Find out what the TTRPG group has done during the autumn semester!

Now that we have the core rules of our system figured out, we’ve been getting into the details. We’ve spent many hours this semester discussing progression, abilities, weapons, and more. Since the beginning of this project, we’ve been planning on having modular equipment. The idea is that you will be able to customize weapons, sets of armor, vehicles, etc. In trying to imagine how that would work, we decided to try out an existing system that uses this concept. This is when Jørgen, one of our members, introduced us to a TTRPG called Doronai Nui.

We quickly learned that Doronai Nui was incredibly complicated. It took us hours to understand the rules well enough to decide how to build our characters and then actually create them. While playing our first session, we discovered the many flaws our builds had, and Jørgen graciously allowed us to fix our characters before the next session. While we had fun trying out this system and got a few good ideas out of it, we mostly learned what not to do. One of our goals with the game is that it should be approachable. In playing Doronai Nui, we were able to pinpoint many of the things that made it so overwhelming, and we’ve kept those lessons in mind as we continue to design aspects of our system.

One of the things we struggle with the most is making decisions. We’re able to come up with a lot of good ideas, but when we try to narrow them down, we end up talking about the pros and cons of each one without coming to a conclusion. This mostly comes down to the fact that none of the options are wrong, they’re just different. At the end of the day, we really just need to test them in an actual session to see what works or feels the best. Ideally, these playtests would include people who are new to the game, so that we can get feedback from people who haven’t been thinking about this system for the past year.

In order to facilitate this kind of playtesting, we wrote a quick start guide. It contains a brief(ish) description of the setting, core rules, character creation, equipment, and exploration rules. The hope is that new players will be able make a character and play a one-shot using only the quick start guide.

Of course we couldn’t write our rules with a normal typesetting software. Instead, we’re using typst. We’ve spent some time learning typst’s syntax and (in Sondre’s case) writing functions to parse json files and create a glossary. Thank you to Sondre and DevOps for setting up a VSCode server, allowing us to work on our typst documents together in real time.

We’re having a lot of fun building new mechanics and improving old ones, and look forward to making the system even better using feedback from playtests in the (hopefully near) future.