My Developer DNA

I've played a lot of games in my day. Not as many as most 'true gamers,' and I haven't played a lot of the 'classics,' but I like to think that I'm well-read, that I've been around, and that I know at least enough to know what people are talking about.

It's inevitable that other games will have influenced my style. I've seen what works and what doesn't, what I like and what I don't. It's interesting, though, that some of the games I've played the least have influenced me the most.

Dungeons & Dragons - Every list like this must begin with D&D. The concept of a role-playing game, the ideas and conventions of a distinction between player and dungeonmaster, attributes, character sheets, initiative, combat rounds, all date back to D&D. In it's recent iterations (3.x), D&D is still an okay game. I enjoy playing it. I just have too many philosophical conflicts to accept all of its quirks at face value. In a family tree, D&D is like your crazy old grandfather, who has a lot of cool stories about the War, but he's so blatantly sexist, racist, nationalistic, classist, and anti-progress that he's hard to take seriously or even deal with sometimes.

Everway - Everway was a crappy little diceless box set with a New Age-y design. It had very shiny artwork, completely arbitrary mechanics, and a hopelessly vague setting. Characters are created by looking at 'vision cards' until you find something that inspires a narrative, and, um, there's like this multiverse, okay, and there are no antagonists so you just explore and do what feels natural. Everway is the RPG equivalent of your pothead cousin who went to Burning Man and changed his name to Thundersouls and thinks that bathing and shaving are conspiracies of the Military-Industrial Complex. Despite my total contempt for this game, my attribute system is copied pretty much verbatim from Everway.

Exalted - Exalted is White Wolf's Storyteller system used to reenact DragonBall Z. It has an amazingly rich, mythic and complex world that incorporates everything 'cool' - vampires, werewolves, ninjas, pirates, dragons, monkeys, BFSs, spiky hair, and epic levels of angst - into an organic whole. Exalted is your liberal little sister in the drama club who watches so much anime she thinks she's Japanese, who cried herself to sleep for a week when Aeris died in FFVII, and always has so much caffeine in her system that she's a constant blur. Like D&D, it's an enjoyable game, but one I didn't take many concepts from. I did rip off a watered-down version of Exalted's stunting rules, the use of bonus points in character creation, and the flexibility to pair a skill with different attributes, depending on the circumstances.

The Riddle of Steel - The Riddle of Steel was written by a guy at my university and I got to try it at one of its earliest promotions. It's a darkly-toned, Conan-esque fantasy game with a ridiculously detailed and complex combat system based on the creators' actual experience with reconstructed medieval swordfighting techniques. Hit location charts? Damage tables? How about seventy pages of intricate anatomical detail on every possible blow from every possible weapon in every possible fighting style. And that's before the combat supplement came out. It was essentially a detailed combat simulator with a little bit of a game tacked on. TRoS is your highly knowledgeable but insanely perfectionistic uncle who hates every movie ever made for being unrealistic and historically inaccurate. TRoS is probably where I got my jones for highly detailed, pseudo-historical worldbuilding and the idea of duress as a skill-improvement method.

GURPS - I've never actually played GURPS, but a couple of my university flatmates did. But, like D&D, it's influence is so pervasive that even if you haven't played it, you've played games with concepts pioneered or popularized by it. Unfortunately, any universal system will expand until it becomes too unwieldy to use, with endless supplements and expansions. GURPS is like your other crazy uncle, the computer programmer, who can solve absolutely any problem you have, but in doing so will make your OS ten times more complicated than it used to be. I, like many others, have taken from it a gifts and flaws system for more open-ended character customization, and I'm toying with things like fright checks and reaction rolls.

Star Wars, 2nd Edition - A long time ago, before the prequels and d20, Star Wars was a smooth, dynamic, high-action game. It offered an expansive universe and flexible gameplay that could cover any situation the players could get into, without being weighed down by an intricate mythos or ponderous mechanics. Best of all, the game perfectly mirrored the style and tone of the original trilogy: fast-paced, heroic, with plenty of room for comedy. Star Wars is the girl next door, simple, fun, just one of the guys. I didn't take much mechanically from Star Wars other than Force Points, but I hope to in some ways be a spiritual successor to its streamlined design.

If Star Wars is so great, why design a new system? Why not just play Star Wars? Well, for one thing the prequels, a lot of the Expanded Universe novels, and the d20 takeover tainted it and the potential playerbase. In spite of myself, I have some obsessive purism in me, which is what connected me to TRoS. Seeing what Star Wars has become is a lot like coming home from college and finding the girl next door in a trailer park with three kids by different men. But also, having been to college (literally and metaphorically), my eyes have been opened to a wider, more complex and nuanced world. There are a lot of things I loved and still love about Star Wars, but when I settle down, I want to be with something similar, but smarter and more serious.