RPG Rules Rough Draft

#1 Theres some really cool and interesting stuff here.

#2 That's what I thought too. Of course, I would think that, wouldn't I? :)

#3 Interesting... >:)

#4 Nice work on that, Steven! It's a shame I won't be using it though, as the RPG I have in mind follows a completely original structure seperate from the typical RPG flavour. If this wasn't the case, I could see it being very useful and I suggest anyone who's planning on putting together an RPG to force themselves to read every last bit of what you have to see if they can even comprehend the scope of such a project.

Again, great work!

- Ronixus

#5 You might consider using a Creative Common license for your document. More information can be found at: http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

#6 Christopher Dapo:

Yes, it is alot of work. And the document I posted is a little screwed up - it's too much trouble to keep the spell list updated. I keep changing what spell effects are available.

I plan to write a program that has lists of data stored in a file and outputs them in some predefined way. It will be able to do things like compute the MP costs of spells based upon what effects the spells have. That will lighten the load just a bit.

Greg Panula:

I'm taking a look at the Creative Commons license. Thanks for pointing it out to me.

#7 This is pretty good stuff. That must have taken a long time to develop -- looks like you put a lot into it.

One quickie, I saw this:

"Of the 5 noncombat skills, only Survival is useful to anyone other than the player."

But I only saw 4 noncombat skills listed, and it didn't include Survival. Did I miss something?

#8 Oops. I removed survival and must have forgotten to remove that line. I'm about to revamp the whole document, so I'll fix it then.

#9 This is clearly intended for western RPG's. This for sure wouldn't work with Final Fantasy or Phantasy Star. And I'm not talking about the online ones. And if everybody uses this, they'd all be the same game with a different skin.
-Ajari-

#10 I agree with Ajari. There's a battle system described there, and usually battle systems are a major part of the thing that makes an RPG unique (on the console RPG realm).

Buuut, it's a worth reading for starters, and it might even work as a nice template to know what kind of stuff you need to think beforehand.

#11 Well, I didn't intend for everyone to start using this framework like it's the holy grail. In fact, each version of the document is like a whole new system, and I'm planning to change it AGAIN. I'm planning to slim it down a bit so that I can actually make it into a game. I've tried to make RPGs before, and I've always become bogged down with feature creep. If I cut down the game system a bit, it should be much easier to finish.

I find it odd that you say it wouldn't work for Final Fantasy. Alot of the details were inspired by a "manual" about how the combat system of Final Fantasy 3 worked. It's alot like the systems used in some of the older Final Fantasy games, but the numbers are much smaller. (You might end the game with 500 HP as opposed to 9000.)

Still, I think my system is pretty cool, even though it wouldn't work for every game.

#12 I wish I saw that when I made my RPGs from scratch in college, would have saved me some time, but its fun doing things the hard way. Nice job though, a lot of thinking went into that.

#13 Thanks.

And I'm still thinking about it. I'll be updating it again pretty soon. It's all output by a program now, so the document will finally match the code.

There's other documents like mine floating around on the Internet, but nothing is quite as satisfying as doing it myself.