RPGs
Manifest RPG Design Blog
About
After reading so many RPGs, playing so many RPGs, and thinking about everything that is the medium of RPG, I decided I needed to put my money where my mouth is, and actually create an RPG. The following are the posts of me detailing my thought processes.
NOTE: All references to games and RPG systems are to be considered “as of writing.” New versions of games might render some of my comments inaccurate.
Posts
- Introduction
- First Steps
- Setting
- Manifestations
- Emotions
- Bond and Tier
- Static Versus Dynamic Dice
- Sync
- Special Effects
- Conditions
- Death
- Agents
- Abilities
- A Complete Rework
- Ruleset 0.1
- Playtesting
- The First Playtest
- Stat-Investment Rework
- The Die Pool and Investing
- LP and Manifesting
- Tiers
- Leveling Up
The RPG Medium
About
I love RPGs, and have played them for most of my life. Relatively recently, I found myself in possession of far more indie RPGs than I could reasonably play, and so my odd little brain demanded I categorize them. I started and quickly quit the project as I found more and more matrices on which to measure these games, and slowly found myself philosophizing about RPGs in aggregate.
The end result was the following tretise with the following theses: much like anime, we should really classify RPGs as a medium rather than a genre; All RPGs are personalized hacks rather than codified systems; and the conflict between an improvised story and a codified ruleset makes RPGs something both more and less than either games or stories.
The other result was a biting need to play more RPGs, as the more I studied each one the more interesting things I discovered.
Eventually, I needed to add an Errata section, as more and more things kept popping up. The medium continues to grow and evolve, as does my treatise…
The List
Errata
- Introduction
- Session Zero
- D&D Alternatives
- What Happens Next?
- Committed Relationships with Dice
- Maneuvers
- Double Classes
- Reskinning
- Discovery
- Troupe Play
- Competition
- Collaborative Competition
- Suffering
- Bargaining
- Random Difficulty
- Leveling Up
- Single Stories
- Personal Games
- Themes
- Rules-Light
- Procedure
- Simulations vs Abstracts
- Bad RPGs
- Acting vs Thinking
- Heroes
- Fun
- Manyfold Part 1: What You Like
- Manyfold Part 2: How You Play
- Manyfold Part 3: Supportive Rules and Practices
- Manyfold Part 4: Different Playstyles and Clusters
- Safety and Immersion
- Miniature Wargaming
- Poe’s Law and the Dangers of Role-play
- A New Kind of Die Roll
- Another Game System