Lemons and Lemonade
I made some homemade, fresh-squeezed lemonade the other day, and I joked to my wife that I had discovered this amazing lifehack for lemons, and why hadn't anybody ever done this before?
OK, that's a corny Dad joke, but that's how I feel with the design of this game since as I've gone around Cypher in circles, trying to use it as the core for a simpler system, something that would be easy for new players to pick up, I realized I was re-inventing playbooks.
For those who don't know, playbooks are everything you need for your character in four pages or less, a combination of character sheet and character specific-rules. You just put your character's name at the top, check the boxes next to the abilities you choose, and voila, you have a character!
Like lemonade, just because someone else did it first doesn't mean it's not tasty.
Now let's combine playbooks with my design goals:
1. Easy for new players to play and run.
2. Short campaigns of 6-20 sessions, more or less.
3. No experience points, no mechanical character advancement.
4. No professional adventurers -- characters are thrust into a situation, have the capacity to deal with it, and then go back to their normal lives.
5. No hyper-specialization -- A corollary to the above. No characters who are so specialized in one area that they are useless in others.
6. General competency with Expertise -- Maybe a more positive way of stating the above. I'm grouping abilities into the following areas -- Combat, Exploration, Social, and Lore. When making a character, you'll have to one set of abilities from each area, and then you can choose one more,
We start to get into the playbook with #5, but to actually get there, I have to get more specific with the campaign and character types in the campaign.
When I first began designing The Amazing! Warehouse, I imagined a toolbox for the GM, a semi-generic set of rules for that particular setting. But I've changed my mind since then. I found that generic approach difficult and boring. I realized that I'm writing for myself first, and although I hope that someone else reads what I've written, plays what I've designed, it's OK if no one does.
What I want to write is a specific set of rules for a specific campaign and playstyle. That excites me. I appreciate the work that goes into GURPS or Cypher or other generic systems, but I'd rather use and mod those systems than create my own.
So all of this leads me to the question of what is the campaign about?
As a recap, the player characters are sentient, mutated animals living in the Amazing! Warehouse. I imagined that they would help their allies, the friendly warehouse workers, with something. I wasn't sure what. Survive the tyrannical rule of the boss? Navigate the extra-dimensional hazards of the warehouse? Perhaps. But thinking more specifically now, thinking about a short campaign and the rest of the design goals, the player characters should be the ones who are threatened, not the warehouse workers.
What that threat (or threats) are and the problems the threats create for the PCs is the next thing I have to figure out.