Dev DIARY #1 - WHY HOMEMADE?
Welcome boxers! Thanksgiving here in the USA is almost upon us. Snow is on the radar for later this week, our first of the year. As I hunker down for the winter and begin gearing up for the months long trek towards the Fists & Fiends kickstarter in the spring, I thought you might like to sit by the fire and read a bit about the game as we journey toward the release. This marks the first ‘official’ Dev Diary entry. The goal of these entries in specific, is to share some background, ideas, concepts, and design choices during the development of the game.
For the first submission, I’m sure it would make sense to discuss the origin story of the game, but since it is such an integral part of the game creation, it is included on the about page. Instead, let’s dive into why I decided to make a game, rather than pick up another ready-made RPG off the shelf and use that to achieve my goals, and while we’re at it…why the heck it is taking so long to finish the game?!?!?!
READY MADE vs HOMEMADE:
When the idea came to me to use this as a tool to keep my Kids Team engaged and invested in their training (from home) once the lockdown hit, I was familiar with tabletop role-playing games such as, D&D and Battletech (from high school decades in the past), about 4 or 5 sessions of Pathfinder (circa 2016), a readthrough of a rules-light rpg game called Dungeon World, perusing a copy of Legend of the Five Rings, and watching an episode of Tabletop on Youtube with host Wil Wheaton showcasing DragonAge the RPG with a group of friends. Beyond that, my knowledge of RPGs outside of computer games was minimal, my interest never waned, nor my desire to play, but martial arts, coaching, and hang-gliding took up most of my spare time.
March of 2020 I was in the midst of shutting down my gym, converting our entire curriculum to online, creating video courses, training missions, and staying up to date with everyone on the team, etc, etc, etc. Time was a rare commodity, so searching for a game to use was complicated. Out of everything I looked at, nothing seemed like a good fit to address accurate martial arts combat. Additionally, I had to find an engine that did not require parents to go searching online for polyhedral dice, they had enough on their plates trying to deal with lockdowns, and homeschooling/remote learning. I needed dice that you could find in any run of the mill board game, that left me with D6 systems, of which I had never tried before.
My first look was Dungeon World. I liked the limited rules and player-centric narrative driven approach, but there just wasn’t enough there that I could tweak the combat and go to work. LOTFR was way too complex, and the symbols on the dice just made things confusing for non-gamers. I was even confused trying to figure them out. I looked at the Star Wars RPG, and Shadowrun, and again the dice symbols and having to learn conversions and meanings was adding too much complexity for the kids, and for me trying to get this off the ground. I went back to DragonAge and took a closer look. I really enjoyed the game when I saw it played on YouTube, and the book was amazing. Plus it ran on 3 six-sided dice!!! Perfect, right??? Wrong!
Thematically DragonAge was a poor fit, and the classes and rules were not something I could easily convert for martial arts, but I looked up the Adventure Game Engine that it was built on, and low and behold, there were other games that used this engine, a bunch of them. ModernAGE was one such version, and it seemed fluid enough that I could build a few martial arts classes, my own fighting techniques, and stunts, and get up and running quickly. I ordered a copy and went to work. We were running weekly sessions within days and I continued modifying and adapting things to fit, flushing out the combat to match realistic martial arts attacks, defenses, etc.
In another DEV DIARY I’ll go into more detail on why I ultimately dropped this engine, but it was rock solid and perfect for what I needed for to start building the early versions of Fists & Fiends. I highly recommend AGE system games, they are fun, have several different genres, cool artwork, clear rules, and a super nice group of people running the company (Green Ronin Games).
Coming Up Next…
Why the game is taking so long to finish. Stay hooked.
