Wild West TTRPG System Devlog 1

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Hi! Welcome to my wild west TTPRG’s first devlog! I figured I’d use this blog as a tool to get me thinking about this project again, and if I can share my thought process and inspire others to be creative and make things as well, that’s an added bonus! Please feel free to use the table of contents above to jump around to stuff that you find interesting, as I’m gonna be yapping quite a bit. So, without further ado, let’s get started!

Where did we start?

This wild west TTRPG project extravaganza started back when I was playing 5e very regularly (over four years ago, holy hell i’m old). I’ve since curtailed my use of the 5e system to take up playing more independent work to draw from in terms of system structure and approach to design, however the wild west system’s old doccuments that i’ll be picking up are still very rooted in that old 5e-style. It leaned heavily into that moment to moment combat that D&D is well known for and it dealt in minute stat values and to-hit bonuses to weapons and heavy resource management. In other words, I think my digital game design practices crossed with my overwhelming 5e experience to that point resulted in a rather creative, yet bewildering network of systems and ideas that aren’t well suited to the TTRPG medium, or at least to the experiences I want to create with this system. Let’s take a look at what remnants remain and what I want to do with them.

Old docs

Here are the old doccuments if anyone’s interested in looking them over.

• First ruleset rev
• Second ruleset rev
• Attempted (then quickly abandoned) third rev
• Weapons & modding rules
• Sample gunslinger class

Combat

As much as I love the detail and ideas behind my combat mechanics, they were incredibly overcomplicated, and, in fact, the system as a whole actually looked to de-incentivese combat as a core design decisison, so introdicing interesting complexity would draw players to combat (ooo, interesting system! Let’s do more of that!) rather than than the other way around. That’s a direction I intend to maintain from the original doccuments, so (in retrospect) this complexity was completely unwarranted. My goal is to make combat bad. Bad as in “incredibly costly”, not “unfun”. Something that pushes players to look for a nonviolent solution, but still remains a last ditch option in a dire crisis.

I assume many tilt their heads at this decision. The wild west ficiton, after all, is rife with gunslinging, cannons, gatling guns, and shootouts. The heroes running into the fray, firing pistols left and right, and emerging with a couple bruises, ready to do it all again a few more times before sundown. And no doubt there are systems out there that fulfill this fantasy, however, I want mine to be a slight departure from the “shoot first ask questions later” mentality. Or at least make an effort to push players away from such behavior, which in turn, makes it more impactful and meaningful when it does occur. The goal is a harsher combat ruleset, but also a simpler one, to help the game keep its focus on the roleplay and immersion in the setting.

Roleplay

This was actually the least developed part of my old docs, as I intended to finish the combat before moving on but uhhhh… ADHD. However I still have a few ideas for where I want to take it.

First off, I dislike stats, at least as a tool for longer term campaigns. In terms of shorter ones, Mothership, for instance, uses them to great effect. You can run up a character in a matter of minutes and have a great idea of what that character is generally capable of with a quick glance at a few simple numbers. However, in my many years running long campaigns of D&D, stats become stale with time and lock fundamental experiences and mechanics behind walls of numbers. ASI’s really don’t do much to help the problem as a) min-maxing is essentally the default approach to character creation and b) in my experience, people just take feats instead.

Abstracting the player character’s development over the course of the narrative to a basic +2 wherever the player wishes to put it (You killed 32 goblins without saying a word in character to get to level 4 and you’ve suddenly gained two charisma?) is frankly strange in my opinion. It’s an intuitive enough abstraction, but I’d argue in a longer campaign where your character’s current actions need to make a difference down the line, any number of sessions in the future, I refuse to accept that inherent stats and arbitrary bonuses are the best way to do that.

A quick aside

If I can pull the discussion towards my sweet child, red dead redemption two, i’d like to point out the honor system in that game, as I believe that many game developers, digital or otherwise, can learn a thing or two therein. It’s a simple as hell system: Arthur does good things, he gets good points. Bad things get him bad points, which cancel out the good points. And depending on how many points you have, positive or negative, the story changes. This isn’t a new idea, but the important thing is how deeply it’s connected to every single thing in the game’s world. Most actions that Arthur can take when interacting with the world around him will tie into this system, good or bad. Again, and again, and again. Players can no longer act like complete maiacs and murderhobos with complete impunity because they clicked the “i’m a goodie goodie” button on some dialogue a couple times. Is it perfect? Definitely not, (1 human life equating to approximately 3 “hey there, pardner!“s is comedic at best), but we can almost certainly draw from it here.

Specifially, I’m looking at the idea of individual actions contributing to a larger longer term result. As opposed to abstracting these to numbers and having the player choose how those improvements come about, they’re forced to actually do the things that improve them. You get smarter by studying. Stronger by lifting and hitting things. Better at lock picking by lock picking. And there’s an opportunity cost to doing things (as I know very well with the sheer number of hobbies and interests i’ve decided to engage in). These should all contribute to their own skills, without the need for essential stats, which in turn allows the character to evolve over the course of the campaign directly based on how they’re played. The trick is how to implement this simply and thoughtfully. That’ll have to be the focus of another devlog, because honestly, I haven’t figured it out yet, myself! But I’m very excited to give it a crack.

Classes

I’m toying with the idea of removing classes outright. They’re a simple, helpful abstraction to help the player shape their character, but I’m opposed to the idea of fundimentally separating ideas or skills from others. If D&D’s classes are the windows operating system, its navigation bar, desktop environment, notification manager, etc… set up in one specific way for the user, I intend for this system to be akin to a version of Linux, giving the user a much wider breadth of fundimental choice at the cost of some user friendliness. Breaking apart classes into a more general pool of available skills, potentially with reccomendations to create common character archetypes, but affording the player the choice and flexibility to create a truly dynamic, unique character. Again, more on this to come.

Dice system

Here’s the kicker. I’m still up in the air about what kind of dice system I want to use! Woe is me! The original was d20 based and was calculus hell. That’s something to move away from. But towards what? PbtE is too crude for my purposes (As much as I adore it). Spire’s d10 pooling system is much closer to something that I like for this purpose but it doesn’t feel quite there just yet, at least for this system. (It kicks some major ass in both spire and heart, though.) The next article is likely going to be focused on my decision process here, as a good dice system will make or break this game, and I need to think for a good long while about what direction I should take with it.

Final Notes

And with that, our short time together is up. Assuming anyone is, in fact, reading this. If you are, and you aren’t a webscraper, thank you for reading. I really appreciate it. And with that, I receed back into my world of dice probability calculators and balatro. Have an amazing day, and I’ll see you next time!