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View Full Version : AMA - I Wrote An RPG!



Horatio@Bridge
2020-10-25, 04:41 PM
I wrote a game called Sengai Jidai: The Age of A Thousand Realities (https://senjitsujidai.wordpress.com/). It's set in a world where reality itself is an illusion shaped by sentient consciousnesses, who must arrive at a consensus to interact with each other. This enables a wildly diverse world where you can go from a cyberpunk dystopia to a medieval samurai's estate in a day's walk. I'm using Fate, which enables all of these diverse archetypes to play together on the same field, and setting it in the socio-political dynamics of the warring states period of Japan. The first Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sengaijidai/sengai-jidai-the-age-of-1000-realities), for a Starter Kit, is now live.

In this AMA, feel free to ask me about the campaign setting, the writing process, how to run a Kickstarter, the Fate game system, adventure writing, or anything else that seems interesting about the project. I look forward to the discussion!

ShadowSandbag
2020-10-25, 05:49 PM
First off, congratulations! I'm also working on a game right now so I get how hard it can be.
My question is related; are there any pitfalls you fell into while working on your game that you would have others watch out for?

Spriteless
2020-10-25, 06:35 PM
Cool. I feel you may have had some inspiration from some crayon drawings.

Horatio@Bridge
2020-10-25, 08:14 PM
First off, congratulations! I'm also working on a game right now so I get how hard it can be.
My question is related; are there any pitfalls you fell into while working on your game that you would have others watch out for?

Thanks! What is your game about?

As for pitfalls, there are so, so many. Speaking in general, I'm going to say that you should expect to make mistakes going into the process. The trick is to make sure that you can go on regardless. It helps to count the cost in advance, so that even if you don't do the optimal thing, whatever it is that you do end up doing is something you can move forward from. Plus, every step is an opportunity to learn. Do try to do your research - google topics like "how to improve your writing" and "how to market a game," and go to seminars at gaming conventions about game design. Take notes of keywords and google those to get more information. And keep moving forward. As they say in Silicon Valley, you want to fail fast - you can fix the problem in the next iteration. That's true whether you're writing drafts of your backstory, working on mechanics, or trying to figure out an advertising campaign. One good piece of advice - get a Twitter, follow other game creators, and promote their projects. It's a good way to network, and you'll get to learn from what they're doing. But the biggest thing is to do a bit of work every day. As long as you're moving forward, you'll get there eventually.

Is there a specific area that you're struggling with? I can share some of my own experiences in that area if you'd like.


Cool. I feel you may have had some inspiration from some crayon drawings.

I hadn't considered it before, but now that you mention it, there is a certain amount of similarity between the Snarl and kaiju in my campaign setting. The kaiju include creatures that rise from the sea, but in my game generally refer to any mindless destructive force that rises from the cracks in reality to tear down the world. There's a bit of Jungian overlap between the sea and the depths of human unconscious cogitation. These kaiju rise from conflicts between the sentient beings when they're trying to establish the world, and the greater the conflict, the more powerful the kaiju that arise. The Sengai Jidai is an era of great conflict, with great monsters rising up from it. That is a world that requires great heroes.

Ken Murikumo
2020-10-28, 07:39 AM
You said your game uses Fate as the system. Does your game include new mechanical content? How about new sub-systems or facets of the mechanics?

If so, how do you balance the new content? I imagine there's more to it than simply comparing against the pre-existing content in the Fate system.


How did you go about playtesting your game? The easiest thing to do would be to play it with your regular TTRPG group, but that only gives you 1 sample of data. How does one introduce a new game into multiple groups for feedback?


And last; what was your general workflow? How do you keep at it? What did you start working on first? What did you save for last?

Horatio@Bridge
2020-10-28, 11:54 AM
You said your game uses Fate as the system. Does your game include new mechanical content? How about new sub-systems or facets of the mechanics?[QUOTE=Ken Murikumo;24774489]

Yes, there's quite a lot of new mechanical content, though there's only a sample of it in the Starter Kit. I've got 5 new skills (Art, Strategy, ESP, Witchcraft, and Reality Shaping) and a variant on the Craft skill called Mad Science. There's a bunch of new stunts for those skills, and each faction has a series of stunts that reflects its reality construct - the Oda have cybernetics, for instance, while the Asakura have stunts that let them create weapons, tools, and summoned creatures using Art. I have written a bunch of Extras for things like Masamune swords and main battle tanks (also useful for making Mecha), and a big chapter of antagonists, each of which have their own set of stunts to give them options beyond invoking their aspects. Most of that's being worked up for the main campaign setting book. Oh, and it will also have new stunts for the main skills, too, that fit the campaign setting.

[QUOTE=Ken Murikumo;24774489]If so, how do you balance the new content? I imagine there's more to it than simply comparing against the pre-existing content in the Fate system.

I mean, comparing to the existing content is not a bad place to start. But beyond that, I have a set of design goals laid out to help me structure things, and that's rooted in the math of the dice distributions, Fate Point economy, etc. I'm wanting a game that's a bit more high powered than Fate, so the faction stunts provide bonuses that start at +2 and get up to about +6 or +8. The antagonists are similarly scaled. Balancing that is pretty straightforward when you have straight number adders, like the Oda cyborgs or the Kaiju "I'm a big, destructive monster" bonus. It gets a bit more tricky for powers which give free invokes or the like, as then I have to balance how many times per session or encounter this can be gained so that the hero isn't just blown away by someone with a straight +4, or blows that person away by hoarding resources and spending them all at once.

The thing I found trickiest was the skills. Initially they were way too broad, which (a) made those characters dominate the scenes, and (b) gave their players a lot of decision paralysis. That's something that was discovered and resolved through playtesting.

Finally, do revisions. It really helps to look back at your old stuff after you do newer stuff. You've learned a lot since then, and you have a better sense of how things fit together. I've probably done half a dozen revisions of the Azai samurai powers.



How did you go about playtesting your game? The easiest thing to do would be to play it with your regular TTRPG group, but that only gives you 1 sample of data. How does one introduce a new game into multiple groups for feedback?

The short answer is conventions. One silver lining of COVID is that conventions are almost entirely virtual. I was even able to run the game in Germany a few times (for comparison, I live in North Carolina). There's also a local gaming community group which I can draw on, and then tons of online groups on Discord, Facebook, and Roll20 where you can recruit people to play a one shot or three.


And last; what was your general workflow? How do you keep at it? What did you start working on first? What did you save for last?

It helps a lot that I found writing for this project to be a lot of fun. This was the thing that I got to do when I finished work and came home for the evening. I'm an engineer by day, so having a creative side hustle works a different side of the brain in a really satisfying way.

But, for more practical advice than "get bit by a radioactive muse," I've described working on this in the past as it being something of a fractal. As you focus in on one part, it opens up a whole lot of new detail. So, I leveraged that a lot, since I could just give a rough sketch of something and then know that when I went back to it that I'd be able to flesh it out.

In general, I would sketch out a rough idea of a swath of content - the new skills, say, or the different factions and the themes for their powers. Then I'd set down and start working my way through a smaller piece of that content, focusing in on the fractal. Looking at a single skill, for example, or a particular faction. That might be another sketch for the fluff and general desire for mechanics, like wanting to have the Azai use compels on aspects representing their oaths to give them interesting abilities. Then I go another step down the fractal to work on specific stunts, extras, antagonists, or other mechanical bits.

There's a fairly similar process for writing fluff. I'd lay out the different topics I want to cover and get a general sense of what they should include (politics, daily life, the reality construct that works in that area), then zoom in on a part and flesh it out. That gets really interesting since I'm also usually researching those areas as I'm writing, so I will sit down one day and learn a lot about the Kanbe clan, or the yakuza, or Japanese aesthetic principles.

I find it really helps to break these things up since I don't have to hold the whole set of material in my head all at once. I can load up on the relevant details and stay focused on that material for a day or a week, then safely forget it when I move onto the next bit.

Does that answer the question? Anything you want to know more about?