Have you ever seen a movie or television show and wished that a games company would bring out a role-playing game based around it. Then like myself and thousands of other gamers you are not alone. The world is full of games that never saw the light of day for one reason or another, the chief among these normally being that you need to get the rights to make a game as most images are licensed to their parent company.

Well aside from this. Games design is not a task to be taken lightly, or so the games companies would have us all believe. In this article I am not trying to teach you the complete rules to the world of games design, or even how to market it, far from it. But if you have a little spare time on your hands and a few friends who are willing to help you out then hopefully this article may be of use to you.

Like all good games. The very first thing that you need is an idea. This sounds easy I know, but think about it for a while before you start off. Firstly and perhaps more importantly, will your friends play the game with you. There is nothing worse than spending months working on a games system, only to find out that your friends don’t like the idea of say hunting down Dinosaurs in a theme park gone astray. So to help save you a lot of hard work and precious time, plan ahead and find out just what your gamers do actually like.

Okay so you have agreed on your idea and your friends are willing to play the game if you design it. For my example I will use the last project that I worked on, that being an RPG based around ‘Microprose’s’ best selling computer game’ X-COM: UFO:ENEMY UNKNOWN’ and its follow ups. You can take your ideas from anywhere you like, but don’t forget that copyright laws prevent you from selling your system once designed unless you get permission from the owner first {more on this later.}

Just like a lot of my friends, I love playing ‘X-COM’, the game is very simple to play, but causes quite a challenge to complete. After playing the game for over a year, and listening to all the talk my players and friends were saying about loving to play this game as an RPG, I decided to take the plunge and go ahead. As I stated before, I started out by asking just who was willing to give the game a try and found that most of my group of players and a few others I know were more than willing to play. So I sat myself down and with a pen and pad of paper began to sketch out a rough idea of how I wanted the game to look and feel.

The Basics.

There are several ways to start your game. Some people like to get the games mechanics out of the way first and then concentrate on the rest of the game {i.e. Character design}. This is a good way to start as you already have a basic system to use and once ready to play its very easy to fit the rest of the game around it. Although you could always start with the Character design first and work the other way around {this sometimes leads to confusion and frustration} it can work but its not as simple. The way that I design my games {so far I have a collection of over forty} is a little different and when I worked in a games design studio they couldn’t understand my reasons for it at first, but soon found that it was a good idea.

Okay now that you have got the first couple of hurdles out of the way its time for the real fun to start. When I decided to make my X-COM rpg, I got my hands on every scrap of information I could on the game, from hint books to screen shots and even the advertising blurb that surrounded its release. I sat down and read all the source material I had at hand, and I even added information on UFO sightings and alien abduction for various magazines and books.

The Mechanics.

Designing the way your game works can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be, but bear in mind that the more complex the game is the harder it is to play and often new comers to the hobby become disheartened. The first thing I did was decide what kind of dice system I was going to use. A lot of games use a standard D6 system {normally rolling a number of six sided dice, West End Game’s Star Wars for example} but some use other variety’s of dice ranging from D10 {White Wolf Storyteller} to D20 {Targets Warzone and Mutant Chronicles} and the percentile system that uses two D10 sided dice. For my game I decided to go for a mixture of dice types but mainly using the standard D6 for generating characters and percentile for skill and combat checks. Getting the system to flow smoothly is always a major task and perhaps one of the hardest parts of designing your own games.

I have over a hundred note pads filled with ideas from the games, and often find that reading them again later often helps when stuck during designing a game. Don’t throw your notes away once you have the system up and running as they are a wealth of information for future reference. If you find that something isn’t quite working out at this stage its very easy to get it sorted or remove it altogether from your system.

A basic working system is all that you need to start off with, get this playable and the rest will come together easily. Once I had settled on my system it was then time to get down to the real serious but fun part of the game, playtesting the rules.

Playtesting the game

When I first started off designing my own games over fifteen years ago, I used to stick to a generic system I knocked up, and only changed things like the character sheet and sometimes combat. The players in my group have become accustomed to these mechanics and I thought that I would try something a little different this time around.

X-Com has you controlling squads of well trained troops and pitting them against a horde of aliens bent on taking over the Earth. The game is very dark and moody and I wanted to capture the feel of the original in my system. Trying to make a game based around a movie or TV show is one task, but around a combat orientated game is quite another, so I had my work cut out for me. As the original game had the forces of X-Com pitted against the aliens, I made sure that my players had the chance to play every conceivable type of character from the P.C. version. I made up a selection of occupations based on the game and included non combat archetypes for the players in my group who prefer to think their way out of a situation rather than fight. The archetypes included, pilots for the various craft in the game, scientists to examine the dead and if lucky live aliens brought back to the base and of course the mainstay of the game the grunts themselves, who went out into the field and made contact one on one with the aliens. This seemed to work very well and in a few sessions I had the system ready to type up for my players. I did a task that I don't recommend lightly to anyone who is thinking of writing their own system, by sitting down with a calculator and loads of charts, plus the hintbooks for the P.C. game and its follow up ‘Terror from the Deep’, I was able to work out the percentage chance of how often a UFO would be detected and what the aliens on board it were likely to be.

In the original as you get further into the game you learn from the aliens and artifacts you find along the way. I included N.P.C.’s to act as the research scientists at first and every mission that the players went on saw them getting better and receiving more items to research, thus leading to better weapons and craft for the players to use. I needed a way to get some of the players into the game and came up with the idea of a ‘Boot Camp’ where misfits were sent to train along side specialist troops to fight the aliens. This simple idea was very effective and soon all the players were acting well in character and getting involved in the game.

As the computer version of the game is very visual, I needed something to represent the players characters, their craft and vehicles and the various aliens that are in the game. At first I used miniatures from a variety of different manufacturers, including differently painted ‘Genestealers’ form Games Workshop to act as the different aliens and Heartbreakers ‘Warzone’ miniatures to act as the X-Com troops. This worked well and was used for a few months until a new player who is a sculptor joined the group. He sculpted all of the various aliens from the game, and cast them up for us to use. Not every one is this lucky to fall onto a player with such skills but you never know, ask around. We played using the miniatures for the combat scenes and missions and role-played out all of the non-combat scenes as normal. I made buildings and maps and a friend of mine made a lot of terrain for us to use in the game.

And so after months of work we had a system that was fun and very playable. Like all games the tendency to play wears off after a while and all the hard work seems wasted. But my X-Com RPG is finished and I am even considering contacting a publisher and Microprose and getting the right to produce it. So if you do decide to try and write your own system out, I wish you luck. Here’s a few pointers and tips that may come in useful when and if you do.

Have fun.

Marc Farrimond.