I've started work on a new game, and one of my goals is to make it be a game where it feels like a heftier game than it is.
The goal is rather simple, really.
Set out to create a game with very simple core rules, but make it feel both dynamic for storytelling and deep for mechanical development of characters.
For maximum simplicity, I'm going with a single die, in this case a d20, for the whole game system.
Because I want to make things go very simply, what I'm doing is having a system where you're rolling under a threshold (we'll get to the reason for this in a minute). A result less than or equal to the threshold is an unmitigated success. If the result is no more than 5 greater than the threshold (e.g. 15 versus a threshold of 10), the player chooses between success with a consequence, or failure.
If the roll is even higher than that, the result is an immediate failure with consequences.
There are two reasons to design this way:
The first is to reduce the barrier to entry. Every action in the game involves adding two or three numbers, rolling dice, and comparing.
Having the comparison to Threshold+5 is a bit of a speed bump, but that's why rule 2 is around, and there will be times when the result is below the threshold or obviously so high that this step is unnecessary.
The second rule also exists to keep play focused on stories.
I've put a twist in by making the system function differently.
Traditionally I like to do a three-layered design and then iterate around that when I make games.
The standard layer setup I use is "attributes", which are universal to all characters, "skills", which are specific to certain characters, and "special abilities", which are rare and mechanics-altering bonuses.
For this system, I'm going with an attribute/special abilities two-layer system.
But there's a twist.
I made the attributes six "generic" attributes and a "special" attribute based off a character's background. When determining a threshold, players choose two relevant attributes (and the GM can give a yay/nay response).
This system already gives each character a fair amount of diversity. A Sturdy and Graceful character will excel at that combination in particular, but might use Grace and Presence to put on a performance or Sturdiness and Presence to intimidate someone. Someone who specializes in Grace and Presence or Sturdiness and Presence would be better at one of those latter tasks, but be able to pull off the other equivalently well.
The combination of two attributes means that you're essentially getting 15 combinations from just the default 6 attributes, and the special attribute can broaden the playing field further.
The special attributes open up opportunities for novel combinations. The setting is a 1600s-punk take, basically Age of Sail but with a lot of (soul-eating) magic and a focus on how awful the world is and how fighting the system is the only proper way to live.
Since the 1600s are still basically feudal, this isn't hard. Being governed by a king in some distant land feels a lot like being ruled over by a heartless corporation or slick politician, so I've found the setting pretty easy to flesh out, though I still need to transfer it into finished writing.
Throw in the special attributes, and you can get access to both things that don't make sense for others (e.g. Animism + Presence to commune with spirits, Animism + Awareness to see if there's some bad mojo about), but also use their special attribute in place of others when it's appropriate. Technical + Cunning or Technical + Sturdiness both work for blacksmithing, which is normally Sturdiness + Cunning.
We don't have a prescriptive approach here, either. Any two attributes work, so a player can argue that Sturdiness and Grace make a character a good blacksmith and the GM can let it roll.
Most of the game's rolls end in narrative, not mechanical, effects. Consequences don't deplete a character's resource pool unless there's a good reason to.
Special abilities are a way to interact with the resource pool. There are three broad categories that I'm planning to start from, and they're based on a character's background with some universal ones.
Every ability has a numerical rating that shows its cost, with some abilities having a variable effect based on the points invested. I've broadly characterized them based on their "expense" which means either a lot of points need to be invested for the special ability to be usable, or the special ability comes with costs.
I also classify things as generic or exclusive.
Passive boosts are fairly obvious options to give a character persistent flavor across all their dealings.
The most obvious threshold boost is the Profession which is basically a third attribute that only applies to certain rolls.
One simple thing about this for a game designer is that I will not define these. Players can just write them down, and the rating of the special ability is equal to the bonus provided. GMs determine whether they're relevant.
The only rule for Professions is that they can't apply to combat. There's a Fighting Style special ability that serves as the equivalent for a particular attribute. Because weapons specify linked attributes (such as Technical + Grace for firearms), you could have Fighting Style (Grace) to get a boost with all weapons that use Grace.
Rarer and limited, these are bonuses to one of the three resource pools, typically tied to certain backgrounds and expensive because I intend the small resource pool size to keep the game from dragging out when high-stakes play is underway.
Active abilities are things that characters actively use. Like passive abilities, they have numerical ratings to denote their cost, but they rarely scale (one exception would be that "cheap" active abilities may have resource costs that decrease as the character invests more points into the abilities).
I call a certain class of active abilities interaction gears because they specifically tie to other mechanics.
Right now there's just the narrative core mechanic and combat.
A simple boost isn't interesting, especially with the passive boosts competing with it. Rather, these have an interesting effect on the die result (e.g. re-roll).
While powerful interaction gears have resource costs, they are cheap in points because I want to encourage players to have them.
The basic rule here is that you can get a resource transferred from one pool to another (e.g. suffering Corruption to restore Health).
These abilities are cheap and limited or expensive and profitable, but they're exclusive enough that it's basically impossible to churn resources in a way that makes characters immortal. The vast majority will-be self-focused, with some abilities to restore Health to other characters.
Rare, things like teleportation or the equivalent of "utility magic" in other games. The emphasis here as opposed to interaction gears is that something is changing in the universe's setting, rather than the mechanics of the game.
Narrative boons are exclusive abilities that are flavorful. They don't have any prescriptive mechanical interactions, but they make up for this by being eminently useful. For instance, a character may have family ties or friends in high places.
The distinction between these and narrative alterations is that many of these are neither strictly passive nor active.
I'm still focusing on the core mechanics, though I've already started in on some basic ideas for how other things will work.
One obvious system to add here is combat.
The design is still in its infancy, but the goal is focusing resource depletion around specific mechanics and letting the core stuff be narrative and free-form with resource depletion if the GM finds it appropriate.
The goal is to have all these systems fit within about 5000 words of text, which can be centralized to a single kernel in the final rulebook.
Why?
This will make the game eminently playable. My focus on this game is to rely on content-driven mechanics like the special abilities for characters to handle a lot of the heavy lifting.
I plan to have spaces for these mechanics on the character sheet.
As a result, the final product will have a rule-book that has about 20-40 pages of rules that can be thumbed through, and character-specific mechanics will be immediately available via the players' loose sheets.
There would be other content to reference outside play-time at the table, but the actual play itself will go smoothly even before players are familiar enough to play without the rules in front of them.
