"Where do you get your ideas?" This would be a question which, thankfully, nobody ever asks, because it's not one you can really answer. "How do you get your ideas?" would be a pretty good one though, and for one reason or another, I feel like answering it tonight. I'm going chronologically here for the heck of it, so it should get more interesting as you read on.

Way the heck back when, I used to "play outside" as little kids used to do. My cousins and I were lucky enough to spend much of our lives in yards full of all sorts of weird stuff, which lead to us developing a lot of odd little kid games, mostly tag variants, some involving up to a dozen varieties of prop in convoluted fashions. i.e. touching a tree gives you immunity to all forms of tag but a thrown wet kooshball. Tagging someone by casting a hoola hoop over them freezes them for 20 seconds and lets you steal one item, etc. I'm going to skip over these years.

Back then I also had a pension for designing side scrolling platformers, and oddly themed console RPGs. Nothing much to be said about them. They were mainly derivative... although I do recall having a stack of 50 or 60 pages, each representing the contents of another screen of a Metroid/Zillion sort of affair way back when which would probably have done well were it actually released at the time. Come to think of it, I wish I had access to 5 year old me right now. I had an insane dedication to minutiae back then, and now it's the one part of designing any given game that I get held up on.

Skip ahead to my discovery of paper RPGs. Weirder path than most take here. My cousin and I stumbled onto a bunch of D&D GM aids. Not the actual rules mind you, just a couple pre-fab campaigns, and this stack of monster flash cards. Incidently, those were a pretty cool concept which could stand to come back. One side was just a color illustration of the monster, the other was the stats. The only way you can improve on a concept like that is to shave down the corners a little and fold them so they're free standing mini-GM shields. Drat. This chain of thought is pulling me out of the chronology. Anyway, getting back on track, this lead to my cousin devising a homebrewed RPG based off our notions thereof at the time. Read: 8-bit console RPGs. There were save points. It was odd. Surprising fun though, and I went on to make a clone of it. Again. A pad full of maps and stats that never went anywhere.

Next comes a phase of playing actual paper RPGs, being a horrible horrible GM, and developing a lot of independent mechanics. I have scattered about 3 or 4 unique systems of magic, designed years ago, still waiting for games to be included in. I'm hoping to find room for them in Ardeas. Most of them involve either a lot of memorization of obscure rituals by the actual players, and/or a lot of odd resource management.

After this stuff, I started in on my first serious attempt at designing a proper RPG. It was a collaborative project, overcomplicated (my fault that), with a system of combat that tried to get the level of complexity found in Lost Worlds, but with dice and complex timing involved. More on that one later though.

The first game I ever made and actually had people PLAYING was called Final Star (a name derived simply by combining the two console RPG series on my brain at the time and removing the Fantasy). Back when I first got a modem, one of the first things I got involved with was a simple, play-by-e-mail, homebrew RPG with a simple all the PCs fight in an arena concept. I found it rather amusing, and started up my own. Given the premise, I gave it an odd swampy dark fantasy setting, and rules weighted heavily towards offense. It evolved as it ran, with the players constantly gaining access to new ways to wipe each other out in 5 rounds, more sophisticated battlegrounds, and a few attempts at adding in some traditional RPGish stuff outside of the arena concept (bad idea, it just didn't work under the system). I have, on various occasions, been urged to revive this, and one of these days I will if I can find time to automate some of the more personally taxing elements.

Now, back to the overwrought combat engine. Reviving this concept, and adding even more complexity to it (at the cost of realism truth be told), I began developing it into a more-specific game, moving it to a computer release when making a single attack hit started to involve 10 consecutive die rolls. The game passed the Jones Test (a concept I'll have to explain in another essay), but it hit a point where it was just too unwieldly to work. The non-combat aspects of the game on the other hand I'm still quite fond of, and I may revamp it one of these days. Or at least strip it for parts.

Skipping over the next dozen games because they either don't bear mention, or they're too embryonic to discuss publicly, we come to the first game design I have actually made visible to the public, Tyranny.

The basic concept for Tyranny has a pretty straight forward genesis. At the time, I had recently read the rules to the Amber Diceless RPG (which is pretty much the archetype of the premise, and good reading for any GM), and I was reading and/or watching a lot of stuff on shamanism and fictitious pantheons. That's all common knowledge though. The real premise behind Tyranny is twofold. First off, to me, it's the perfect one-shot system. Anyone should, I hope at least, be able to pick up the book for the first time and have either a character or an adventure done up completely within 15 minutes. My Tyranny con kit consists of nothing but a few single page character sheets, enabling anyone to whip up a character in a minute, and at the same time giving a detailed explanation of all the abilities they may have. Now I just need to get people to sign up for a demo session one of these years.

The second concept is to serve as something of an RPG skin. We have a premise, which serves as a sketchy setting, we have all the really important NPCs. We have a system for designing characters, mainly on the conceptual level. That's about it. Sure, there's quick and dirty rules for the basics, but if you really want to play an actual extended campaign of Tyranny, it's intentionally designed to be overlaid onto the rules of the RPG of your choice. You'd have to think up whatever point cost (or equivalent) is fair for Half-Demon as a PC race, and plug in damage for the various attacks, but that's easy enough to do. Ideally, I'd like to some day release a GURPS version of the rules, maybe a d20. Maybe even a Shadowrunization. All of that requires licensing I don't want to deal with right now though.

The next RPG concept, which is one of my dustiest, is Power. The main concept of the game is that experience points are a static and very finite resource. This here NPC has 500 EXP. You kill him. You gain his 500 EXP. If someone kills you, they get YOUR total. The total number of experience points in the world never changes, and they tend to clump up. Running with this forced me into a rather rigid mold. The only way you can really play Power is in a Highlander sort of campaign, where a perpetually dwindling number of characters rapidly snowball towards godhood at each other's expense. Every single other aspect of the game is designed around making the most out of this restriction.

RPG the RPG pretty much explains itself. Somewhere in a binge of designing the above two games, and at one point playing in or running 4 or 5 campaigns at once, certain trends came together and resulted in this bit of silliness.

Next (unless you really want me to discuss Simple Games) comes The Massive Vs. The Masses. The idea really came out of protest against what was around me at the time. All I was seeing was multiplayer party games, like Munchkin and Kill Dr. Lucky, or complex head to head strategy games with one for one balancing. So I come up with the gimmick of a two player strategy game where each player works under different rules. Specifically, a great big monster on one side, an army on the other. At the time, I'd never heard of Ogre for the record, and honestly even as I'm writing this, all I know about it is that it shares that core premise. In any case, the card based mechanics and modular sets were in there from day one, but I was kicking the idea around for quite a while before I thought to make the boards and pieces. The earliest design used the cards themselves as pieces, with special rules for adding, removing, and shifting cards around the edges of a growing sprawl, like dominoes. Be glad it evolved from there, since it wasn't much worth looking at back then.

Then of course there's my currently active projects. Ardeas comes out of a combination of four main concerns. I wanted a game in a fantasy setting with rules closer to Shadowrun than D&D. I wanted races to be more a lot more than just a set of stat modifications. I wanted fairly complex rules for everything, not just combat (while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of overcomplicating things, or not sticking with the same basic mechanic throughout). Finally, I wanted to structure things in a different way than the other games out there.

Finally, my most recent game concept as of this writing is my online RPG notion, whose genesis can be found elsewhere on this site. So for now, I'll end things here.