Welcome to Wooden Pencils Studio's first blog post. I just created the blog earlier today after procrastinating for months. This blog is primarily to chronicle the development of my RPG products. I started working on a new game a few years ago. The core idea was sort of inspired by "Don't Rest Your Head", but I decided that rolling so many dice was too cumbersome. I started to adapt it to a more traditional game inspired by Savage Worlds and D6. The goal was to make a game that could do anything either SW or D6 could do, but with only 6d6 or less.
I like Savage Worlds for the simple generic attributes and the way characters are detailed more by their Edges and Hindrances than by their attributes. I like D6 for the simple resolution system that works the same way for everything and the way more skill means more dice. (I really like dice pools but I'll talk about those in a later post.) The thing I liked most about D6 was being able to GM the game in broad strokes. I didn't have to worry about calculating anything or adding anything up. One of the things that really bugged me in my last D&D 3E campaign was when I would make up NPCs on the fly and then hear questions from players like "How can that character perform action X with feat Y when they don't have ability Z?" I missed running Star Wars D6 and being able to grab some dice that felt about right and say "This guy is this good at this ability" and it's perfectly all right with the rules. Nothing breaks.
I started a Word document on my laptop and pasted in my notes on stats and abilities from the dice-heavy game I mentioned above. I wrote out a set of skills that I thought were comprehensive without getting too repetitive. There was a time when I would have made different skills for different weapons, but Savage Worlds opened my eyes to the simplicity of just Fighting and Shooting. I carried that "usefully broad skills" idea through and wrote descriptions of how they could be used in different genres. Why have a "Running and Jumping" skill for pulp action and a separate "Run up walls and jump over houses" skill for wuxia action? If those skills won't be used in the same game, then they can both be "Athletics" in the core rules and applied on a different scale in different genres. I wrote a long list of Talents, my version of Edges/Feats/Advantages/etc. and then promptly forgot about the game when things became very busy with my day job.
I got the game out again in late 2009 year and started fiddling with it again. I decided to give the system the working name of Van Gogh to help me keep the "broad strokes" impressionist concept in mind. I have a tendency to get too detailed when I'm writing game rules, but I never use those details in play. Writing them would be a waste of time and counterproductive to the kind of game I wanted: a game that consists entirely of what you see in play rather than lots of fiddly bits that exist only on the character sheet but are only used indirectly if at all. I don't really like games that feature a bunch of primary stats that aren't used for anything other than calculating the derived stats you use in actual play. I sent my long document of notes and ideas to a couple friends to get their take on it. Then I got distracted by the day job again and Van Gogh went on the back burner.
When I came back to designing, it was to work on 3 other projects. I was inspired to work on some cool setting ideas, so the Van Gogh system languished in the depths of my hard drive. Then my hard drive inexplicably died. I lost everything I had written for my 3 setting concepts. After I got my hard drive replaced and spent a few long afternoons reinstalling software, I remembered that I had emailed Van Gogh to some friends. I recovered it from my Sent folder and looked at it again with fresh eyes.
Van Gogh was still too complicated and fiddly. Each Talent had its own unique rules for what it did. The rules weren't complicated to use because they were all based on the same core resolution system. I had no doubt that a player would be able to remember what all of their character's Talents did, but I wouldn't want to be the GM that has to remember what all the Talents of all the PCs and NPCs do. So I set about streamlining the Talent system. My old friend Addison at Zombie Dojo helped me to bounce some ideas around about tightening up that section of the rules. Since then, I've been hacking and trimming Van Gogh into a sleeker and easier to use form. A lot of vague ideas I had about subsystems were fleshed out with this tight focus in mind. Specifically, the "subsystems" are just examples of how to use the core mechanic for different things: all of the subsystems for combat, social situations, vehicles, etc. all work the same way.
Van Gogh is still not finished, but I'm starting to get really excited about how it's coming together. By keeping all the components simple and easily connected to each other like DNA amino acids or Lego bricks, it's really easy to combine them in a wide variety of ways without having to twist or break anything. I first noticed this emergent complexity while writing up the rules for using social skills. I went back and looked at earlier parts of the manuscript that I had postponed finishing and suddenly realized how simple it would be to finish the parts I had struggled with.
I intend to finish the Van Gogh system, lay it out with some art, and make a nice PDF. Then I'll release it for free. I have a lot of ideas for interesting settings that I want to develop, but there aren't any systems I'd really enjoy working with to make them (but Savage Worlds and Mini6 come close). That's one of my main motivations for making Van Gogh. I want a universal system that I can use to produce gaming settings without having to force them into someone else's system that will make me think about fiddly bits rather than the world itself. I think I've rambled enough for now. In future blog posts, I'll start detailing the system and my design goals and inspirations.
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