i basically burned myself out on working on that OSR inspired game so hard i don't really want to even look at it for maybe another year, but in it's place i've tried working on something far far more simple that i can use to run one shots much easier and not get bogged down in details and tables.
my position as a DM/GM is that im annoyed having to reference things i didn't write or reference statblocks. i like being prepared, but to me, statblocks are just dense chunks of text that really don't mean anything to my style of storytelling with ttrpgs. i don't know if there's a word for it, but i think i'm pretty good at improving off of player reactions and changing how the story progresses based off of that. in the fantasy AGE game i'm running, i didn't have a clear picture on how the story would go until the players started adding their own flavor to the table to the point that i've altered a lot of the Canon DND Module that i am technically running in that game to suit it. it's made the game a lot more weak in terms of running combat, but as a narrative game it's much much stronger. (i'd like to fix this eventually but that's beyond the point i'm trying to make right now)
so that other game i'm working on. it's kind of got that mindset worked into its mechanics: the narrative comes first and then the mechanics and the dice rolls attempt to compliment the action. it's inspired by cypher system in a lot of ways, so the opposition is created purely because of the player interaction with the story.
however, at the end of the day i've just made a set of rules. there's no character classes to speak of, i'm working on writing a one shot to test play it, but it has no world setting guide attached, it has no set species or creatures, it has no canon it needs to follow. it's just a set of rules.
what i worry a lot about writing and designing ttrpgs is "why would someone want to play this?" what do they get out of my game that they can't get in dnd or cypher or AGE or any other system that i do like playing. my answer is usually "rules lite" (or light idk when to use one or the other in this context), whereas i just give you the framework of the set of rules and then you fill in the story.
myself and other game masters i know write A Lot of their own stories and campaign content, however we use a bunch of canon materials as the basis and backing to our stories. this leads to a lot of homebrewing and original mechanical material we have to create to accompany the story so it suits the system we're using.
rarely rarely ever have i heard of a game master running everything straight out of the book they're referencing. having gone through a lot of the dungeons and dragons materials, you actually don't have a campaign if you just go straight out of the book. the books are all designed and written to leave a lot up to the decision of the game master and the actions of their players, for better or for worse. it makes it an anxiety inducing experience for a newbie game master that might find themselves with half the information they feel they need to have in order to run a game, that's how it felt for me, until i got more into the habit of writing my player characters more into the setting and forming the setting around the story (with themes and motifs!) that i wanted to tell.
but that's not what sells books i think. in terms of dnd alone, there are a huge amount of official rules and settings supplements and what feels to me a comparatively low canon adventure books. on dms guild or drivethru, there's a massive massive massive amount of dnd supplemental material, people publish or put up for free their own homebrew classes and monsters and whatnot, all within the dnd format. everyone knows dnd so everyone wants to design something to play in dnd, rather than coming up with an entirely new system or game to suit the things that they've created. and that's fine! that's not for me, but remixing and making new material that exists within a narrative or mechanical "canon" of a ttrpg is a fun thing to do! there's also all of those "5e compatible" materials that people put out for both original and preexisting ip materials so people can keep playing dnd while operating in a realm outside of what 5e's designers could imagine.
and then this got me thinking about how many powered by the apocalypse games there are. i'm vocally not that into pbta games, they're fine and ive played them but they aren't for me. there's a huge huge amount of pbta games out there because as a framework system, it's designed to just readjust the pieces of the puzzle and flavor it however you want. i've seen it been said that people design world and story and then use pbta to just give the ttrpg a mechanical backbone that it wouldn't have otherwise. each pbta games becomes unique because people usually just built their game from the ground up with this framework in place, making it far far easier than trying to balance and relate a homebrew dnd class to the rest of dnd's other materials.
using a smaller example, lasers and feelings is so damn simple there's a million hacks of that game. it was originally a star trek/space game right? and yet it has become like the utterly simplest backbone to any narrative game anyone could tell. you just need a setting, two stats on a binary and you're done. play the damn game.
dnd, pbta, and lasers and feelings materials feel like they make up a huge part of the ttrpg ecosystem. they're "household" names when it comes to people that are interested both the mainstream and indie ttrpg realms. on top of that, they have really active homebrew/hacking scenes. they really dominate the space when it comes to people making "custom" ttrpg games. and i emphasize Games, not just pure supplements but full on basically new arenas for play that use these systems to drive their stories. just in this three games alone, you can't argue that people homebrew/hack games on their rule complexity alone.
then i look then at all those OSR games i researched for my original OSR project and how there aren't many supplemental materials for all these OSR games, the reason seeming to be that a lot of OSR content is crossplay compatible in a sense. all these OSR games have a general guiding force on how their games work with a few mechanical differences and details on how they handle situations, but when it comes to things like monsters or adventures or npcs and archetypes, they're all largely indistinguishable, hence why a lot of OSR games advertise "compatible with your preexisting OSR materials". There's a bunch of OSR games! they all play slightly differently from each other but these games pride themselves on being able to draw in materials from all the other games that you have with not a whole lot of conversion needed, unlike when people try to recreate skyrim using dnd.
rounding out to the question i posed earlier: "why would someone want to play this?" in the context of dnd, pbta, and lasers and feelings, people play those games because they're familiar a lot of the time, but i think also because there's a lot of other supplemental material you can use to build up your game's story rather than just trying to pull everything out of your own brain every single time. i love the forgotten realms narrative and the content that comes out of it even if dnd itself doesn't mechanically lend itself well to the stories that i'd particularly want to tell in that world. i'm far more interested in the intrigue rather than the possible wars waged.
so, "why would someone want to play MY game?" i don't know really, which leads to a lot of insecurity over designing my games i think. i think the mechanics i've come up with are interesting and can create fun interactions but unless i dedicate a lot of my time and effort to this new game to create a lot of stories and campaign materials for it, it doesn't lend itself well to the ways that people hack games, ie: designing new classes, designing new settings, designing new monsters, designing new npcs. it wouldn't have longevity in the the spaces occupied by the titans of the ttrpg scene.
negating wider popularity and success, should a game sacrifice its design philosophy so that it can be more "hackable" for another game master to change and suit toward their particular story?
i don't know! i design games because i want to tell particular stories that aren't well suited to be mechanically bent toward any existing ttrpg system, so at the end of the day, my games are for me and my table first. i like to share the things i've made, but it's always harder to write a game for another table to use rather than just how i would word stuff in a way my friends can understand.
