What Cool Stuff Are You Working On?

[MrStabby]

I am working on a few things... dipping into and out of for the past two years. In order of most recent progress:

1) A spy game set in a low magic world - social heavy, a spot of the occult, lots of mystery and intreague. My most recent progress has been tearing up about 65% or the rules. The issue is the tension between narative flexability and codified rules. I want players to not be constrained but for different players/characters to have different skills... The new format pretty much ditches character skills in favour of backgrounds - you get different spy networks, resources you can use in your investigation instead. No combat per se, but lots of evasion to try and avoid being caught.

2) A board game. A very styalised conquest game. My observation has been that a lot of multiplayer games suck. If you are in the lead, then everyone trys to bring you down so there is little point in striving to be in the lead. If they can't bring you down it means it isn't interactive enough... or the other players are too weak in which case you have the problem that players are being bored playing a game they know they can't win. My approach is to use a lot of face down cards for hidden information - hoping to enable sound tactical choices, some interaction but to avoid making it too clear who is actually winning to make it a bit harder to gang up on the leader... it also means you don't know that you are not winning yourself. Trick is trying to give enough information to enable informed strategic moves whilst not so much that it just opens up the whole game. So far in testing the games seem to go through about 8 rounds of deployment and positioning followed by two turns of cascading violence (I saw your big army was in region X so I know it isn't in region Y so I can move my armies in... in turn revealing where they are...). Quite fun but still unpollished and it feels a little one dimensional.

3) D&D campaign world. Purely for my own pleasure. I am using this to help identify what I like thematically in a world and what I wouldn't miss if if were to be gone.

4) The heartbreaker. A lot of people have these; I am no exception. It has been on the back burner for a while and I am struggling with balance in my mind. A>B>C>A type of non-transitive comparison of the effectiveness of abilities is givingme headaches. I feel I have about 30% genuinely good ideas, about 50% filler that is uninspired but enough to make things work... feels like a placeholder. And then 20% badideas that I have become so attached to that I don't see their issues.

5) A book. I started writing it 10 years ago. I got about 250k words in then stopped when I got a new job. It is only writing for pleasure but I would love to pick it up again. Hard with a young child and other commitments. Still, I add it to the list!

[Horatio@Bridge]

I am working on a few things... dipping into and out of for the past two years. In order of most recent progress:

1) A spy game set in a low magic world - social heavy, a spot of the occult, lots of mystery and intreague. My most recent progress has been tearing up about 65% or the rules.

Oof. I've been through that a time or two with my stuff, and I feel like it's always resulted in an improved game or bit of writing, but boy is it painful.

[Xervous]

Mostly at the idea stage on this one.

Unnamed Bard Inheritance Game.

Daddy Bard was a stereotypical bard, romancing every dragon and talking boulder he could on his trip through life. Now he’s dead and all the players are vying for a slice of the inheritance, each one of them half human offspring from the various romances.

The general concept of play involves multiple rounds where samples of loot become available. Players will use standard actions or cards drawn from a communal deck to aid them in acquiring items, hinder their opponents, gift undesired ones to opponents, arrange for things to be donated/destroyed etc. There will also be the will, a concealed stack of end-of-game events that players will be situationally allowed to view and alter. Each player will have a public facing agenda (Specific scoring bonuses and penalties) and some unique play options as defined by their choice of heir. One or more secret agendas will probably be in the mix, possibly as things you draw from the central pile or that come tacked onto specific pieces of loot.

[Lacco]

My next game should include:

• combat dance-offs
• militarized boomboxes running on depleted uranium
• bass battles and militarized guitar riffs
• mexican standoffs using bananas (among players)
• combat stances = famous poses ("I'll go with MJ's anti-gravity lean!" / "I'll counter with Freddie Mercury's Victory Pose!")
• players have to actively change places during game round
• "Power of Meme" - memes are magic

Just a braindump. Sorry for that.

[Yora]

I've got most of my prep work done for a Star Wars d6 game set during the Rebellion that I want to run in the winter. The players get to pick backgrounds as simple mechanics or cargo pilots, or as former staff members of disappeared senators or deserted Imperial Navy officers who went into hiding in the Outer Rim after the senate was dissolved and the military replaced planetary governments. Things heat up when the Moff in charge of the hyperlane between Hutt Space and and the Sullust-Sluis Van-Eriadu-Malastare industrial region cracks down on spice smuggling, leading to a drug war between the Hutts and Black Sun who are fighting over the smugglers and corrupt officials who still take bribes and have not yet been arrested.
Everyone between Tatooine and Sullust is really pissed at the Empire for taking away the autonomy of their planets and causing the increasing criminal violence, which makes the region a prime target for rebel agents. And we'll see where things go from there.

Meanwhile I am reviving old ideas I've used for three different campaigns in the past (Pathfinder, Basic Fantasy, and 5th edition), but completely severing it from any D&D baggage by moving on to Barbarians of Lemuria.
The idea for the world is a continent based on Pangea during the Permian period (full of pseudo-dinosaurs), which has one region populated by cultures based on the Bronze Age empires (Myceneans, Hittites, Egyptians around 1200 BC) blended together with elements from the Hellenistic World (Greeks, Scythians, Persians, Indians around 300 BC). Aiming for a weird environment and culture like in Morrowind and Dark Sun, but with the relatively low magic of the Hyborian Age. And it's primarily a jungle and forest world, instead of the typical desert settings that you almost always get with this style of fantasy.

[CharonsHelper]

I've spent several years off & on writing "Space Dogs: A Swashbuckling Space Western RPG" (totally playable - in my signature). The basic set-up is that in the near future an alien species called "the builders" come to Earth looking to recruit enforcers. They control the only means of safe warp travel (without their beacons, there's about a 2-3% of being lost to the warp with each jump), but they suck at fighting, and the starlanes are dangerous (space pirates, maruading zerg/tyranid style bug aliens etc.). So they came to Earth to trade their technology and access to the starlanes for soldiers.

So - humans become the badasses of the starlanes. Both manning The Armada, and *cue soundtrack* as Space Dogs - privateers who go places and take jobs across the starlanes.

I'm pretty proud of it. I like the fluff & crunch. At this point I'm mostly adding foes (I want a full book of NPC foes & starships, as I have a whole theory about how important variation in foes is to longevity of campaigns) and creating starship maps - which are important as the starship combat mechanics are streamlined and make boarding the enemy ship the alpha tactic for PCs, bringing combat back to the infantry/mecha level ASAP, which is the system's focus.

I'm hoping to Kickstarter it in 2021, but I'm making sure that the system is 95-98% done first, as I want to be able to assure everyone that it won't be delayed for years. Basically I'll use the Kickstarter backers as the last round of beta testers while I get more artwork (already have a good bit) and get someone to do the layout.

[MrStabby]

Oof. I've been through that a time or two with my stuff, and I feel like it's always resulted in an improved game or bit of writing, but boy is it painful.

Yeah, it hurts. You realise X and Y are incompatible... but each of these have a huge amount built on top of them. You have to get rid of a lot, but sometimes you have to chose which of your sacred cows to get rid of.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I just recently started working on a set of 5e compatible rules for early modern firearms [that is to say firearms of the American Western Period and British Victorian/Edwardian periods, which pretty much covers most games I've played in/run which feature firearms].

It's not really a secret that I have issues with the implementations that are usually offered by default or by other people's homebrew and they usually wind up never being touched by the players [usually as a consequence of having rules that make them undesirable for the only classes eligible to use them], so for my own use, I'm doing my own.

Objectives include:
Damage and range profiles such that no adjustment is required to the existing weapon options of D&D to have them fit seamlessly together with verisimilitude.
Basic traits and rules that interact to naturally encompass and within their framework encourage the players to reflect the general changes in combat trends between 1066 to 1880
Weapon Feats for each category of weapon of similar power and desirability to Sharpshooter, but with unique condition and effect for each category to facilitate meaningfully diverse playstyle.
Fighting Styles of similar strength and diversity to the extant ones that cover different types of weapons.
Support Spells that buff and work with firearms based martial combatants.
And possibly as a reach goal subclasses or reworking of subclasses to avoid having features that don't work with new weapons and techniques.

[Man_Over_Game]

My favorite part of game design is when you are having fun making your game. As long as that is the case, then it's been worthwhile. And it sounds like you've got some interesting design concepts going on! I am intrigued by the idea of getting more powerful the closer you are to defeat - kind of the opposite of the death spiral effect in games with wound penalties.

We got to do some real playtesting this week. So far, the game actually is fun to play! We designed it around being a "strategic sandbox", where the plethora of mechanics and decisions you can make allows you to create your own strategy, rather than follow several straightforward ones.


At first, I was a bit worried about the system. I looked at my cards and realized I didn't really have an obvious plan on how to make any of it work, so I just tried to spitball together some kind jury-rigged plan, and it worked. The RNG kept things from being too consistent, but most of the strategies we individually made all came to fruition because of the fact that each decision you made had lasting repercussions on later mechanics. Like how assigning more power towards a card forced it to act sooner, and that could actually be a problem if you wanted that card to act last.


Weirdly enough, Dead Cells made me think of it, which is a fast-paced combat-focused platformer that has a lot of interesting mechanics that the player can create their own strategies around, like how enemies create a splash damage explosion when they fall or collide with walls, or how busting through a door can stun an enemy. By having multiple mechanics that tie into other mechanics (like how a hidden/facedown card gets the Protect trait), how each mechanic works is completely up to the player, as opposed to other card games where an effect's use is fairly straightforward and 1-dimensional.