My first game was something I designed at school. As I remember it only had one mechanic, roll a d6, on a 1-3 something worked, otherwise it failed. Like, 1-3 lose a life, 4-6 survive. Eventually I think it grew a few more, but that was the main thing.
It started as a little map I drew on graph paper in maths class, which someone else explored around, collecting treasure and trying not to die in traps. Because it was so fatal I changed it so that the whole game was one big virtual reality system. The characters (if you can call them that, they still had no stats or backgrounds) were rich members of a future society who spent their whole life competing in the game trying to see who could gain the most treasure and loose the least lives, just like the players did.
By a process I can't fully remember the game expanded until the main map was about 7 or 8 feet across (made out of many many sheets of graph paper stuck together) with piles of extra dungeon levels and maybe 10-12 people were playing on a semi-regular basis. I would take the map and my folder of other maps into the school library at lunchtimes and lay it out on the main table and people would come and tell me what they were doing next, roll some dice, take turns and so on till lunch was over.
Not quite an RPG, but a game certainly.
[Edit: Move this post here as "Things of Interest" threads should only contain things of interest and not debate or posts about them.]
When I was clearing out some
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Wed, 05/09/2007 - 16:32.
When I was clearing out some of the junk in my old room at my mum's house I came across a load of notebooks, each with about 4 or 5 pages of proto-games. When I was 9 or 10 I used to love grabbing a new notebook and starting to write a new game in it - not any of the useful stuff like mechanics or setting, but all the boring crap stuff that rpgs have at the beginning (pithy and cocky introduction, what is roleplaying, what you will need etc) because clearly that was how a game should look. They all had crappy names that were acronyms of something (C.O.D.E. and so on) and all fantasy heartbreakers. The Fighting Fantasy books were my primary source of inspiration at that stage, although these were clearly intended to be in the mould of WFRP or DnD.
Then a few years later me and my brother spent one summer holiday making a surprisingly complete game that was part wargame/part rpg, with each player controlling a single big giant mech. It was like some unholy crossbreed of Battletech, Power Rangers and the old GW/40k game, Confrontation.
I have notebooks just like
Submitted by David Donachie on Wed, 05/09/2007 - 16:42.
I have notebooks just like that, loads of them. I love to look through them from time to time. Most of my notebooks are full of mechanics though, which says something about me.
Solipsist RPG, on its way ... eventually
Use the FORRS
Submitted by Per Fischer on Wed, 05/09/2007 - 20:17.
Man, I still had this lying around on my harddisk:
http://download.alexandria.dk/~pfischer/forrs_core.html
This is from 2002 - before I discovered the Forge, but AFTER I read and played The Window.
Per
http://darkplaces.squarespace.com
I must say, the die rolling
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Wed, 05/09/2007 - 20:24.
I must say, the die rolling mechanics are highly reminiscent of FUDGE or FATE - how prescient of you! That certainly looks a lot more robust and playable than anything I ever came with when I was young!
I think my first forays into
Submitted by Iain McAllister on Wed, 05/09/2007 - 21:11.
I think my first forays into game deisgn where a dungeon game and something based on fishing that was very educational.
Cheers
Iain
Mob Justice now available!
'The Giant Brain':Small games, big ideas.
When I was 11 I made a
Submitted by Ben Clapperton on Wed, 05/09/2007 - 22:13.
When I was 11 I made a football card game which I kept in shoebox. It was played once by me, a draw that I won 2-1 on penalties, and then I gave it to a schoolfriend and never saw it again.
Apocalypse War
Submitted by Neil Gow on Thu, 06/09/2007 - 08:57.
When I was young, I made a board game that modelled the invasion of Mega-City One in the 'Apocalypse War' storyline in 2000AD. It was a lot like those games of tank battles where your force opposed another force but their force numbers were hidden and you revealed them at the end of the battle to see who won.
And then we got our puppy. He pissed on my map and chewed up Judge Dredd, Judge Hershey and the Stub Gun facility. I was less than impressed...
Neil