Introduction

What am I doing? If I wanted to open with an epic feel I might say I’m on the quest for a perfect tabletop gaming system. But that would be contrived since I know no such thing exists. Hell, its contrived me bringing it up only to say its contrived, but it’s done, I’ve typed it. This will probably be little more than a mildly edited brain dump, but that’s fine, it’ll serve its purpose. What I’m doing here with this blog is musing about different tabletop systems, pulling apart pieces I like, and maybe at the end of it all I’ll even pull my favourite parts out and stitch together a Frankenstein system. Or maybe no concrete system will come of this blog, only my musings as I type into the void to keep track of my thought process. I could make it a real project and give myself a deadline but I’m not looking for a second job at the moment, this is just for fun, seeing where inspiration takes me. So that’s the what; the anatomy of tabletop systems, and what appeals to me in them.

The second part then is why? Probably because I dislike what is currently on offer, or at least it doesn’t scratch my specific itch. I was lured into Dungeons and Dragons with the promise of homebrews and worldbuilding. Yes, not the epic adventures, but the endless possibilities of D&D’s multiverse to carve out my own world. However, I found myself limited by the assumptions D&D’s mechanics make about magic. I looked through the rulebook, with an army of homerules to shape the world in my vision. But when messing with the metaphysics of the world, D&D’s classes would take a hit, especially if you want the metaphysics to interact via game mechanics. So sure, I could homebrew 5E into something nigh unrecognisable to perfectly fit my world, or I could find a different system, a more setting agnostic one. But when browsing through the different systems, imagining how I could tweak them to fit my goals, I found myself wondering what it would be like to just build a system from the ground up. Ambitious sure, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, maybe. But the concept intrigued me and here I am.