Building an entirely new system.

[Shinizak]

Yo. Anyone have any tips on building new RPG systems?

I'm trying to build a new system (not reskin an existing system, but build one new) but I keep on running into numerical road blocks. I don't know how to balance statistics in game play. Any tips? Articles? Web pages? Anything?

Any help is appreciated.

[aimlessPolymath]

Nobody's done, AFAIK, because it's not something most people have to deal with; most are working within an established mathematical framework like d20, d%, roll-and-keep, etc. with expectations on numbers semi-built in.

I'm not fully sure what you mean by "entirely new system", but you should have some design goals starting out- what do you want out of this system that other systems can't provide? What sort of frameworks have you considered for resolution methods, and what do you want out of them?

With that in mind, there are some general starting questions to start to build your statistics:
-What kind of chance of success do you want for an average character to have for a task? For a specialized character? For a character who is (say) two adventures more experienced? A character who is in an advantageous circumstance? How do these modifiers relate to each other- can a specialist be beaten by someone who's just lucky? Can a high-level generalist do a low-level specialist's job?

-What sort of circumstances do you want to simulate with the greatest accuracy? The less important aspects can be abstracted away to a single roll, while more involved decisions will be more likely to take multiple rolls and/or decision points.

-How much complexity do you want to allow in character design?



I'm not clear on what exactly you want to do here/why you want to build your own system, but these are some questions to get started with.