As I'm writing this I've got a few tabs up in OpenOffice. One is labelled "quickplay d6 system" and the other is "newd6system." These are two files that I've spent months working on and as of Friday, I got a glimpse of what that work accomplished. But first a bit of background.

Friday I woke up late and banged out a few last minute characters for the quickplay I had scheduled that night; there was a fighter-style character, a melee-caster, a cleric for heals, and a full fledged magic user. I was trying to test magic extensively; it has the most changes and thus needs the most balancing.

I'd love to get in to details; I will later, but for now let's focus on the night. As I was compiling the 14 page quickplaym this poorly formatted, casually written dpcument full of injokes and some theories, I realized I didn't have a cover; I decided to grab the "Are you a Wizard" image from off the web and plaster it on the front of a 3 dollar binder and write "Heroic" at the bottom.

I'm not a small details kind of guy; they come last, big picture first. And that was sort of the theme of the day; there were holes in the scenario that I had written out that I had to fill and filled them perfectly.

You see, the players woke up in a room with a locked door; it wasn't long before they were given a call to come to the stage to perform in a play that they didn't know about. They follow their way through an infinite hallway, in to a room full of ghosts at a dinner party, and towards the theater stage (where we called it since it was 1 am at that point and I needed feedback.) Eventually they're supposed to fight and kill the Wraithlord Alabaster, who had been doing this for some time, causing hundreds of deaths each month in the land as he kidnapped people this way.

The hole really came in the dining hall; I had a loose speech challenge lined up, but people weren't really biting at the plot hooks. Instead they kept asking about the director; rather than just flatly tell them "no go find the plot" I decided to improvise. I had them roll speech against the ghosts to get information; the ghosts then countered with an argument and we both rolled out Speech skills; the amount of successes that they had over mine, or vice versa, was how much damage their "Resolve" took (their willpower, essentially.) When resolve was reduced to 0, the ghosts would tell them a bit of information and leave.

It was the most fun people ever had in making speech checks; they were required to have an argument to make the check, and gained bonuses through clever actions, and could be aided by a roll from their teammates (who added their own rolls of their skill to the mixture.) Ploys like using prestidigitation to make jewelry appear more elaborate and the good old fashioned "I slam the ghosts head in to the table" were all able to be handled without a hitch.

The combat test went about as well I expected; the main thing I took from the quickplay was that I had balanced martial combat to where a player wasn't going to take half their health in damage from one attack, and they could dish it out rather nicely. I also took that speech needed to be expanded upon; while players could do some creative stuff, it didn't really have a lot of mechanical depth.

Overall it was an overwhelming success; the problems were really born out of "yo this is the first time anyone has actually used the system" and it was able to function well out of the gate, with almost nothing supporting it but the base structure of the game. it adapts well to situations and when morality was brought up, nobody had a fight. I'm serious.

This was probably the most exciting thing I've done in awhile; while this quickplay won't be the one I put up free on Hubski, there will be one as I get done more and more of the actual system.

Because I know that me going "Yo it was really cool to be productive" isn't the best for audience participation, please, by all means give suggestions for what you want to see from an RPG in general; the system is open to ideas since I've only got about 50 pages or so written down (unformatted, if its formatted more) and there's plenty of space for new stuff. Also, I hope people like character sheets; a martial character has 4 pages at this point, and more looks like its on the horizon.

EDIT & UPDATE:

Wow, a full circle? I expected this to basically get shit on. Thanks a lot everyone! I'm still really excited and seeing more people reading and sharing this than just my small group of friends is one of the best feelings in the world.

Anyway, to put a small damper on it, development is being delayed a bit while I reign in a bit of my classwork and job (I found I have a 33% in my history class, though I haven't missed any tests so its just a recovery thing). I want to eventually get my PhD in, ironically, history, and so getting the class back in line is sort of paramount (I missed a few days due to illness.)

I'll improve the mood a bit by opening up a tentative beta test. This is some ways down the line; I write this in my spare time which is dwindling steadily, but maybe three months? Yeah, three months should do it, hopefully less.

Basically, once the actual rules are finished, and edited, I will send out ten copies to people. This will be generally poorly formatted in 8x10 paper with no color and will likely be sent in a binder. You'll get character sheets along with the Feat of Strength achievement "Beta Males (Or Females if you are a Female) Finish First" as part of the achievement system that goes with the RPG.

I say 10 because I don't expect any more than 10 will be interested. If people are like "YO FUCK I NEED THIS BRO" then I might open it up more. There won't be a lot though.

If you send me feedback about the system that provides me with useful insights on balance, ease of understanding, etc., or even just tell me how the session went and any improvements you'd like to see, you'll get the actual release .pdf free, and if I actually get enough money to publish a physical copy, a signed core rulebook. But that's thinking way down the line.

I'll have another post for that later on; this is just your chance to jump in early.

Again, thanks for everything guys! Now I know I should actually write this and not give up like a sad fuck.