I am not, formally, a game designer by any stretch. My college training was in dramatic writing, primarily screenwriting. I've gravitated more toward writing prose since then. But over the past ten years, I've found myself really inspired by the possibilities of D&D, and TTRPGs in general.
The vast, vast majority of TTRPG-playing I've done has been D&D 5th Edition. It's pretty foundational, of course, as the quintessential game of that medium, and I think I'll probably be playing D&D as long as I can still find friends interested in the hobby.
I've written a lot here about Draw Steel, MCDM's alternative take on the core notion of a fantasy RPG, and still haven't gotten around to actually playing it. But I respected the audacity of really going back to the drawing board with it.
I think Draw Steel is basically built to tell the stories that most of my contemporaries seek to do with D&D, but which the folks at MCDM think 5E isn't really built for.
I am very eager to try out their new take on this kind of heroic fantasy game, but I think what I'd be interested in creating would be something that bends the genre or just kind of breaks out of its mold.
I only became aware of the term "The New Weird" a couple years ago, but retroactively, it feels like a good fit for a lot of things I've written over the years.
I discovered The Dark Tower, a fantasy series by Stephen King, when I was a senior in high school. The timing worked out that King had just published the fifth book in the series, and I want to say that the sixth game out just in time for Christmas that year, while the seventh and final (until an "interquel" 8th book years later that honestly can kind of stand on its own) book came out during my freshman year at college.
During that senior year, I started writing my own story that was heavily inspired by The Dark Tower, especially its kind of post-apocalyptic Western setting with a mysterious and dangerously magical, taunting antagonist.
Gradually, that setting would start to fill out as its own thing, becoming "Otherworld," and for several years in the early/mid 2010s I wrote a blog of serialized fiction taking place in that setting (that and this blog started around the same time).
The exact kind of tone and genre of that world shifted a lot - for one thing, I fully dropped the post-apocalyptic element, even including a human civilization that was over a hundred thousand years old. I had some ideas that there might be a bit of steampunk to it, but where I ultimately landed was that it was very much like a modern world, with similar technology and culture, though of course its own history and geography.
The key, to me, was that it have surreal elements. One of my earliest artistic influences was the computer game Myst, and I always liked the incongruity, particularly, of artificial structures seeming, at least, to grow naturally out of an environment.
Then, I think the piece that has really started to become a core thing I like to do in my fiction is a kind of mid-to-late 20th Century surreal Americana. I find a lot of potential in sun-blasted motels off of high ways going through the American Southwest, in part because when I was a kid I went on a number of cross-country road trips from Massachusetts to California, passing through the Southwestern states. I also think that the kind of "out in the desert" paranormal conspiracy theories (the fun kind, rather than the bigoted kind) were really in the zeitgeist in my childhood, with shows like the X-Files and tabloids focusing on cryptids more than celebrities (at least how I remember them).
Nostalgia's a weird, moving target. I was writing in my other other blog about the weird way in which the 80s nostalgia trend didn't really end like the ones for the 50s, 60s, and 70s did. As someone who has real-life nostalgia for the 1990s, I've always kind of resented pop culture's continuing fixation on the 80s (even though I like some of that stuff - flawed though it is, I enjoyed the final season of Stranger Things).
But I guess I don't really want to get bogged down precisely in which decade I want to focus my nostalgia. Because ultimately, I'm interested in building other worlds: My TTRPG would not be set on Earth, but just as a matter of genre convention, I'd make a world that has the feeling, vaguely, of America in the 1960s through the 1990s.
This is an era of widespread use of electronics, but while there could be something like the primitive internet, it's for sure an era before smartphones and social media.
But aside from tone, what would the game be about? What would the game have its players do?
Here's the thing: I like a game with some sense of system mastery, but that still lets you perform well if you pick thematic choices that might not be perfectly optimized on a big excel spreadsheet. I think 5E does this pretty well. I still (still! This year I intend to, one of my resolutions) haven't played Draw Steel, but I get the sense that it does this maybe even better.
What I might try to do is build a combat system that works better with theater-of-the-mind, caring less about movement speeds and ranges and focusing instead on an interplay of actions, but I'll concede that my more likely direction to take this would be something grid-based.
That then leads me to an interesting question:
To what degree would I want to truly make a new game from scratch, versus building something on the bones of what came before (almost certainly the better option for someone who has never designed a game before). And then, from there, which system to build it on?
See, I've really enjoyed watching the development process for Draw Steel. I really like the way it does character resources and abilities, how it makes martial characters feel just as interesting as spellcasters, and its push-forward momentum mechanics (Victories, primarily).
But there are elements of Draw Steel that I feel a certain skepticism toward - I actually think 5E's (or just d20 fantasy in general) binary pass/fail d20 tests are a lower-friction system than the way Tests work in Draw Steel, always with three tier results. Now, that could be just a lack of experience, and maybe after one or two sessions running Draw Steel, I'd fully internalize what a tier 2 on a moderate difficulty test results in.
In terms of finding an audience, I have to imagine that just making it a 5E hack would be easiest. And I'm certainly more comfortable with that system purely from experience.
Then, the question is how ambitious to get with it.
See, I think part of me would want it to be a familiar but fully independent game system, where no, you can't play a High Elf Druid, but you might be able to play a Mirrorfolk Agent (I came up with both species and class off the top of my head, but here's what I imagine they are: Mirrorfolk are beings who come from the other dimension we're actually seeing into when we look into a mirror, and in their natural state, they look like humanoid figures of living mercury. Agents are a class that is trained specifically to track down and incapacitate their foes, proficient with martial weaponry and minor paranormal technology. What mechanical definition does minor paranormal technology have? No idea. But I feel like they're whatever this game's equivalent of a half-caster would be).
Monsters
I love monsters, and I would want this to be a system where you could open a big book of monsters (something both D&D and Draw Steel have in abundance).
If this were a true hack, and not just a supplement for one of these games, I'd probably use a different category of creature types.
Mutants would probably be a whole type (with lots and lots of variety).
Cryptids could also be a type (possibly taking the place of Monstrosities from D&D).
Aliens could also be one (in this case, it could be an analogue for aberrations). However, this might need to be split into more specific types. I feel like I'd want to delineate between your classic flying-saucer aliens (which would, for sure, be part of this,) eldritch abominations like something out of Lovecraft, and energy-beings like Polaris or the Hiss from Control.
Undead might actually just stay the same, to be honest. Likewise humanoid, beast, possibly construct.
I might shy away from more religious-affiliated creature types - the celestials and fiends - because I imagine this game/setting/hack being pushed a little more into the sci-fi realms, where the aforementioned eldritch abominations and energy beings might play similar roles to these kinds of creatures, but with an emphasis on their being alien rather than superior, spiritual entities.
Classes
I really like a class-based system. I think a skill-based system can work great (the FromSoft souls-like games do this very well) but I think that classes not only enforce some diversity in character capabilities, but they also serve to inspire players to come up with character concepts based on the unique flavors they bring.
I would be inclined to try, if possible, to make new classes. D&D's classes present a very good array of classic fantasy archetypes, but given that we'd want to really make a clean break from any real fantasy orthodoxy here, it might be best to kind of make a clean break with D&D's class choices. Even if this were built on the bones of Draw Steel, several of that game's classes can be profoundly reflavored with the use of Kits, but I think there's a philosophical divide in the sources of power assumed within that game - in its case Primordial Elements (represented in the Elementalist and Fury,) Divine Power (the Conduit and Censor,) and Psionics (the Talent and Null) - that might not work so well for our purposes.
D&D, of course, also has an informal (which they toyed with making formal in the early playtests for 5.5) division between Arcane, Divine, and Primal magic. I think we could take the idea of three kinds of paranormal power and use that as a foundation to build classes.
As I see it, we ought to come up with a couple (three feels right) sources of paranormal power.
Psionics is an obvious one - playing into those Stephen King Firestarter/Carrie vibes, as well as some of its derivatives, like Eleven from Stranger Things. Naturally, if this were a Draw Steel hack, it'd be easy to go with just the Talent and the Null, though the Null, I'd argue, fits less neatly into the kind of genre we're looking at - still a possibility, though.
Technology is another source of power that I would really want to emphasize. Technology could be human- (or humanoid - we'll get into species or whatever we call them later) made, but I think that the idea here would be that this is specifically paranormal technology that requires exotic materials, and might be derived from alien tech.
The last paranormal power source is a little trickier to pin down. I'm inclined to go with Mutation. There's the potential for some overlap here with Psionics, but I think we'd get really into the weeds on how these two things differ - Psionics is purely the power of the mind to shape reality (I could go really deep on some foundational idea about conscious perception truly making reality in the first place). But Mutations are more bodily in nature.
So, then, as I see it, we basically have a class for each of these purely focused on that power source, acting as our kind of "pure spellcasters" in a world where we don't really call magic magic (though certainly there might be some people who argue that that's what it really is). Then, we have classes that combine a bit of this power with martial capabilities. And finally, we have a group of purely mundane classes that focus exclusively on the kind of skills and abilities that would all work in a totally mundane world. So, six paranormal classes (three pure, three hybrid) and then some number of mundane classes (for sure some kind of "soldier" class equivalent to the Fighter, and some kind of "sneaky" class equivalent to the Rogue. Not sure if this game needs a Bard/Troubadour class, though I might look to Starfinder's Envoy class as an inspiration for that).
Species
When 5.5 changed the term "race" to "species," I sort of felt like it was a weirdly clinical term, where other games had gone with things like Ancestries (such as Draw Steel). In our paranormal sci-fi-adjacent game, I actually think Species works best.
Naturally, you're going to have humans. And, to be frank, there's a part of me that would want to stick to just humans. One of the consequences of making elves and dwarves playable is that you have to kind of tamp down on the weirdness of them.
Given how human-like the playable species of D&D are, I like that they aren't bound by cultural stereotypes (as someone who has a somewhat mixed background - still basically white, but I'm half-Jewish - I really cringe at broad generalizations about what a given group of people are like) but I think that when you're talking about non-humans, there's a potential for a truly different way of seeing the world and existing that sometimes gets lost in the effort to make fantasy species the analogue for different human ethnicities in the real world.
At the same time, though, making playable options all pretty much people does make them far easier to RP. My Triton Wizard I play in our Exandria-based campaign feels very much like a human, but part of that is also that he's grown up in a largely human city on the Menagerie Coast, and hasn't even been to his underwater ancestral homeland. It's very much like being an American, with ancestry back in other countries (unless you're a Native American, of course, where you have to go back to the Ice Age to trace ancestors to another continent) but not necessarily being connected to it in any deep way.
Another note, is that we don't have the tropes of classic fantasy to draw upon, and will probably need to come up with our own unique ideas. I mentioned before the Mirrorfolk, which I think is a cool concept. I think we could also very much have a Little Green Men/Gray classic alien option (though I think we might want to even draw a distinction between the two, to preserve one as the deeply mysterious and sinister abductors and the others being friendly. I think the green ones are probably the friendly ones. Frankly, these could be the "elves" of this game, as the slightly arrogant and superior-feeling but ultimately benevolent species).
I think some kind of mutant species would also be a good fit (we could take inspiration from our creature types). Likewise, some kind of undead species (I had thought about a ghost-possessed one, but that might be too similar to another concept, so we're probably talking about someone reanimated physically). Another might be something like a human host with a resonant energy being inside (honestly not unlike the Kalashtar of Eberron. Jesse Faden from Control would be kind of like this, but I conceptualize this as more like the energy being is fully in control of the body, but we could iterate on that, maybe making it more like a symbiosis).
I will say that another playable species might actually have a bit of a Fey vibe to them, perhaps combining a sort of traditional Irish fairy role (like Brownies or Pookas) with more modern cryptozoology.
World:
So, I really prefer setting-agonstic systems. I think that one of the huge fun parts of TTRPGs is having control over the setting and the story, and a game ought to be able to work in lots of different settings.
On the other hand, giving people an example as a place to start is not a bad idea (and certainly if I were to run this, my setting would be, you know, the default one).
While I think you could probably run this in modern (or recent-days) Earth, I'd prefer to make it its own world with its own history.
Still, I think I'd want it to look a bit more like the modern world - heads of state are not kings and queens but presidents and prime ministers, and the agents of the government are likely be-suited or uniformed officers rather than armor-clad knights. This is a world criss-crossed with telephone lines and a skyline that, even in rural areas, is dotted with radio towers.
The big question, though, is to what degree the populace is aware of the paranormal. And while I think most works of this kind tend to make it a hidden secret that is unknown to all but those initiated into the world of the weird, I think the assumption for this game would be that the paranormal is well-known.
However, it's not something that is easily harnessed. If that were the case, we'd probably be forced into a kind of futuristic science-fiction world, and that's not the tone we're going for.
The Paranormal is known but not understood.
It's something people are aware of, are probably mostly afraid of, and powerful agencies have been founded to investigate and research it, but such work is dangerous and progress is very slow.
Settled regions can become catastrophically uninhabitable when a paranormal event changes them, but sometimes it just makes things weirder there. People might choose to remain in affected areas either because they can't afford to leave or because they see an opportunity for discovery and profit.
I think the powers of the world are complex and grey - heroic player characters might be government agents who are there to protect citizens from paranormal dangers, but the same government might have sinister agents with agendas to exploit the paranormal to gain power at the expense of the innocent.
If the Paranormal is known, I think that some of the other species, like the Little Green Men (might need a better name for them) might be well-known and even integrated into society.
In fact, the Paranormal might have been known for quite a long time now, and so we could have a society in which humans have known they weren't alone for even most of their history. The Fey-like playable species might be something that was seen in a more magical/fantasy context early on in the world's history, but are now understood in a more cryptozoological context, with some cultural breakthrough that saw their society open up closer ties with humanity.
Mundane foes like evil corporations or evil government agencies could certainly be a common trope here. I also think that you could easily update the evil cult trope without too much work - maybe give them a kind of New-Agey vibe or make them a big corporate cult like a certain very-litigious organization that counts many Hollywood celebrities among its members.
Of course, other-worldly threats will of course make a lot of sense here. I think I'd want to build a kind of planar cosmology, but again, keeping to that "paranormal is known but not understood" philosophy, I'd want to keep it vague. There's probably some general sense of a realm that links other worlds/universes together, but likely no obvious organizing principle between those dimensions/planes/worlds.
Levels:
I really like that both Daggerheart and Draw Steel have a level cap of 10. It seems more manageable, and avoids the kind of massive power-inflation that you see in D&D that leaves running high-level adventures pretty challenging (if I were to pinpoint what I think makes it a struggle is that each combat encounter is far more complex, but you need just as many if not more to exhaust and challenge a party, so the "adventuring day" starts feeling really bloated).
I'm less familiar with Daggerheart, but Draw Steel certainly aims to have a level 10 character feel on a thematically similar level of power as a level 20 D&D character (arguably even more powerful).
For this, though, I might limit it so that level 10 in this game feels more like level 10 in D&D - certainly quite powerful, but still at a terrestrial level of, kind of, humility.
I don't think this is a superhero game, which high-level D&D and Draw Steel both kind of look like. I think there needs to always be some paranormal entity that is truly terrifyingly powerful. As demonstrated in Dimension 20 (I'm thinking particularly the final fights of Fantasy High's first season and Unsleeping City) you can throw very high-level monsters against a low-level party, and it will make for an epic battle. I think I'd prefer that kind of high-stakes spectacle, and fights where reducing a monster to zero hit points is maybe not really feasible, and some kind of sealing-away is all you can really manage.
Additional Rules Systems:
Getting too complex with alternative rules systems can be a risk - we've seen how 5E has struggled a bit with how to handle vehicle combat, usually taking the safe route and just making it easier to treat vehicles as big platforms to fight with the normal rules.
I don't see vehicle combat being a huge part of this game, but I do think vehicles should be. I think a simple but substantial system for car chases and fighting from cars would be really good to have here - it would need to be simple enough that you won't be discouraged from using it, but interesting enough that you'd want to use it.
Given its modern setting, I also think that this game would probably emphasize the use of ranged weapons over melee weapons. That might then necessitate a little more complexity to the rules - melee combat inherently makes positioning a lot more important, and I think that ranged characters should have similar considerations.
If the game emphasizes ranged combat, though, you need to have some reason to encourage melee combat. In D&D (and I think Draw Steel as well) you tend to do a little more damage up in melee. I'd still want melee builds to be viable, but kind of flip which are more common and which are less common - like, having nearly all martial classes have plenty of ranged options but making a few quite capable in melee. I think the likely way to compensate the melee characters is perhaps to make them a bit better at multi-target damage (like swinging in a big arc) and certainly making them more resilient.
The degree to which this is a hack versus a wholly original system, of course, would affect how the combat system works. While I prefer the d20 pass/fail system for things like ability checks, I also like how Draw Steel does its power rolls and attacks that always hit. I actually think the solution might be as simple as just using one system for the former and the other for the latter.
I think you could maybe even just give damaging abilities a kind of roll you'd get in D&D and treat it as a hit regardless, but perhaps build abilities that have a narrower band of results (likely having a static modifier plus a die roll).
How This Might Manifest:
I've been tinkering with the idea of getting into formal game design, and I think that the first step would be to do some kind of 3rd party supplement, so the most likely way I'd start this off is with some kind of monster and species supplement for either 5.5E or Draw Steel (or, if I had my druthers, a version for both - though I for sure would need to actually play some Draw Steel before building for it).
And if I could get that off the ground, maybe the next step would be to build out some classes and/or subclasses for those games.
If there were interest and if I attracted some collaborators, we'd see where it all went.
What would I call it? Paranormal seems too much like an existing term (though it didn't stop the creation of Cyberpunk). It doesn't really roll off the tongue, but I think for the time being, ParaWeird feels like a decent working title.
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