A little over 2 years ago the company I was contracting with pitched a video game concept to a publisher based on a tabletop role playing game that the publisher owned. To our surprise they showed an immediate interest and asked for more information, usually these things take ages. I had nothing to do with the actual pitch, but given I was working there as a designer I needed to catch up fast and come up with that ‘more information’.
Back in the day (as they say on the Grogpod) I played a lot of role playing games, starting with the Moldvay Basic D&D boxed set which I’d asked from Santa in, hmm maybe 1982. Basic soon led to Advanced, then Traveler, Call of Cthulhu, Middle Earth Role Playing and on and on for the next ten years. At some point we switched to playing games of our own devising, Frankensteined things cobbled together from many systems. My first forays into game design I guess.
I was an obsessed and shameless rpg nerd. One time I even managed to get my whole 2nd year English class playing D&D for a lesson (thanks Mr Strachan!) and I was a founding member of the school D&D club at a time when there were no other such after school clubs* due to it being the height of Thatcherism.
The game IP for which my colleagues were pitching was not one of those I had played however, so I started reading. My response to the material went from cringe to obsession in a few days. By the time we met the publishers in person I had gone fully native, speaking its abstruse language with confidence. The project got signed, so it turned out my research was just beginning.
Although I was loving the material we were working on, it was reading this reddit thread - that got me looking at other systems. The thread asks for examples of rules which didn’t sound great on paper but were brilliant in play. The details people listed blew me away - it was the first time I got an inkling of how far things might have moved on since I last played. As a result I ordered Mouse Guard, then Dungeon World, then Blades in the Dark, then… well see the pic at top, plus there's more in the post not to mention a bunch of Kickstarters still to be fulfilled.
I wasn’t actually playing these games though, only reading them and trying to imagine how the rules would play out and glean whatever I could for the work project. At some point I realized I needed to start taking notes or I’d forget what I’d read in a few weeks. So starting with Over the Edge I would jot down my thoughts on each system when I finished reading it.
Sadly the work project got canned at the start of this year. I’m not at all sure what I can say about that so I’m going to play it safe and say nothing. It was a great opportunity which just didn’t work out. So it goes. The key thing here is that it rekindled my love of ttrpgs and now I'm always in the process of reading some system with at least one or two more laying in wait on the living room table.
I am also still writing up my thoughts which is why I’m writing this. I thought I might (gradually) post all the notes that I’ve taken to date and then post new ones as I write them, this being instigated as much as anything by the fact I now follow and read a lot of great rpg blogs. These notes are not reviews, and at the time of writing them the main thing was to outline the key rules and features for ease of comparison later. I have not played any of these games, well other than the solo journaling ones, only read them, which is ironic given that reddit post which nudged me into buying Mouse Guard and set me off on this adventure in the first place….
Thanks for reading :)
*there was one other club - a martial arts one run by a teacher who was eventually fired for pointing an air rifle at a pupil, but that's another story
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