Well, I figured I’d better get my ass moving with these things, so I thought I’d just put on what I had been working on lately - that is, what have I been doing with my pen and paper RPG system?

Note: This will probably be very boring and pointless for most - heck - all of you, but it’s my blog, right? :B

Anyway, better begin at the beginning.

For my fictional world (that I’ve been working on for more than 10 years now, I think), I’ve always used Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) to let my friends explore it.

Nice system that it might be, it never quite sat right with me, so I’ve always been tinkering with it in some fashion. Now, a couple of years ago, I read this manga of Naruto, where they were training to walk up trees without using their hands. I was like… This sort of thing would be utterly pointless in D&D, since ‘training’ is only a flavor thing, without anything in the rules to govern a flexible personal improvement like what Naruto and Sasuke were going through.

I decided I wanted to make a system where the sky was the limit (figure of speech, not even the sky would be any limit, hehe), where players had true *freedom* to create a character as they pleased, without the trappings of ‘class’ as it is in D&D.

At first I wanted to keep it a bit basic - as close to D&D as I could keep it. But eventually I found that I had a festering dislike for the rulesset so that I wanted to distance myself from it.
After that, I was making things really complex - too complex to work at the gametable, but I didn’t care, since I could always simplify it (I said to myself). In the end it was too complex for me as well (not in the understanding, or else I wouldn’t have made it, but in the creating and organizing of all the information).
Then I was rather tired of it for a while, and I also had school to worry about, so I took a break from it…

Come my finals, I started to work on it a bit more, but now trying to figure out a way to make it a bit more basic again, since my friends started talk of feeling like playing again, and that they might want to give my new system a try (since they prefer the free-form over the restrictive class system as well).
I was making some nice progress, till I was done with the basics, and I was trying to think of innovative stuff that in the end took way too much of my time again (but I still did it, lol).

It was all slowing to a crawl again, till one evening where I played a bit of Final Fantasy Tactics for the first time in ages (my ‘perfect’ game, with all Genji gear and the Masamune stolen from Elmdor, Ultima learned, the works, hehe - still working on getting everything again, though :B ). An interest in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was sparked in me then, so I started playing the ROM I had downloaded ages ago, but never really got into before, to see how its system worked compared to that of FFT.
This started me looking into the whole Ability Point stuff that is prevailent in many Final Fantasy games, but which I had never really given much thought to in conjunction to my own system.
I remember that I was struggling on how to work with magical items, but not have it be based on a monetary system like is used in D&D (a seriously flawed system, which I truely abhor), and going through the whole Ability Point thing from Final Fantasy made my mind work on a way out of this dilemma.
Before, I had tried to push everything into Experience Points, but it wasn’t quite working out well. Now I was considering letting go on this resolve to keep it to a single tier system (Exp), and adding a second tier to it (AP).
It was like someone had handed me the cylinder shaped wooden piece while I was trying to wedge the rectangular one into the round hole in the box..err…with holes.. that.. err.. yeah, nevermind with the analogies.
So, it finally fit. I started working on it with a fever, finally having found a breakthrough that would help me move forward with my system (and being a big FF fan, I couldn’t resist adding some FF elements into the developement of it, like spell names and such.. “thundara, wooh” :P)

Now then, with that behind us, I can.. Start :P
Ah well, this message is long enough as is… I’ll leave it for the next one :B