By About Late '95 I had a system, broken, flawed, but a system none the less..
Because of the many changes, I'm likely to explain bits and pieces and why they worked or failed, but I'd like to think that we pretty much started with a working but flawed system, then broke parts and healed them properly...
The first underlying premise was that level ups had to match. Working from a Warhammer base, I assigned boxes to each of the stat set, for experience. You could not get a stat bonus, unless you had 100 XP in that stat. Fellowship XP happened from roleplaying your character, Toughness XP from resisting and taking damage. This really suited things well, Mages were no longer getting combat bonuses, unless they were IN combat, Warriors did not get Leadership bonuses, unless the group agreed, they had performed well as a leader that session.
But Warhammer has many small problems of its own. Firstly its built on a battle board game, combat relies on your own Weapon skill, and nothing to do with your opponents. too often we'd have problems where a monster of fairly decent skill was constantly being hit, sure his toughness reduced the damage, but since it was touch poison attacks, only 1 Wound was needed, you couldn't really have a character whose ability to duck and weave, dance around the opponent, worked well.
But things that did work well, was the concept of Attacks, the concept of Real life jobs and skills and training, and your starting equipment. and Magic?, well, I'll come to that later.
We ran around 6 months of this adjusted WHFRP.
Around that time, my Club, Dungeonworld, was coming to an end, I had failed to advertise for more members, I could not handle the numbers I had, and many of them started to grow up, they viewed the club as something relating to their teenage years. Some of them had to be asked to leave for theft, and their friends of course went with them,, it was a sad time.
I gathered the more serious players, and we started roleplaying at my place. Most of us were young adults by then, so it was less of a concern that we were no longer a club, and more of a gaming group. It was around then that I sold the first "edition" of the rules, trademarked my game and decided that this was something I was going to do with my life.. even if I had no idea how.
