Here's something I wrote a while back.

Roleplaying games have gone all narrative these days.  It’s hard to move (in RPG circles) without bumping into one story-focussed rule system or other.  I’ve played both types and this is an attempt to marshal my thoughts and opinions on them.  Somewhere, I feel, there’s a game that’s just perfect for my style of GM’ing but I think I’m going to have to write it myself.   Realm Guard (a hack of the Mouse Guard RPG) has really been ringing a lot of bells for me recently.  I like the way I don’t have to do much prep for a game, partly because I’m pretty comfortable with the Midde-earth setting and also because the twists inherent in the game rules make for fun emergent gameplay.  I also like that the conflicts give everyone playing room for juicy narration while not tossing out the reassuring crunch of plenty of dice-rolling.

So, I’ve been really enthused about the hobby by the very existence of Realm Guard.  But an interesting and rather surprising result of playing this game is that I feel I’ve arrived in a place where I have a clear view of my favourite parts of both story-based and more traditional RPGs. 

This is where I’ve arrived:

1.     Realm Guard has taught me that assisted storytelling has its place but that the assistance is mostly for me as the GM.  There’s no actual need for players to feel the pressure to narrate or tell a story.  Often it feels positively awkward to have to narrate every roll.

2.     Players want to roll dice.  Dicing to see if you succeed or fail spectacularly is fundamentally exciting.

3.     Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing system (BRP) was really a very good crunchy system, and still is.

I’m now thinking there ought to be room for a game system that assists (rather than requires) storytelling, lets the game hang on a single die roll when it matters and has a good deal of crunch.

So, if we were to build a Frankenstein’s Monster of a system, taking the best parts from several other games and sewing them together, what might it look like?  Something like this maybe…

·      When a character fails at something they can actually, succeed but with a condition, based on the severity of the failure.

·      When a character fails at something they can actually succeed, but the GM introduces a twist.

·      Players have characters that look different to each other in numerical terms.  Less of that fluffy trait stuff.  An ability either applies or it doesn’t!

·      Players can choose how much to risk in certain situations, based on how much they want something to happen.