Tag: RPG Design

There are a small set of skills that tend to recur in almost every game, as they represent common tactics and approaches that players use in games.

One of them is intimidation – representing under various names (coercion, threats, etc), the skill of being able to get others to do what you want through threats or power.

While most skills comfortably sit in one of the various categories of characteristics (acrobatics type skills all fall under some variant of Dexterity/Agility and knowledge skills are found under Intelligence or its equivalent), intimidation is one that falls under many different characteristics.

For example:

D&D 5e                            Charisma

Savage Worlds                Spirit

Legend of 5 Rings          Willpower

Warhammer 3e              Strength

Star Wars (d6)               Knowledge

By way of contrast, it’s hard to find some form of persuasion/charm under anything but a social type characteristic, such as Charisma, Fellowship, Presence or such.

What makes intimidation so different?

Different Approaches?

One possible answer is that there are many ways to force someone to do what we want. We could use force of personality (Spirit or Charisma), force of will (Willpower), sheer muscle mass (Strength) or techniques of intimidation (Knowledge), resulting in the differences.

This isn’t entirely a satisfying answer since you could use the same argument with charm – strength of personality, knowledge of how to entice others, physical attractiveness or techniques of manipulation could shift that skill to a variety of different techniques.

Design Philosophy?

It could be taken as a sign of the game designer’s approach to the game world – perhaps in Warhammer designers are signalling that might makes right; maybe in Star Wars there’s the opposite view of knowledge is true power; it could be that in D&D and Savage Worlds social abilities of any kind are ruled by Charisma/Spirit to give an undervalued characteristic extra utility; while in LO5R designers reflect a world where the strongest willpower will triumph over the weaker minds?

These are just guesses, but if this is the answer then we would guess that other skills would follow this pattern. But, as stated earlier, usually other skills are fairly uniform in the type of characteristic they fall under – why again is intimidation so different?

Making Other People Do What You Want Is Hard?

It seems to me that a combination of the above two factors is most likely, but mixed in with the fact that forcing other people to do what we want them to do (the essence of intimidation) is, in real life, hard to do.

One of the most important lessons in life is that you only have control over yourself, not other people. The use of intimidation to get your way in games is really wish fulfillment and different people have their own ideas how it should or “is” done, which leads to different approaches and different game theories coming together to push intimidation in the different directions that we see in games.

 

It’s a curious skill that warrants a second look for all game designers – what are you saying about your game world? How, if at all, do people in your game world attempt to force others to do their will?

On the road to see a flick in Nashville, my non-gamer friend, Trey, was asking about how RPGs worked. Having never played an RPG before and probably having never had much interest in the hobby in the first place, this was all new territory for him. I gave the usual pitch—you create or choose a character and then make decisions for that character, blah, blah, blah. You know what an RPG is, so I’ll move on.

In the thick of the discussion, my sobriety-afflicted little attic wiggled and seized on an idea, one that crystallized why and how the experience one has playing the game has evolved to the point that the way we play “mainstream” RPGs would be unrecognizable to our older selves. I think it all comes down to the problem of increasing complexity.

The big coup that made 3rd Edition such an innovative game was that it took all the little independent systems lurking in D&D’s dark and scary corners, brought them into the light, and pounded on them until they all used the core task resolution mechanic. Old D&D felt like it was cobbled together from a variety of resolution systems made ad hoc to resolve situations that cropped in play. Attacks with melee weapons and ranged weapons both rolled a d20, but they took place at different points in the round and each had special rules. Dodging a fireball, resisting a spell, or withstanding poison all used saving throws, but the numbers varied by class and level. And don’t get me started on psionics or unarmed combat.

Distilling everything down to a common mechanic obviously made the game easier to learn. After all, once you figure out how to add a number to a random number, you can play D&D. Sort of. Initiative, attack rolls, saving throws, and everything else you would do that had an uncertain outcome relied on the common mechanical procedure for determining success and failure. Slick, sexy, and fun to play, and which is why the game is still being played in one version or another almost 15 years after it first appeared on the shelves.

As awesome and as powerful as the 3rd Edition rules were for D&D, I think it came with a deeper and far more insidious transformation. And that transformation finds its roots in character customization outside of class and race. Introducing rules exceptions by methods outside of the big choices made the game fuzzier and, in my opinion, harder to master. Non-weapon proficiencies may have been the initial culprit, but I would argue that it was the line of complete books in 2nd Edition that gave the final push that would drag the game down the rabbit hole into the murky and strange world in which we now live.

The difference between now and then is that though game-complexity started higher (the learning curve for AD&D was pretty damned steep), it stayed relatively flat once you figured out how it worked. You could create a dozen fighters, with different races, alignments, personalities, weapon assortments, but they all played more or less the same. The more you played a fighter, the more second nature it became until you could always play your fighter effectively. Your big contribution to game-play was high accuracy and consistent damage output most of the time. That might not seem like much fun, but given the necessary abstractions to make combat simulation manageable, the mechanics did the job.

Obviously, spellcasters were complicated. Keeping track of all the spells is tough and so players who chose to play magic-using characters had their work cut out for them. But, again, once you get over the hump, does complexity really ramp up? I’d say no. Even if you’re preparing 35 spells each day, you eventually settle into a pattern after you figure out what spells work well and what spells don’t. There’s not a lot of mystery to magic missile after the first time you cast it.

At the time, 2nd Edition felt like a radical change from 1st Edition and, in hindsight, the nerd rage I felt then is kind of amusing when I look at the rulebooks today. The guts of that system are basically the same and, I would even say, better. We lost a lot of the really arcane mechanics and the system made great strides toward normalizing how you did things in the game. And, best of all, you could still enjoy the same experience of system mastery you had with 1E in that a fighter was pretty much a fighter every time you played. But the Complete books changed that. Not only did they help push the non-weapon proficiency system away from being an optional set of rules, they made class functionality and definition fuzzy. You might play a myrmidon in one campaign and a gladiator in the next. Both are fighters, yes, but the fighter identity—what I do in the game—changed by allowing players to select a kit. More options are good, yes? Maybe? Maybe not.

Kits just kicked open the door for more customization. Since there aren’t moving parts in classes aside from spells, the game needed other elements for players to choose, elements that would become skills and feats. Kits from 2nd Edition didn’t really have mechanical weight. They just added flavor. Since people gravitate toward those things that make their characters more powerful, skills and feats needed and got mechanical weight, which, in turn, raised their importance for making an effective character. And, since the game needs to reflect growth, the system had to parcel them out over time. The net result is great texture and mechanical weight attached to things that used to just be how you described or roleplayed your character. But it had a huge price tag.

From 3rd Edition on, your character, regardless of whether you chose a fighter or a wizard, always becomes harder to play as you gain levels. A character is a veritable catalog of permissions (I can attack with this weapon, I know this thing) and exceptions to the rules (I can sacrifice accuracy to boost damage, I can maximize my spell damage). By the time you reach the top of the ladder, you have so many things to track and remember, so many widgets, what should be simple—I attack with my sword, is a veritable labyrinth of yes and nos. The result is a slower, clunky game that more often than not comes screeching to a halt as everyone gathers around to sort out just what widget Q from sourcebook 76 actually does.

I know, I sound like a cantankerous old man and I’m really just whining about bygone days. But seriously, the prevailing opinion that greater complexity over time terrifies me. When did it become good to make a game harder to play the longer you play it? And I’m not talking about harder challenges; I’m talking about making basic decisions and resolving them as you take on those harder challenges. Why would we ever build-in a disincentive to play the game more if the goal, as producers of product, is to encourage customers to use our form of entertainment instead of something else?

The genie is undoubtedly out of the bottle. The existing audience demands cool and interesting rewards to act as carrots for continuous play. However, the methods we use to deliver these rewards and to determine what awards ought to be is critical for controlling complexity bloat.

One of the things I liked a lot about 4E was the attempt to control complexity by having higher-level powers replace lower level powers. Of course, the game shot itself in the junk by piling on extra powers that were additions rather than replacements, but the core idea is sound. Widgets that retain their core functionality and just improve at later points would be an easier way to deliver these extras. Maybe instead of getting 7 feats, you gain 3. And at the points when you would normally gain a feat, you upgrade the effects of the feat(s) you already have. Power Attack, in this model, might be a flat penalty to the attack roll to get a flat boost to damage. Let’s say –2 for +4 damage. At level 6, the penalty might stay at –2 and the damage would jump to +6 or +8. Just a vague idea, but I think something like this would demonstrate improvement, preserve character customization, and control the excess of complexity by piling more stuff on top of the stuff you already have.

So, what do you think? How often does increasing play complexity end your campaigns compared to finishing the campaign’s story? Is complexity a problem in your games or is it something you work around?

I’ve not made a secret my disdain for skills in d20-based games. They always feel tacked on, a sop offered to players who need more numbers to truly realize the character they want to play. Rather than just say, “My dude spent a lot of time in the king’s court” and let the GM interpret what this means, most players feel it’s important to have mechanics that represent capabilities beyond the core task resolution system. Today, I want to talk about why I feel this approach is bad for d20 games and probably make you super upset as a result. But I have a solution and it comes at the end.

Where to begin? Every RPG needs a clear and easy way to interpret whether what a player describes happens or doesn’t happen. Every description can be distilled down to a yes or no. While some games explore ideas of “yes, but” and “no, but,” the “but” only slaps on a consequence for not quite getting to the positive outcome or dipping into the negative and provides a bit more nuance and story fodder for folks who want it. It’s still a binary outcome though. Ultimately it happens or it doesn’t.

In old editions of D&D, the game had individual mechanics for tasks and sometimes those mechanics employed completely different systems based on whether or not you were a member of a particular class. Cast a spell? The target might make a saving throw against spells. Swing a sword, roll the die, add your modifier, and tell the DM who then checks the table. Want to pummel a dude, try something else that’s not quite so arcane or involved please. Proficiencies, introduced in 1st and spread to 2nd as an optional rule, provided yet another method for resolving tasks. It was a great, big complicated mess. When 3rd Edition showed up, all slick and sexy with a unified task resolution mechanic, it was a revelation to me and it’s still remarkable how much the game changed when the edition meter rolled over to 3.

As awesome and as powerful as a core mechanic was for the game, it fundamentally altered the role ability scores played in the game and in a manner that reduced abilities to nothing more than descriptors. In the older editions, the six abilities pretty much told you everything you needed to know about your character and the game system told you how those abilities plugged into specific tasks. I know when I ran 2nd Edition, whenever someone described an action that wasn’t an attack or a spell, there were three possible outcomes: yes, no, and roll a d20 to see what happens. If the player rolled under his or her score, the action happened. Otherwise it didn’t. This technique comes straight out of the game’s proficiency system, so I wasn’t doing anything revolutionary. But the main thing is that the abilities were always where the player looked to determine whether a described action happened when the outcome was not certain.

From 3rd Edition on, ability scores primarily served as the method to derive another number, the modifier that plugged into the core task resolution system. Aside from a few weird corner case rules, the scores only functioned as another kind of hit point pool. A special attack could damage or drain a character’s score, and thus reduce the modifier. And 4th Edition didn’t even have that.

So what’s the problem? If the modifiers were the only thing a character added to his or her task resolution roll, I probably wouldn’t have much of a problem aside from the fact that the score itself is just character sheet clutter for much of the game (True20 solves this problem by just jettisoning the score). But the modifier is not the only thing you add to your task resolution roll and skills bloat the numbers until they are the only thing that matters.

Both 3rd Edition and 4th Edition effectively abandoned abilities as the primary method for task resolution by attaching numbers to ability modifiers that were larger than the numbers themselves. If you can have 23 ranks in Use Rope, the +3 bonus from Dexterity seems paltry. The most important component of the calculation to determine if you manage to tie the knot properly is the bonus from the skill. And if the skill ranks are the thing that matters most, why bother having the ability modifier at all? Wouldn’t it be simpler to just use a range of skills and have a character choose a couple of descriptors (Strong, Smart, Alert) that plug into the skills and increase the skill bonus? For example, you might have the Athletics skill and it might start with a modifier of 0 to 4 that can grow as you gain levels. If you have the Strong tag, you might get a +1 bonus to Athletics checks. While similar to what 4E did with skills (granting a big, heavy flat bonus instead of mucking about with ranks), it dispels the illusion that abilities matter.

But, carving up the corpses of abilities into smaller pieces encourages specialization and, when those pieces directly interact with the game’s predominant play-style (combat, intrigue, exploration, whatever), survival impels players to focus develop those pieces. We see this all over the place in 3rd and 4th. Choosing the History skill in 4th Edition over Perception is a stupid decision unless the game is focused on dredging up dusty bits of trivia instead of finding treasure and butchering monsters. Similarly, putting ranks in Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering) is foolish if you take those points away from Listen/Search/Tumble. Such focus undermines the whole point in having skills in the first place. To realize that wonderful character you’ve imagined in your head, you have to make bad build decisions about your character. Efforts to mitigate this problem by making flavor-skills more mechanically useful only managed to create weird narrative problems. If having History gives your dude a big fat bonus to attack rolls every now and then, your game is likely to be filled with historian-fighters. That seems weird.

Let’s wrap this up. D&D is chock full of big abstractions and the biggest is in how the big six abilities claim all the character’s descriptive real estate. The game, at various points, tells us that ability scores are a combination of natural talent and formal training. Intelligence isn’t just your character’s IQ, but it’s also your character’s education, wits, and recall.

The non-weapon proficiency system is a long way from perfect, but what it did was plug into the existing system architecture without diluting the importance of ability scores. Simply, you roll a die and if you equaled or got under the score (+ or – the check modifier), you succeed. Boom. Dead simple. And if you want to improve your proficiency, you can just take it again, gaining a +1 bonus to the check for each time you took it after the first.

Adopting a system like this for your d20 game isn’t that hard, but it would mean stripping a fairly big chunk of the task resolution system out of the game. The big thing is to flip the chance for success. You’d need to double the modifier for all checks (not attack rolls or saving throws) and make the baseline DC 10. Drop the DC to 5 for easy tasks and jack it up to 15 for hard tasks.

Rather than have a slew of combat skills like Spot, Athletics, and so on, you just lean on the abilities. If you want to get better at climbing, make darn sure you put your ability score increases in Strength. Skills would become things you have to have special training to pull off: Animal Handling, Picking Locks, and so on. And those skills would modify the DC based on their complexity. Feats would just cover everything else.

Well that took a while to get to, but I think this is pretty cool. What about you?

If you’re thinking of making your own RPG, you probably have an idea of what dice you want to use, what characteristics you want to model and how heroic you want the characters to be. Those are important to think about, but where do you go from there? Let’s look at some guiding principles that will help you make a system that flows.

Simple
RPG systems can get complex really quickly. When designing a system, you want to keep things as simple as you can while still keeping the level of function where you want it to be. There are a few tools that will help you to do this. The first and most obvious is the unified mechanic, if you want every interaction in the game to be handled by one set of rules. Once the players learn that set, they can do everything the game is designed to do. The main consideration is to keep things consistent so the players don’t have to look up how something is handled, they just know because they’ve learned the core mechanic. GMs will tolerate looking up material, but the more you can reduce the GM’s mental load – the more creative they can be.

Now think about how many individual steps you have in your mechanic. From the start of a round to the end of a round, count up how many dice rolls, equations, calculations and steps the players will have to slog through. Are all of them needed? Can you cut some of them out and still keep the same functionality? Is a slight reduction of function still enough to get you where you want to go? Your first answer is probably going to be that they’re all needed or that taking some of them away will take away some feature of the game you like.  However, if you allow yourself to kill your darlings and reconnect the dots without them, you may just end up with a stronger system.

Do your numbers have to be so big? If characters have 10 hit points and most weapons do at least 5 damage, couldn’t you make it so that characters have 2 HP and weapons do 1 damage? If payers roll 1d20 and the average difficulty is 10, is there a difference if you reduced things to 1d6 and the average difficulty is 3? There very well could be a reason for the higher numbers, but try to reduce them if it’s practical.

The last thing to consider is your math. “Do you need all that math?” would be the obvious first question. Could you provide a non-math approximation of what you’re trying to accomplish? If that’s not practical, try to change the type of math you have to do. Mentally, not all math is equal. Comparing two numbers is about as simple as you can get. This means looking at a number and saying if it is more, equal or less. Adding small numbers is the second simplest math operation you can have. Subtracting small numbers is actually slightly harder for your brain. Multiplication and division are probably not acceptable in the middle of play, unless you’re doubling or halving numbers. Small changes here add up over the course of a game. As a player’s mind is taxed to do repeated equations, they’ll slowly tire and become less creative. The more load you have on them, the more they’ll just follow the most obvious path.

The other question about math to consider is when will the players have to do it? A player that is going to get a big payoff from the math will more happily crunch numbers or at least more happily reach for the calculator. If the math is for something mundane or even harmful to them, it’s going to impact their enjoyment of the game.

This doesn’t mean you have to have a rules-lite system. The emphasis here is reducing the number of steps that have to happen in each round and reducing the mental load of the players. Extra steps are often acceptable for special effects that add spice to the game, but happen only occasionally.

Flexible
Now that you have your core mechanic, try to think of how many ways it can be used. Does the same system that you used for combat apply to social conflict? Could it be used in a survival situation? What about when computer-hacking? How does a doctor heal characters using the system? Can a character maintain a troop of minions with the system and still have turns go quickly? Try to push the boundaries and find exceptions.  If you haven’t found them, you haven’t looked hard enough.

Once you find the exceptions, examine what’s causing them. Is it the lack of a rule, or the existence of a rule? Either way, try not to add a new rule or step – see if you can modify the existing rules to encompass the exception. Sometimes when you’re able to do this, you blow open a whole new set of things your game can do, so really go after this whenever you can.

Think about the steps and rules you currently have. Can they be expanded to cover circumstances that you didn’t originally intend them to? If you’re already play-testing, a way to get some feedback on this is to pay attention to when a player misuses or misapplies a rule. They’re making a connection you may not have been thinking of as being a good thing. The player obviously thinks it is, so can you adjust things to fit the rest of the game?

Bullet Proof
Next think about how the mechanic can be abused. Is there an exploit that will make a character unstoppable? This may not happen right away; it often does happen as the PCs gain experience. Is it a bad thing? Can the challenge be moved somewhere else so that the PC is still fun to play? If you are going to migrate the challenge, make sure it happens slowly and that the players and the GM know that this is the direction the game will move in. This is vital so the players don’t get blindsided by the change and not understand how to keep enjoying their characters.

If you can let a PC max out any stat of their choice and the game is still fun and challenging, you have a robust system. If you can give them any piece of equipment they want and it doesn’t break the game, you’re doing pretty good. If the PC can be unstoppable in one aspect, but still vulnerable in another, you’re on to something.

Whenever a player tries something that has no effect in-game, you have a problem. When a player wants to do flips into a fight and the system doesn’t handle that, there’s a hole between what the player wants to do and what the system can handle. When the player wants to jump on the back of a beast and stab it in the neck, and nothing special happens, there’s a problem. When the player wants to start off with a horse and is willing to sacrifice other things for it, but they can’t, there’s a problem. Let them know how the change could effect the game and ask them for input on how the issue could be handled. It may require a lot of rethinking, but you’ll have happier players for it.

I’ve said it before, “We all have our own RPG, right?”  Well, I assume that’s the case, because I’ve written several, and some of them have several editions.  No, I’ve never published any of my RPGs – they were always written for my enjoyment, my players’ enjoyment, and my need to vent creative brain vapor build-up.  Most often, I wrote them simply because I wanted to play or run a game (genre) that wasn’t really out yet or readily available.  Sometimes I even thought I could make a better version of an existing game.

In this article, I’m going to talk about some of the pitfalls of writing your own RPG, and how to overcome them.  Actually publishing a role-playing game for profit is a whole other ball of hot magma, one that I’m certainly not qualified to talk about.

 *I am not a professional writer, and I’ve never tried to sell a game.*

I’ve written several RPGs.  Unfortunately, most of them were 10-30 pages destined for a fiery death in the recycle bin.  I did, however, have a few juggernauts that saw some serious game-time, so I’m very happy about that…

1. Back in high school (when my love / hate relationship with Heroes Unlimited began), I felt that I could make a better supers game than anything else out there.  Using Wordperfect, I put together 100+ pages of pure super material (titled “Supers“).  Unfortunately, it ended up being nowhere near original, so I rewrote it – only to find it still wasn’t very original.  So I just dumped the entire thing.
2. I then created two editions of Militech, which was a brilliant combination of Aliens and Robotech.  Space Marine combat and Versatile Fighter combat provided our group many hours of entertainment, complete with military rank, tons of options, and some cool (ripped) artwork.  I even had six books printed, complete with a cool front cover.  Unfortunately, I eventually killed the game because I kept tinkering with it.  I’d get inspired by a movie or book and then try to add those new concepts to the game.  I should have just left it alone, since a lot of time went into that RPG.
3. My last major endeavor was Nighthaven.  A Blade/Buffy/Underworld kind of a game.  This game had all the bells and whistles.  150+ pages, great options, and great (ripped) artwork.  Of course, I had to have it printed in book form.  We played this game through many, many sessions, and I simply liked it so very much.  I liked this game so much that it went through three editions.  <sigh> And that is what ultimately shelved it.  I kept tinkering with it, changing things, making the game “supposedly better” – and it simply ran away from me.  I really should have focused more on fluff than stuff.

So, where did I go wrong with all of my games?  And why am I even writing this article?

Well, I’m getting the itch to start developing Nighthaven again, but I don’t want to run into the same old problems.  So, I thought about it, and then came up with some of the roadblocks and pitfalls that I’ve faced in the past with the hope that I don’t make the same mistakes again.  If you’re looking to write your own RPG for fun, hopefully you’ll find this useful as well.

The 10 Commandments of RPG Writing

1. Create a “to do” list.  Create a list of things that need to be explained in the game.  This is most often a list of chapters and subchapters.  I always look through other RPGs to see what kinds of things get explained in those games, to help ensure that my game will be complete.  Really, in creating a list, you’re creating a plan of attack, one that will help you stay on track.
2. Don’t stall.  If you get an idea, go with it.  Don’t worry about your idea not being original or perfectly figured out – you simply have to get the ball rolling.  Don’t sit there trying to flesh it all out in your head.  I’ve sat for hours in front of my computer just waiting for the right words to mystically flow through my fingertips onto that keyboard.  And you know what?  Those were hours well-wasted. Once you get that initial idea, just go with it.  Write, write, write.
3. Setting, Setting, Setting.  This is important.  A great system mechanic or character options tree might be cool, but it won’t last when paired with a poor, uninspired, or under-developed setting.  A setting connects the player characters to the story, and that’s mucho important in keeping players interested in the game.
4. Only focus on what is on your mind. You don’t have to write your game from front to back (this is why you created your “to do” list).  If you’re working on a specific section – like PC  Races, but then get inspired about your PC Classes, work on your PC Classes.  You’ll get so much more done writing about what’s on your mind than if you try to finish one section before moving on to the next.  Trust me.
5. Steal what works from your competitors. Hey, if you like how Wizards formats their D&D Powers section, copy it.  Or, copy and alter it.  Whatever.  It’s ok to study what’s out there, because it just might work for your game (and you may even be able to improve it).  On the flipside, you can also check out things from games that don’t seem to work, and avoid making those mistakes.
6. Keep it simple.  Several of my failures occured in part because I thought I could make grapple rules more realistic, or ranged combat, or falling damage… whatever.  All that did was add more rules to an untested RPG system.  Using my “obviously superior intelligence” to make certain parts of the game more realistic only makes the game less playable.  It makes the game clunky, and opens your system mechanic to a vast set of inconsistent rules.  Just keep it simple.  Again, trust me.
7. Consider using an existing game system.  In line with keeping it simple, why not make your game using an established generic system, like Savage Worlds or Stands of FATE?  This is soooo much less work and (more importantly) less stress.  Of course, if your idea of a game is based off a unique system mechanic of your own design, then by all means, go for it – just remember that desiging your own system can be a daunting, time-consuming, tedious task.  Using an existing generic game system can easily cut out tons and tons of age-inducing playtest hours.
8. Playtest with one-shots on occasion.  This will help you adjust numbers, balance powers, and show you what simply doesn’t work (and anything that takes a lot of explanation certainly doesn’t work).  Players are not going to want to play the game if they can’t remember the eight-step process for determining initiative.
9. Make the rules consistent.  When you design your own system, a common error occurs – it’s very easy to focus on combat resolution while disregarding conflict resolution.  Then, later you’ll realize that you need to figure out how to handle ability checks, skill checks, casting spells, and social interractions.  Pretty soon you could end up with several different ways of handling such conflicts (sub-systems), when you should have devised a single mechanic that applies to just about every situation.
10. Stop making changes.  After you’ve finished your game and distributed it to your players, resist the urge to make changes.  This is the time to play the game, not work on it.  Unless you find something that is seriously breaking your RPG, leave it alone.  Just go with what you have and let it be. Sure, you’re going to find errors, inconsistencies, and power imbalance, but your players will forgive that.  They won’t forgive you for interrupting the campaign when you start making changes.  My two most successful games were ultimately killed because I kept trying to improve them.

That’s it, I think.  Hopefully this list will help you with your homebrew RPG project – I know it’ll help me.  Here’s a few more ideas to help make your original role-playing game a success:

1. Include artwork.  I always rip images off the web for my personal RPG projects.  I’ll even doctor those images to suit my needs.  Imagery adds a great element – it helps give the game flavor, and helps your players envision the game’s concepts.  Just remember, don’t post your game online with ripped images, and I know you’re not going to try to sell it that way.
2. Make a character sheet.  There are all sorts of ways to create a character sheet.  Microsoft Word or Excel is usually fine for a homebrew RPG, though there are many other (better suited) graphics programs out there.  Really, having players write their characters down on some binder paper is a no-no.  Doing so will irritate your players.  Make a character sheet, even if it’s a very simple one.
3. Make your game easily available to your players.  If I’m going the cheap route, I’ll print my game on my home printer (or at work) and put it into binders for my players.  However, I prefer to have it printed in a printshop.  I’ve done it for as little as $15 per spool-binded book in color, with front and back covers.  Whether you print it or not, give your players a Word document or PDF of the game (you can save as a PDF in Word if you want).

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I’m assuming you’re writing your own homebrew RPG because you have a cool setting, genre, or mechanic that you’d like to play, or because you’re dissatisfied with the output of the current industry games.  Writing an RPG takes a lot of work, and can easily lead to a lot of wasted hours.  I really do first suggest looking at other games to see if you can modify one of them to suit your needs.  That could very easily get you the game you want (and much sooner), instead of starting from scratch.

Of course, if you’ve read this article down to this point, then you’re probably like me – you probably get enjoyment not just from playing the game, but in creating it.