DGRPG Design Diary: Back to Basics

It's been a while. I had a brief exploratory sidequest to check out the possibility of some kind of Dungeon Grind computer game, but that didn't pan out because coding is hard. Certainly harder than I anticipated. Making pixel-graphics is fun and I'm not bad at webdesign coding with CSS and HTML and even a bit of the ol' PHP/SQL stuff, so how tricky could it be, right? Suffice to say it turned into a rather brisk lesson in humility. But at least I tried.

So, back to the world of paper-and-pencils.

Part of the reason for the above digression was because I was having some trouble coming up with rules for the DGRPG - I've got a fairly good idea of what I want in terms of feel and texture for the game, but assigning actual numbers to things was challenging, because I kept getting tied up in working out which approach was "better" for everything - flat modifiers vs. dice modifiers, whether task resolution should be d20 + modifier, or d20 + attribute, how these things might affect balance and fairness, which option feels best, and so on and so forth. And looming on the horizon was the idea that I'd have to make this kind of decision for everything the rules might have to cover, because I'd been mentally modelling DGRPG on later editions of D&D, which tend to have rules for everything - if you want to do something there's probably a rule to cover it. Part of this likely stems from the attempt to make the d20 system a "universal" system (rather than just sticking to the Heroic Fantasy genre of previous editions), while the rest is probably because more rules means being able to sell more rulebooks detailing and explaining those rules.

Whatever the reason, that's really not what I'm aiming for. Ideally I'd like to get all the rules needed to play DGRPG into one booklet, maybe 32 pages or so tops. Character generation, a bit of setting information, some spells, equipment, task resolution, combat system, and that's about it. Something nice and lightweight.

Then I took a closer look at this OSR thing I've seen mentioned here and there online in RPG communities, read a few blogs, downloaded a few articles, and things are starting to click. The Quick Primer for OSR Gaming has been pretty informative, and meshes pretty well with what I have in mind.

Which is a slightly long-winded way of saying that I've got a clearer idea of where to take things from here, and will thus be able to start putting together an actual workable system, from the ground up.