7 Things You Should Know When Making Your Own TTRPG

you want to make your own ttrpg you want to join the ranks of those who have influenced and twisted the little minds of players all over the world yes it's a good ambition but can you actually do it how easy or how difficult or what should you even be thinking about when it comes to creating your own tt rpgs hello and welcome to today's episode my name is guy and we're going to be looking at how to make your own ttrpg or at least we're going to be looking at it in broad strokes because there are so many different components that one can go into when making your own ttrpg that it can be quite daunting so in this overview video if you like we're going to be exploring sort of things about what kind of decisions you should make before you even start writing out the new rules that you have come up with so that's what we're going to get that's what we're going to be going through today now if you do want to see more videos on how to make your own ttrpgs let me know in the dooblydoo down below because well that's the only way that we know what you want to see so i can't guarantee that you'll get it before say mid-january but if you are interested and you do want to know let us know and while it's strated hit that like button and well you might as well hit the subscribe button that way you won't miss out if i do do a second video that i do for you to do you know anyway let's get straight into it okay so first step step number one oh no oh no no no ichi what is your goal in writing the tt rpg what what is what why why are you even making it are you trying to improve upon something that has already been made so you're going well we've home brewed this system so much that it doesn't even look like the original system so we might as well make it our own and that way we can get rid of all of those old legacy things that we included and just start from scratch so we're making something we're improving something is it ah is it a oh and i got stuck on on is it a holy new and completely different idea you've decided you know what this whole dice thing is nonsense from now on we're going to be uh rolling grandmothers and whoever's grandmother rolls the furthest succeeds in the task they're after you can come up with all kinds of crazy things and there are there are ttrpgs out there that use that use dice they use cards playing cards they use bespoke dice they use bespoke playing cards they use jenga towers they use pickup sticks they use bouncing balls they use car license plates yes yes that is how i used to role play on the road you use car license plates to give you your numbers all kinds of craziness that exists out there and that's a good thing it allows us to explore options and go that was a dumb idea we won't use that one again so either you are improving upon an existing system and creating a new one out of that or you're starting from scratch either way you need to know why you're doing it is it is it to have fun is it to create something that allows you to tell a story better why are you doing this why are you doing it you have to be able to answer that question right up front now when i look at the role role-playing games that i have designed uh or i'm still working on i should say often times it was a case of well i really want to play dungeons and dragons but i want to play it in the wild west so i need to invent rules for firearms they didn't have them in the second edition very much um i want to include rules for shooting off of horseback and all those kinds of things or i really want to do a nautical campaign rule set this was also second edition dungeons and dragons where they didn't have naval combat so you had to we well we tried to figure out how to do it and again 20 years later we finally did do it and i'm quite happy to say it worked out quite well so there it was improving a system starting from scratch i've been tasked by my significant other to try and come up with a rule system that doesn't involve any numbers no mathematics at all merely yes or no outcomes that's an interesting one that's a more of a mental puzzle anything else because my immediate reaction was don't be silly everything every role-playing game out there uses some form of mathematic mathematics except for those that don't so how do they work hmm anyway so you have to choose your reason why are you trying to make this game and if your best reason is because i wanna i'm not entirely sure that's gonna help sustain you because this is a long and arduous process and you are going to have more people telling you what's wrong with it then you are going to have people telling you what's right with it they're not going to tell you what's right with it because they're not going to comment on that they're going to say oh i didn't like how this worked but what did you think about the rest oh the rest was fine it was great it worked well and so i'm not saying anything about it i'm only telling you what i don't like so it is a long journey you need to stick to your core principle and then and this was insight that i learned from working with a good friend of mine i've worked with a couple friends trying to create role-playing systems they've always fizzled out and died because our goals why we were making these things were dissimilar they were not in concert i had a goal for a simple system the other partner had a goal for a system that was so simple it was beyond simple it was uh you only have five skills for everything i i'd whittled it down to 20. you want five that's very very different so again knowing what your goal is is very important point number two uh me point number two is you have to choose your genre now why do i say this there are a few systems out there that are generic you can use them for medieval settings for fantasy settings for science fiction settings for modern day set you can but they oftentimes require tweaking what i find generally helps me a lot more when creating a basic rule system is to choose the genre that you most enjoy playing in because what that does is that allows you to unlock all of the information that you have in your head for the other role-playing games that you've been playing most likely from the same genre because you now can take those rules take those things look at what they did look at your system and go okay i can use that i can use that if you go with a generic system you're then going to be struggling to try and reconcile how do you fly a boeing 747 versus a star destroyer versus then casting magic so you're starting to try and juggle a lot of different mechanics and it can become overwhelming whereas if you choose to do simply a fantasy setting well now you've all the only thing you have to worry about is magic not necessarily all of the components about flying or about sailing or about high speed impact crashing and the like so choose your genre that is definitely definitely my my my advice number three number three is about choosing how you are going to determine outcomes now this might seem a little bit backwards shouldn't you try and work out what the system is first no because your outcome resolution is going to be i think anyway your guiding light in terms of what mechanics you should be using anyway so is it random chance is it just um roll or die maybe you can add some numbers to it but ultimately it's just coming down to random chance you succeed or you fail is it interpretation so there are games that i have played where there are no dice and it is interpretive well you wanted to fix the wagon and you did say in your character history that you used to work as a wagon wheel maker as a a wagoneer i don't know what is the official term for someone who makes wagons i want to say creepier but that's a a cooper but that's a barrel maker uh nonetheless you have some background in wagon wheel fixing or you're going to steal a wagon wheel off of another wagon and so you can see how it's done that gives you plus three to your option the difficulty was two and so you succeed so you're interpreting the outcome based on some values that you have in your character sheet it could be quite literally beating values so i have five you have two i succeed no dice unnecessary it's a straight up comparison or it could simply be do you have the skill path finding yes then you can track anything regardless of the situation it could also be through agreement i have played games where everybody votes on whether your outcome succeeds or not it's not a very fast system and oftentimes the people involved might vote yes because they want you to succeed because they have a vested interest sometimes they vote no because it's going to be comically interesting but narratively destructive or is it perhaps a point allocation system well this round you have 10 points you can spend those however you like you can spend one point to defeat my two difficulty you'll fail you have to spend three points that leaves you only with seven so you've got a guard knowing that you're going to run out of points whatever the mechanic there are multiple ways of resolving an outcome there are multiple ways of determining an outcome why do you need this though why do you need to determine an outcome well to be put to put it quite simply that's part of our game it would be like saying well you could play soccer without a ball but i'm not entirely sure how you'd keep track of who's winning and who isn't if you leave it up to the players they're both going to claim victory so you do need to have some kind of resolution some kind of effect that you know is going to allow you to determine the outcome why do we do this first before we do anything else like determining the the the mechanics the the skills if you're going to have skills all those kinds of things why do we do this first well we do it because it's a going to inform us in terms of what our system is going to be using but b it puts us in the right mindset so if we are going to be using some random decision making process we then know that our mechanics should be aligned to a random process and that they shouldn't become definite yes or no's which would be more towards perhaps an interpretive situation or towards a value system so we need to know exactly how we want this to play out should it be gimmicky do you want to say well i want a system that no one else has ever done before so we're going to be rolling um stones and we're going to have little green stones and redstones and blue stones and you have to roll them over a circle and the stones that remain in the middle of the circle are the stones that count the ones that roll out the sides count against you you deduct the ones from the sides from the ones in the middle and whatever's left that's your score that's entirely up to you if you feel that that's the most practical way of resolving your particular conflict then that's the way that you do it but remember you've got to go back and ask yourself well does this fit within the genre because there are some there are some games that use playing cards and they use playing cards because there's a wild west kind of flavor which is where poker comes from so it's thematically relevant there it's a chance it's randomness you're drawing cards and then you're trying to influence that randomness but it's still a random generator effectively it's just using cards there are other games where it's has nothing to do with the system whatsoever it has nothing to do with a genre whatsoever it's just a fun cool mechanic and those are one-shot type adventures that you play when you have nothing better to do and you don't particularly care about the story and then you want to look at how does that all fit in terms of why you wanted to make this game in the first place if you get frustrated because the dice are always rolling against you what's the point of using another random generator system if it's going to be doing exactly the reason why you didn't like the first system in the first place so it's time to then stretch your wings and go okay we're gonna go somewhere else now we're gonna go looking somewhere else we're gonna do something else that becomes incredibly important number four number four mechanics now we finally get down to it the actual mechanic so you've determined this is going to be um let's say uh a yes or no it's going to be yes or no that's the only mechanic we're doing and that's what my my partner has asked for a role-playing game that is just yes or no what mechanic what mechanic do we we then employ how do we determine yes or no is that a heads or tails but that's more random than just a straight up yes or no so we don't want any kind of mathematics and when you're flipping a coin there is a statistical probability of a yes or no so that's still a random value whereas if the outcome is either a flat yes or a flat no then there is no probability it is either yes or it is no we do not have any schrodinger's cats running around so when we then look at the mechanic we go well that means everything then has to boil down to yes or no does that mean that we're going to have skills whereas you have a cooking skill or a driving skill or a photography skill or a fighting skill or does that mean that rather than having that we're going to have a collection of abilities which when added together no we can't have mathematics involved so we're going to have a collection of abilities that are either yes or no scenarios and that will allow us to determine our exact outcome there are role-playing games out there that don't have any skills whatsoever they simply have your abilities and your disciplines and you derive from that whatever it might be to solve that particular skill do you see how important it is to have defined how your role-playing game is going to work in terms of its outcomes before you start looking at anything else so in a yes or no type of scenario i can't see that skills are going to be particularly useful here you can drive yes or no okay so that does solve that question but can you drive better than somebody else in this case there can only be an answer of no because whether you have been driving for one month or whether you have been driving for six months you can still drive there is no gradation there is no differentiation so perhaps then we don't need skills perhaps we need something else and so that's how the journey goes now that we're in the mechanics phase we're now starting to say what will allow us to determine whether you are a good driver or a bad driver or a better driver do we need to even have the definition of better driver so there are a lot of things that then come into play as we start to examine that once you have however once you have decided okay so the characters are going to have the ability to choose yes or no there's no mathematics involved and what we're going to do is we're going to tie that to let's say 12 abilities each ability is going to cover a specific area within this this role-playing game if you have the ability whatever you're attempting to do the answer is yes if you don't have the ability whatever you're attempting to do the answer is no that's it straight up there is no gradation there is no better or worse there is just yes or no so in step five we now test our system not with friends not yet we're not gonna get them involved just yet we still have to make some tweaks some adjustments on our own and the very first one we're going to do is we're going to test it against a standard possible scenario the character using your role-playing system must climb a cliff how would they do it in my yes or no type of game it would be do they have a physical skill yes then they can climb the cliff or perhaps it's a dexterity skill or perhaps it's a mountaineering skill i don't know i haven't worked out the minutiae yet but if the answer is yes then they climb the the cliff perhaps it isn't even a question of having the ability to climb perhaps there's a question of gear do they have grappling hook and rope yes they can climb the cliff so that is then what you test your system against if it's playing cards if it's django if it's pick up sticks if it's bouncing balls test it against that one first helping someone else can your character help somebody else in my scenario the answer would be yes or no we want them to be able to help each other so we want collaboration we want the characters to work together because perhaps if we go all the way back to our first decision we want the game to feel more like a team rather than as individuals playing in a group space so the answer is yes we want our characters to be able to help each other so how would they do it in my scenario maybe there's a ability that says assist or works well with others yes or no if it's yes then yes you work well with somebody else do you help them well again i don't have any gradation within my role playing system apparently so if you have the ability does work well with others and let's say then the thing is mountain climbing and your character has mountain coming yes then the two of you will be able to climb the mountain because you can work well with others and you can mountain climb do you see what i'm driving at is you're going to start testing all of the usual role-playing scenarios against your own system so the next one discovering a hidden door or a secret clue is that another skill is that an ability is it a talent is it a feat is it a focus is it a you start to come up with these things start to test the system and then of course melee combat can you engage in malay combat yes yes you can how do you engage in melee combat and how do you determine damage how do you determine the ability to dodge or block out of the jump out of the way maybe you don't in my scenario i'm particularly stuck can they use a sword yes so does that mean they automatically are dealing damage to the enemy if the enemy can use a shield then are they automatically cancelled out i will need to go and test the system and to come up with a solution where there is no maths and i can't give you the solution by the way folks i am literally making this up during this video as we go along um i will have to go and find solutions that are yes no and then the outcome is based on certain yes or no's and then the damage is based on yes or no or maybe there is no damage maybe this is completely a theatrical kind of thing do you have a sword yes does your opponent have a shield no the opponent is no longer standing they double over and they are dying it could be something as simple as that because then we need to look at ranged combat in almost any system i can think of there is always ranged combat that was one of the fundamental steps that mankind took when they realized they could throw something at an enemy and cause it to move less than when they were trying to just run up to it and it also gave the advantage of not being hit back by the enemy when you were throwing things at range so how does your range combat work is it fundamentally different from melee combat is it fundamentally the same in my system i suspect it's going to be exactly the same thing just with no return damage being possible there are some role-playing systems out there where only the players roll dice and so only the players determine whether their enemy hits or whether the enemy fails or whether the enemy deals damage or whether it doesn't so it's only taken to mind into consideration step number six now you take your system and you test it with your friends and i cannot emphasize this enough when we were writing the book complete guide to nautical campaigns we had the most amazing play testers come in and they sat around the table and they tried to do stuff they tried to break the system they tried to do things that i hadn't anticipated in the system they succeeded 100 of the time they asked oh how do i do this you go i don't know i hadn't accounted for that oh how do you do that you did this way oh no that doesn't make sense that's broken and even when i shipped it off to other people to try and role play they sent back almost as many pages as the rule book was in terms of questions you've said this but there's no accounting for that you've said this but this is et cetera et cetera et cetera so there's lots and lots and lots and lots of things you need to take into account once you've tested it a couple times not just once a couple times my suggestion would be test it at least twice before you change anything then change stuff based on those those those testings and then only do you update it and then you test it again and again and your objective is to whittle down the amount of feedback that you're getting from your players until eventually they're going oh can we plan your system because i really love it i really enjoy it it's so cool it does this it solves that problem and solves the next problem so that's what you're looking for when you're testing your system is trying to get it to the point where there is nothing but don't doubt yourself you might get players going oh this is terrible why did you think this would ever be interesting try it with different groups that's the other important thing is your own home group might be so used to the style that you normally run using the normal system that they don't want to even know about this new system so they're naturally going to be resistant to it take it online there are so many things that you can find out there table finder wizard for example that's that's that's where you should go and the right link will be in the in the video today trust me uh so so go and have a look for for different groups to play it on the more people you can play test it with the stronger the system will definitely be then well now what you need to do is last step you start fleshing it out because they're going to want to know the equipment oh can i buy equipment people love buying equipment i don't know why they often don't use it but they like to have it and they like to earn cash so they can go and buy more you're going to need to work out equipment you're going to need to work out whether that equipment has durability does it last does it break what are the chances of it being destroyed by fire how heavy is it is that something that you even need to worry about in your ttrpg all those kinds of questions so you're starting to flesh it out you're starting to now build up all those additional things and it's at this point that you then start to add in additional mechanics as well oh well the players felt it was a little bit difficult to create a unique character because you only had three basic character classes in your first test so you can now add in another 15 if you want to they then felt well leveling there was no leveling so how do we level please tell us how we level work out how we level et cetera et cetera et cetera once you've done that revision guess what you're back to play testing and you want to play test that thing again play test all of the additions that you've now added on because they may very well have broken the system and then you go back and you revise and you say does this work with my core original purpose my original plan of having a system which was either yes or no or whatever your particular goal was does this rule fit with that does this rule fit with that because you might find that as you expand as you add on to this particular rule system it starts to change and evolve and sometimes shifts back towards the role playing system that you're used to playing or sometimes gets to the point where you're like this just isn't actually fun this mechanic no matter which way i twist it no matter which way i look at it just isn't going to work and then my last piece of advice to you because that's it for this particular video i've gone on for way too long anyway the last piece of advice that i have for you is don't give up the current rule system that i've been trying to get off of the ground called the try system and the tri-fi system those i have been writing for years years i have had people come in and join me and they've added or they've subtracted they haven't had the same goal so they've pulled out or i've pulled out and it's sort of been malleable and it's been evolving constantly changing constantly adjusting and now it's in a place where i think you know what i could now start get to the point where i am kind of happy with it because i have players going i really love that system i want to play it again but having played some new systems in the last three months i'm going yeah but i think i could make it better i think i could make it better and then with you know my partner going well i only want to play a game that says yes or no because i've never role played before and i think would be a really good easy system to get into i'm going that is a whole different challenge that is a whole different challenge for me it's an intellectual one um and one that i want to do obviously but um yeah it's a different a different kettle of fish once you start designing systems though forever will you be designing systems because you'll start to see oh cool well i can tweak this and i can do that oh let's try this mechanic whoa that didn't work but if i just tweak and tinker and this and that that's how you get gnomes that's how you get gnomes all right so to avoid gnomes i'm ending this video i wish you and yours the very best of luck if you are going to be designing your own system and if you do join our discord discord gg forward slash great gm and come and share it with us there are 5 000 play testers just ready and waiting to try out your new system well we don't have a sponsor for today other than our wonderful patreons now our patreons get amazing rewards every month they get maps they get tables that help them create random locations and all kinds of things you're seeing that on screen now so a big thank you to all of our patrons now another thank you to our kickstarter which is epic battle maps it was fully funded within five hours of launch thanks again to your amazing support we're moving up increasing reaching towards those new stretch goals which will just add more maps to this collection now if you don't know what i'm talking about epic battle maps is our offering it contains 24 maps it will increase over time but it contains 24 maps at the moment which you can then use virtually or around the table in a nice neat compact fold-out book like this one behind me it's a standard size book it fits on your bookshelf but the maps are absolutely huge within it and uh it's doing really well the link for that kickstarter is down below if you want to support us that would be absolutely amazing and yes so a big thank you to you for watching all the way to the end of today's video and until next time i wish you and yours the very happiest of gaming

Channel: How to be a Great GM

Views: 146,618

Keywords: creating the campaign, campaign creator, how to be a great game master, how to gm, great gm, dnd campaign, dnd campaign design, dnd campaign ideas, rpg campaign design, rpg campaign, role playing campaign, campaign design, fantasy campaign, running the game, game master guide, gm tips, dm tips, epic guide to creating campaigns, how to make a ttrpg, creating a rpg game, how to create a rpg game, creating your own dnd world, how to make a tabletop roleplaying game

Id: v8K3lQCXcAk

Length: 27min 56sec (1676 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020