Creating Your Own Game System

Why Creating Your Own Game is Hard:
I think many people out there flirt around at least one time with coming up with your own homebrew system. I'm definitely guilty of this bug, and attempted it many times from middle school until right now.

However, actually going through with creating your own system and making it functional so that it works? Wow. As much work as you think it might be? It's more work than even that.

Creating your own game system is an incredibly difficult venture. For one, no matter what, you're going to hit a wall of tedium. Eventually, you will have to write out the descriptions for every single skill that is in your game. You will have to write out every single feat in the game. You will have to write out every single spell.

It's just not at cool as you would have imagined. Basically, if you look at most role-playing games, their text is made up of large lists. Heck, most of the D&D Player's Guide is a list of spells and their effects. Now, let's say that you do get through this titanic wall of tedium. Now you have to go and playtest your game.

Playtesting is Trying:
When others playtest your game, the flaws in the system will be immediately apparent. They haven't been apparent to you, because you're probably too close to the system to see where the loopholes are. However, other people will immediately see the dynamics of your game that you did not.

When we sat down to playtest Witch Hunter, our playtesters continually and constantly found flaws in the system. The game was too slow. Or too confusing. Or damage didn't work right. It was too deadly. Too easy. The list went on. Every time we changed a rule to make the system work, it opened up another problem, which again caused the whole system to fail.

That was what was so difficult about creating our own game system. Any flaw that was found in the game usually caused the whole structure to collapse in on itself.
And, really, that shouldn't be surprising, because any game system works on a holistic level. For example, in D&D, the rule of Attacks of Opportunity affect a wide variety of other elements in the game.

One of the most contested issues in our game system was how Defense was going to work. How does someone defend against an incoming attack? We literally went through 5 different methods of generating Defense before coming to our current solution.

And it's not just combat that we had to worry about. We had to concern ourselves with how social challenges would work. How monsters would be constructed. How monsters would be built. How monster powers would work.

In the end, the final game system that we arrived at was very different from the original design. 3 game stats were dropped entirely. Damage was completely redone. And the way weapons worked was redone.

At the end of the entire process, which took 2 years, we were even debating at the last minute if people should be rolling 10-sided dice and looking for 7's or higher...or if a success would be 6's or higher. So even as we were putting on the finishing touches, debates raged on about even the most fundamental aspects of the game.

Now, that being said, I've been very pleased at how the game has turned out. There are broken parts to the game (not problem, all games have that), but nothing in the game breaks the system apart, which was our main concern.

That's all for now. Next time, I'll actually talk about making the monsters of Witch Hunter.