The Original Stats: Warrior

For the Longest Time, The DW stats were just the same as Dragon Warrior Stats, with the addition of Ranged Attack...

But we had some problems..

Dragon Warriors Stats are: Attack, defence, Evasion, Stealth, Perception, Magical Attack, Magical Defence.

But how do you compare a Monks attack skill to a knights defence? Monks use Hand fighting.. so.. a knight has a defence modifier? or Monk has attack modifier?

Again I was kitting this wall of 'modifiers' Sure sure, it makes your charactersheet look cleaner to have one stat, then your GM has a table of modifiers to play with.. but either I was too lazy or my players wanted to have more information, we decided that this wasn't good enough..

So we had to have Melee Attack, Melee Defence, Weapon Attack and Weapon Defence.. which was sorta cool..

Then there were some great skills in Warhammer.. Strike Mighty blow, Strike to Stun, Strike to Injure. Some of the other game system had more skills of combat.. always there was a modifier.. -7, -5, -6.. when looking at what they did.. it seemed that they were just the same values, just different to what they actually did.. so why have 3 skills.. 5 skills.. 100 skills.. so we spoke to some Combat Simulations Experts, and for the most part what we got was, a strike, no matter what type.. was a kind of moment when you felt that your opponent had left themselves open, and you took advantage of that to get in a decent blow.. be it harder, faster, or to incapacitate.

So, this Damaging strike.. it was really a kind of regular skill, which in many systems were just Statistics..

Thats really what a Stat is.. its a skill thats used so regularly, by so many classes that you need its value on the front page. So thats where we put it..

Of course, the names needed a change.. Melee, Weapon Skill, Damage Strike, Block, Parry .. but sometimes you just need to get out of the way.. so.. Dodge.

Warrior Stats Down.. what next  Archer..

Health, Bruises, Bleeding and Tracking

Ever forgot to rub out the arrow box when you shoot off arrows? or had arguments with your GM about provisions or potions that you had or had not drunk?

I'm sure its staple roleplay, there are many small aspects of the game that you might forget.. If its in your favour, you turn a blind eye, but against you, well I've seen entire tables rage against the DM about whether a potion was drunk or not..

So Imagine a system, where you tick off XP bonuses for each and every stat.. I tried tick boxes, rising numbered boxes.. mathematical equations, all sorts of things.. the biggest problem was tracking.. and worse still for health..

We had introduced a kind of non-lethal damage, called Body Ready.. not sure where I got the name now.. but you had a set of boxes.. and to nominate if the physical damage you just took was light, you ticked the box.. you could 'take a breather' in combat and get back d4+ con bonus BR.. if you didn't each tick cost you a -1 to all skills & stats (out of breath) and if it was medium, you crossed the tick, you needed a full round of breathing to stop that one.. but was still only a -1  and the final heavy, circle that crossed tick.. this one need a nights rest (or at least an hour per circle)

Health was another matter, When you got cut, you got health damage and bleed damage (per 5 pts of health = 1 bleed), you needed to stauch the wound to stop it.. else you'd lose that much bleed as health per round.

Then we also had a problem, If I smacked you over the head.. how could I knock you out? most systems had a rule about, if you're at 0 HP, you're unconcious... but as often as not, you were also bleeding to death too.. we had to lower death down to -15 to be able to counter that.. but what if you were poisoned, ok so now poisons had to have more damage to match the sword + bleed numbers.. ok so what about if you fall off a cliff? slam into the ground, maybe you break your legs.. do you pass out? walk away?

Health has always had a problem in Roleplay Games, its dumbed down to make it a game.. there we are again, referring to it as a game.. well I'm sorry, but by this stage this was no longer a game, this was a way of representing reality within a game system.. its called gamification..

Yes, some of my players riled against this attitude that I had (I've changed a bit since.. but I used to be very sheldon about it)

I was slowly developing something that was no longer a roleplay game, I was trying to understand how we represent ourselves as a set of statistics... why? because that has to be the basis to things.. a solid foundation, before making things playable.. and I think its become one of the reasons why alot of players actually like my game, because they can see themselves doing things, rather than a list of actions in a choice menu.

But I digress (I'll write more about this later) At this stage of development, we had Health, Body Ready, Knockout and Death.. you could get values of up to 100 Health as a moderate 7th level character.. but to get to 120, took an extraordinary ammount of bonuses, skills and game events.. 20th level characters might get 125... but We forgot healing..

The first iteration of the game, was WHFRP, health was out of 10, starting around 3... Dragon Warriors has something similar.. starting around 8 and sometimes getting to 25.. both systems had a fairly even idea that you'd wait a few days to get back 1 point, then 1 point per day after that.. seemed ok..

.. but after we added in bleeding, we needed to multiple everyones health by 5, (so that 1-3 points of bleeding per round, was less problematic), which meant all weapons x5, ok, so that made healing easier.. you started healing 1 point on day 1, and rose by 1 per day.. by 10 days, if you were still damaged, you healed by 10 that night..

Damage dice for weapons was now broken, poisons and spells broken.. everything was broken from this bleeding rule. So we scrapped it. I had to think of something new, something that worked.. infact the whole Body ready system was flawed, but for the longest time, I had no other solution..

But we did add all the Rolemaster Criticals in.. that made things fun. 

Initiative and All the Other Numbers

So Characteristics and Statistics were in.. but we still had a lot of little left over numbers. Days until starvation? ABR bonuses? Initiative? For the bulk of it, it was values that got listed on the back of your character. Your "background".

Height, weight, hair colour, all part n parcel of your character..

well that changes quickly as we needed Initiative & ABR on the front page, for combat.

So what was needed? Initiative was a value that has gone up and down over time, most games have some value of Initiative, Actions from Warhammer, Armour Bypass Rolls (ABR) from Dragon Warriors, Punch Damage was needed, Study & Crafting base abilities were added, as players would need a quick reference for 'deciphering manuscripts' or 'researching information' or just plain old 'make rope bridge'

Later, Some of these become core Statistics, or even reverted back to Skills. What is Crafting? at its core, its some level of mechanical reasoning and dexterity to perform the task, well thats just a WIS + DEX roll if you don't have any associated skills.

ABR was and still is, a nice clever way to increase damage, based on your characters strength (to puncture armour) and dexterity ( to aim for the weak spots) with a dash of wisdom (plain ole smarts) plus players could improve this value over time with skills, spells and attributes.

But Initiative.. well this was one of my crowning joys

Initiative

In the beginning, Initiative was based on Speed, and that meant reflexes. But also wisdom, because you had to be able to think quickly. But what was Initiative?

So, with a lot of research..  Initiative is: your ability to swing a weapon fast (strength & dexterity) your ability to act quickly under stress (courage) your ability to take a blow (constitution) and recover from the pain (willpower), Your speed of though and wit (Intelligence and Wisdom) your attunement to the external forces (psychic), how quickly you can word your speech (charisma) and any distraction bonuses from your (Looks) and of course if your (Luck)y, Oh did I forget.. Reflexes? Speed? the Initiative starter.. lets include that twice for good measure.

Actually the inclusion of all the numbers didn't happen until later in '97, according to older charactersheets, it'd have been a set of bonuses from the above stats, to make a number to match a dice, then you rolled that dice. But for some insane reason, we abandoned that, in favour for something that was far more like D&D.. until years later when I was compiling version #3 and thought long and hard and said.. you know what? this makes more sense.. and put it back in.

But back in 97-00, it was something along the lines of Initiative of around 150. which divided by 10 into a combat Initiative of 15, which was your turn order & told you how many times you could swing a sword. and still works, mostly, like that today (except + a dice like as above)

[DWDev]Statistics Part 2

In Part 1, I discussed how I got to this place.. now what I did about it.

Skills, and how it affected the decisions on stats:

'96 was the Year I really ripped apart the system I had and started again. My Mate Craig and I grabbed a whole slew of skills from all the systems, correlated them into one big list of skills. Crossed out all the double ups, so many systems have skills that are just pointless. Light Lantern! in comparison to Climb. Its all about balance, if a skill is worth a 'slot' of your game, and players can spend X time learning a skill and one give you access to the +Dex/Ref bonus to all climb skills/checks and the other allows you to light a lantern..

The Skill system has pretty much had the same core mechanic from the beginning, but changes the dice used. The Idea was instead of a flat "pass/fail" I'd just recenly seen Vampires 'number of success' system, which made far more sense.. Alot of D&D stories involve some incredibly exotic and mind bending events,.. but give than you have a 5% chance of exotic death, or exotic success in any given roll.. I'm not so surprised. 

My core mechanic was.. each time you roll, you had a chance of gaining experience in that skill.. when the skill experience is equal to or greater than the skill, your skill score increases. 

In Examples below.. I've quickly done the maths to show how much XP would be required to get the skill to that score. i.e. score of 5 = 15 or 1+2+3+4+5xp

back to the story...

We then took a big look at how the rolls were being made.. the first thing to start on was the Mathematics of a flat d20.

The Beginning of it all .. 

In most systems, the d20 for example, is a flat rate of advancement. each point is worth exactly the same as any other point. It matches the human mind as much as a ruler can be a balloon. Other systems were using piles of dice, while I'm ok with maths, adding up 16d6 to determine values every single combat.. slows things to a crawl.. I wanted a clean and quick system like a flat d20, but with more realism...All the literature I was reading at the time suggested that the human mind took 4 stages of learning.. so I looked into that first.

The first, the stage where you know nothing, struggle with everything, have to think about what your doing & fail constantly. You are Unaware of how Ineffective you are.. you just keep trying. So I needed characters to take an amount of time, that was fairly quick to get to a stage whereby they could sometimes perform the skill, but still have a large chance of failure...

Next, you are aware of how bad you are, you study under some master or something, and you become better faster. only showing a slight slowing in the speed of learning.

Then you begin to become pretty good at the skill, showing aptitude at performing the task.. you are aware of how good you're becoming, and are still improving, but less noticeably as you progress.

Finally, you are very very good, almost natural, but it takes months and months of effort at this stage to become just that tiny bit better. 

How to Represent that with numbers.

So, we all know that the d20 system uses 3d6 to start stats, it always had that little problem of the 1/2 and 19/20.. it felt uneven to me. The Maths of 4d6 sorta looked nice, and matched this 4 stages thing I just learnt.. but 4 dice was still clunky.. Then Shogun happened..

My Cousin and I used to play shogun, Japanese medieval warfare.. used d12s.. something majestic about the dice, I just sorta looked at it and said.. wow.. that's what I'm looking for.

The first thing that was so noticeable was the bell curve. the plain straight forward understanding that while mid point 13, is a 50/50 chance.. 1 single point of difference, up or down, is approx 9%. its the real deal, its worth far more than any other edge of the spectrum. The next point is around 7-8% (remember I'm doing this from memory, sure I could go look it up, but its the idea, not the pure maths of it) so now if you are 2 points higher than someone.. you are almost 20% better to hit them.. Its the sweet spot..

Why is it? 

I wanted players to find a 'zone' kinda like if you think about it, it many swashbuckling movies.. they dispatch the npcs pretty fast, swash here, buckle there, and you're done with the guards and fighting the mini-boss.. He's a bit of a fight.. and then you face off against the boss.. now comes the hard and drawn out battle, all your skills are pressed into this one.. until you finally defeat him..

to d20 this.. you'd need to be rolling above Thac0 1's for the guards, but 1's wouldn't be fails, they'd just be a miss for that one attack.. then the mini boss would need to be a 10, a crit couldn't be a crit, it'd just be a booster, otherwise you'd spoil the scene.. and the final boss, you'd need 20's to hit him, and only when his HP are at their last, a critical would be needed to finish him off.. 

to get such values in a D&D game, (or pathfinder these days) you'd need all the guards to be 2nd levels.. the mini boss to be 10th, and the final boss to be 18th! that'd be the most imbalanced module ever...

worse yet.. the 1st 1 against a guard would result in being flatfooted, and he'd have a chance to injure you and knock you down a peg, then the mini boss would screw through your remaining HP if you fumbled any further.. you'd critical him as a splat into the wall.. and finally the big boss would be impossible to hit, and you'd all be there roll after roll after roll.. no story.. just waiting for the dice to finally get the 20 to...

ok I'm being melodramatic.. it'd be fudged by the GM to make it more playable.. and if you have a nice GM, that's ok.. but a evil GM.. well sorry.. your evening of fun became a TPK to tell your friends.

No, I wanted something that would get those 'edges' and give more scope to play. I needed this 7th level mission to have 5th/6th level guards, a 7th level mini boss and an 8th level boss.. to ensure the right balance of enemies.. with the aforementioned variances in combat..

With 2d12.. less than 10 has a 25% chance to hit.. while less than 16 is 75% chance to hit, that's only 6 levels of difference between bad guys.. more believable that a 16th level BBG has a 13th level 2nd in command, and hires 10th level guards and I get my mathematical variance with very little shift in numbers.

Will it still work with the skill system:

So, that learning chart.. Stage #1, don't know how, or how to improve. At this stage of a skill, your score is less than 8, It took 36 xp to get to an 8.. in those days you got an xp every time you rolled, + bonuses for rolling a double 1 when you didn't need it. so you only needed to try the skill 36 times to get fairly much out of the first stage. 

Stage #2, you have 20% chance of success.. your a beginner. but you're getting better. It now takes 63 more xp to get to the mid point.. little less than double.. but that's a quick progression to get to 50% success.

by Stage #3, each point progresses you further and further into higher chances of success, +8%, +7%, +6%, +6%, +5%. by a score of 19, you have 90% chance of success, sure it took you 99xp more to get here, but with barely a 10% chance of fail, you're on the home stretch.

The Last Stage #4, you know your skill, and you know its going to take ages to get further.. Later we added in the ruling that A) if the modifier took the 'roll' above 24, you didn't get to roll, you just 'did' it. No rolling meant no xp, so the last 90 xp took much longer.. the standard 'this is easy' task was a +3 and a very easy task +6, so it became obvious to the players that an 18-21 was the point when skills needed a 'challenge' if they wanted to progress further. 

The last thing we used, was the idea of 'pass by'.. but more on that later...

So that was the start.. a nice balanced 2d12 system for Chats, Stats and skills, which had a balanced progression system, matched the reality of how we learn skills, a nice progression from zero to hero, and a set of easy pointers on how to roleplay the game for far more player friendly balance, swashbuckling adventure and a way to put the rules to one side and just play the game.  

Later, much later, I would discover how the number 12 just came to make everything in my system

Resources:

https://psygrammer.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/learning.png

[DWDev]Statistics, Part 1

6 months of roleplay, moving out of home, meeting new friends, getting a job as a telemarketer, and gaming into the wee hours of the night.. seems like such a blur..

I really got down to business in the next 6 months, we had a regular group every Sunday, I was writing up professions.. gawd I can still remember the order: Knights Crusader, Knight, Hunter, Forest Assassin, Thief, Magician, Sorcerer, Priest, Templar, Thaumaturge and Commoner.. (ok, so maybe I missed a few)

To make things simpler, I didn't want to bog myself down with all the Warhammer professions.. It seemed that I re-wrote the character-sheets monthly, and with them some rules, which meant that I managed to have around 20 versions of Knights Crusader, before I gave up and decided to get something done about it..

You see we had the period of time when the players were sick of me adding or tweaking rules.. they just wanted to play.. so I'd stick to a set of rules, but at the same time, would be making the next set for the next campaign.. at the table, I'd often get confused between the two.. Should a Knights crusader actually start with a horse & barding? one player started as a KC and sold off the horse, to buy some nicer magical gear, forgoing the crusade, because that was 'who he was' but in reality, he abused the rules to get a better start..

This is the inherit problem with players, treating the game as a game.. they don't take it seriously. Many RPGs create their rules to balance out this problem, which creates their own problem.

Imagine a world in which the wizards never managed to develop spells above 4th level.. why would a player play as a mage.. maybe it'd be ok for the first few years.. and possibly there would be some way they could use their 5th slot to develop a new spell, or they'd be stuck just casting the 4th as a 5th with a +1.. most would probably multi-class.. I don't remember, would a rolemaster wizard be better off?

Imagine an Island, where the largest creature is a squirrel or flying fox or a shark.. The Druid can transform into any animal he knows.. sharks only ok if he's near the water.. but everything else? becomes useless...

Image roleplaying in 200BC Rome, No Iron, No Steel, No Longbow, No Crossbow, but the Druid can become an Owlbear, Wizards cast Lightning and Fireball, Clerics can bring back the dead.. but the warrior.. reduced to semi-magical versions of short swords of Bronze..

Sure, I'm not being realistic(!) but that's the point, No given class is supposed to be 'equal' to another.. you play it because it suits you, or your temperament, or you'd interested to go outside the box, If we played it like a board game, we'd pick a character and level suited to the adventure and go from there.. sheesh..

So there I was.. stuck in this quagmire of players who wanted to stay stuck.. and I just wanted to make things right, or better.. We broke up the gang.

Now, sure, some of them were roleplaying other games, and some weren't, some had gotten jobs and lives, no-one had Girlfriends so that wasn't it, so I can understand that the frustration of not knowing the rules had gotten too much.. people wanted stability.. and I was a leaky boat of a GM.. 

Characteristics

Having come from a Dragon Warriors Background, I found that Warhammers lack of Value for simple things like Reflexes or Psychic Talent or How good Looking you were, seemed to be Problematic. Game Systems with a base Characteristic such as Strength were the fall back for things like, a character using their strength, with no extra skills to perform a task..

Sure WHFRP has Strength, but how to compare to Reflexes? Dexterity? Charisma? they didn't.. You could multiply it by 10, but we'd already begun to introduce modifiers,

Also, since we had this XP per stat system, you had to divide any strength XP by 10, and lose out on a few points.. it didn't gel, it wasn't clean. something I can't stand is game systems which have too many clauses or cases (When I was teaching English this too became a pet peeve)

So I had to go back and look at these values. What was Strength, easy.. What was Reflexes vs Dexterity.. well most references to Dexterity was Hand Eye co-ordination, while Reflexes was more about speed and dodge.. D&D had both Intelligence AND Wisdom and Charisma was considered how good looking you were, everyone knew in real life that less attractive people are more likely to be nicer.. so it seemed wrong to lump them together. Psychic Talent from Dragon Warriors didn;t seem to appear in many systems, but Gurps had Willpower too, which made sense, and many times I saw rules for courage, but it was not considered something people had, it was a skill (like you had it or not.. more on skills later again...) or it was a check against wisdom and Rank or Level.. it was all very messy.. but the names made sense to us at the time as a basic fall back..

These are things that people have, regardless of race, religion, class, creed, training or development. A child even at the age of 1 has these things.. infact that seemed to be where we were heading.. looking at a basic being from the point of view.. what does a child have that is there from the beginning.. genetically so to speak. So we had our basic stats:

Strength, Courage, Constitution, Reflexes, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, Psychic, Willpower, Charisma and Looks.. years later I reverted a 'hit system' of luck, instead, to the final of 12 Characteristics.

By Mid Year of '96 we'd accomplished a new charactersheet, new basic characteristics, but we still had alot of leftover. Weapon skill, Ballistic Skill, Leadership, etc.. plus some of the new elements of Dragon Warriors.. Defence, Magical Attack and Magical Defence, Stealth and Perception..They were all there.. all messily bunched together.

Getting Complex ... adding Warhammer

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.

Simplicity, Complexity and Tracking NPCs

All games have to start somewhere, and I, even as a naive 19yr old knew that I would not be able to begin with nothing.

So, over the next few years, I played (and researched) in this order: Dragon Warriors, Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Rolemaster, Gurps (fantasy), Traveller, Vampire(VtM) and Shadowrun. I then borrowed and read the base rule set for several other games, including some niche games, such as Tank Girl & DragonballZ.

By 19, I was 4 game systems into this list. I came to Warhammer via HeroQuest & AdvHeroQuest, which we a very clever marketing system for Citadel.

So I had these basic ideas: The game system needs to be rules lite in the basic design, so players can quickly make choices. Attack vs Cast spell vs Heal vs Run away, but I roleplay needed more choices too, rather than 'roll charisma'

How many times has it happened: I try to seduce the girl, roll: 20! crit, she succumbs to your charms and you bed her that night.. if only it were that easy, you'd just go into a club, say 1 line to 20-30 girls, eventually you get a crit20 and you 'win' (or in the new systems, take 20) 


The game system needs to have more reality to it. 

Not in the sense of story, play or otherwise, but the underlying maths need to be mathematical, the structure of the rules need to make sense, so that any human being can make choices in the world, which are logical, predictable and would react the same way in real life & game play. This gives players a nice sense of 'grounding' to work from.

Not having that grounding has always caused ire in games, both from my own experience, and told to me at numerous conventions. 

I had a game where I was playing a Vampire, who could speed up to perform multiple actions. I kicked a cup at my enemy, expecting it to fly across the room at heightened speed (or shatter and the peices fly across the room) but as soon as it had left the tip of my foot, it slowed down to normal speed.. the roleplay was broken by the rules (yes I know GMs should, but often side with rule books until they get more experience) an argument ensured, and the entire nights RP was soured by the lack of trust I had with the world.

So I needed a system that would follow the laws of physics from the start, THEN we could bend the rules for magic etc.

Lastly, I wanted my game world to be both dynamic and static. I can not tell you how many times I felt that the GM was pandering the players, to the point of frustration. (I have also fallen into the GMtrap, players conciously or subconciously become stupid if you let them get away with it, it also spoils the game). Usually this was because the GM had picked a campaign that was too high for the players, or too low, and had to scale it. Sure, a well written campaign can be 'scaled' but as often as not, the scaling causes things to be too easy, lulling the players into false securities, or too hard, causing them TPK more often than not (Why do players decide to keep going, when they probably know they're going to die?)

Probably because I was running a club, where each week I might have a whole new set of players, repeatedly starting campaigns, never finishing the storyline. I began to structure the game in sessions: If you got out by the end of the session, you lived for another day. If you failed, rock falls TPK. Players would look at the clock, and begin thinking about how to get out (one exception. If ALL players turned up the next week, we'd do a 'to be continued' ending)
But this created a sequence of events, in which a group of adventurers would come into the first room of a dungeon, clean it out, loot the room, then realise they were too damaged to continue, and go back to town to regroup, resupply and think it over. The following week, a new group, some of the same players, some new, would return to the dungeon, the older players would explain to the new what happened, and what they intended on next. Sometimes new players would provide new skills and find hidden treasures, or work out a puzzle to help the older team get through without harm (yes, sometimes old players would quickly make up a character relevant to the quest,just for that session,  so they COULD figure out the puzzle).

" Sir Baldwin, Hector and the Bard Zafrodi realise that their quest has come to a premature end. The Puzzle on the door is far too archaic to understand, they return to the city of Malthue and seek out a wizard. Hector, having some duties with his lord, agrees to meet them in a weeks time, leaving Baldwin and Zaf to find a suitable candidate. Along comes Hwentil the Shaman & Mystic, who mysteriously knows the Archaic Language of Hui'k Lui'k and together they figure out the door puzzle, and dispatch the undead they lie in wait behind the locking mechanism"

This meant that the world lived on between adventures.. that between the sessions, people were getting on with their medieval lives, and that was when I began to track these NPC lives, their politics and the world at large. 

The Start of Dungeonworld the Roleplay System

So, I had a club. A captive audience. I could test my new 'system' on these new minds.

My clubs age group was roughly 11-19. Some kids from the after school care I worked at, some from Highschool, and some my own age.

Could I develop a system which was, to my mind, a roleplay system. not a wargaming system.

I had, subconciously, not liked any roleplay system, because it was based around a table-top concept. miniatures might be needed (which none of us could afford) many, MANY books might be needed (AD&D, I'm looking at you) and the biggest part. RULES were needed..

You have to realise, I'm writing this as a 40yr old. some of my thoughts have been stewing in my mind for 21 years, realisations occured about what it was I was thinking.. Back then I didn't like it because it felt wrong. I didn;t know WHY it felt wrong, it just did. 4 years ago, I clicked, when talking to a 19yr old. It felt wrong.Therebecause it WAS wrong. They had created a set of rules that went against what was possible in reality.

I've come to refer to it as Bandaid Gaming.

Bandaids solve the problem for now, cover the wound until it heals. If the wound is not properly cleaned & sutured, this bandaid will not be a solution, the wound may or may not heal, will likely leave something, a scar or problem that might need to be ignored, or fixed later.

Many Game systems, created a set of rules that suited the needs of the designers, for now. They test it, but its broken and the cost to fix is above that they are willing to do. Many fixes are bandaids. They find a problem and fix the bandaid for that problem, but in turn that sometimes breaks and they need to fix it again.

This actually turns out to be a good business model. D&D is up to 5th edition now? Make a game, realise its flawed, make a magazine which addresses the flaws, bring all the flaws together til you have a nice big list. fix the flaws with an Uber bandaid, print new edition. Ad-infinitdum!?

So over 1994, I was trying to find a game system that wasn't all bandaids. I failed.

So I decided to make my own.  

Dungeonworld, The Beginning of the Club

In 1992, I was in Highschool, Year 12. I had an after school job in Childcare, and alot of kids from the after school care were interested in board games,. one in particular was Heroquest.

Back then I was paid $7 an hour to look after kids. I worked one hour after school from 3:45 to 4:45 when the school care had the most kids, and needed extra help.

I volunteered to run Heroquest for any of the kids interested, from 4:45 to 5:45 as some of the kids had to wait around for their parents until 6pm.

while I recognised that I was giving up a potential $7 an hour.. I also saw this need. Kids wanted to play these games, and their parents might be in the need for them to get out of the house and give them some peace and quiet..

So I started a club, Saturday and Sunday afternoons, 12pm til 4pm, for $2 an hour (I was expecting the kids to get most of this from their parents)

First of all, this partly didn't work, Parents had choices, and many of them were not as expensive as $8 for the day. Magic mountain, down at the beach, cost 20c a game, and $2 would get you a hot dog and coke.. so parents could leave their kids there for the day, with barely $5 in their pocket.

Most of the kids who wanted to come to my club, couldn't get $5 a month out of their parents, let alone $8 a week.. So I had to scale this.. firstly I made a set of 'helpers' those who would turn up at 11:30, help set up, and get in free.. then I made a membership card, laminated , which allowed 5 'visits' for $10.

So my next big problem was gamesmasters.. which is still a problem to this day.. I ran games, I never once had anyone run a game for me, For the next 4 years, I would run games.