By that I mean, why not just fit my ideas around one of the many excellent systems that already exists, rather than try to launch something entirely new and may not ever appeal to anyone else but me?
I have been following with great interest and have given serious thought to embracing the OSR movement, writing for Labyrinth Lord, Castles and Crusades, or even just busting open my old Red Box and going from there. Then I have to be honest and admit that while I love rolling-it Old Skool, when it comes to writing I much prefer a sinmple, cohesive system rather than the 'different dice mechanic for every rule' approach.
So why not start my own D6 Renaissance, or even a TWERPS Revival Association. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.
I could even tinker with the Omnisystem, but to me that is forever bound to Talislanta, and thus, pretty much sacred. BTW, one of these days remind me to get into how Talislanta was directly responsible for 3D&D.
If I had to choose a system to work with, my choice would probably have to be RISUS, which is distilled awesome.
There was a time when I had found a game and thought; this was it, this was going to be the only game for me. Everthing thing I did forthwith, was going to be based on THIS ONE game. I also had a night job at the time and was watching a lot of pirated anime. That game was BESM. I quickly created a world called the ‘Moonlit Empire’ and ran my players through a couple of good to satisfactory adventures (gotta dig up those world notes one of these days).
Then with every successive book and supplement that “a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardians_of_Order>GoO released, the disillusionment grew. I railed in the forums and even sent letters to the company to get it back, get it back! This had been a pure and useful system, what where you doing to it?! Cock Fighting Seizure Monsters? Obscure licences to shows I barely recognized? Where was the frackin’ basic Fantasy Supplement? Finally, I gave up and sold all my books on ebay a few years before GoO finally imploded.
BESM aside, with all these great systems available, why break new ground? There are thousands of unplayed and abandoned homebrew systems out there littering the dead pages of the intraweb. Do I really want to add one more?
Frankly, yes. My time to write is limited and if I am going to do this at all, I might as well play in my own sandbox; play by no one else’s rules or restrictions. Do I care if anyone else ever plays the game as is? Not really. If someone ends up plays one of the adventures using a different set of rules, or even just gets a good idea, or a laugh out of something I put out there, I’ll consider it worthwhile.
If anyone is interested in starting up a TWERPS revival movement, leave a comment!
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