Games and Vulpinoid Studios)

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