So what do I want for a game that has less than 10 minis? Apparently a very stripped down RPG.

It seems when you give a mix of stats and skills in a stat line you get the worst of wargame and RPG, in my opinion. Seems that having broad attributes like ones from BESM and defined actions that reference the broad attributes allows you everything you need from a stat line plus the added ability to do more RPing on a table top.

Five attributes, size that determines wounds and movement, some feats, some equipment and the sky is the limit.

More thought later.

The throw in feats/talents that give you your cool powers or neat equipment. You get on talent for each point in your ability. Yes, that means a fighter could be throwing out magic missiles, but it’s up to the player to determine if they are casting it or it’s a magic item.

Seems to make for a simple, yet flexible system.

The idea is that one day a week you skip your regular job duties and work on something you love. People bring a different mindset and work harder on things they want to work on. It’s true that much of this 20% work may amount to nothing, but you just need a few Adsense or Post-it notes to carry the rest.

But it’s a great idea even beyond business. Imagine a few hours a week where you worked on things you cared about at home. It might be a small business you might want to work on or the next great novel. Either way it’s something you do because you want to that leaves you more jazzed than when you started.

So maybe you won’t make the next Post-it notepad, but at least it will leave you excited when you do all the other things you have to.

So Spy20 is basically going to be Back to Basics merged with Spycraft Lite with some ideas taken from SWSE and D&D 4e. Twenty pages for classes plus 32 pages for the base rules plus a few pages for premise/setting.

Next to revise the equipment system.

What I really would like is a game that had the beat stuff from Spycraft but in a simplier package. Then it occured to me you could use the framework of Star Wars Saga Edition with the details from Spycraft and D20 Modern to build a modern and streamlined system. Why D20 Modern when I’m a hater of that “game”? Simple it has good stuff worth stealing like Talent trees in a bad framework.

So basically I take the bones of Star Wars Saga and drop in the feats, gear and chase system from Spycraft and the Talent trees from D20 Modern. Tweak so it’s more xXx than Tom Clancy and serve with Doritos and Mountain Dew.

Now the heavy lifting. Build classes using SWSE and D20M Talents. Then tweak Spycraft feats. Then tweak Spycraft equipment rules.

Next post, character classes. Wish me luck.

Hopefully I’ll keep tweaking it or else it will stay this way.

Now in order to make a complete game in as few pages you have to give up on a few things. First is setting. Your game has to imply a setting rather than explain it. That’s OK since the big dog D&D already does that. A lot of details also have to be vague since you don’t have the space to explain all the uses for the electronics skill. That means a freer system when playing, but again this is nothing new to people used to (A)D&D. The real task is to boil a game down to it’s essentials and finding simple solutions where more detailed systems could eat up pages.

My interst in lite games is really from a curiousity design stand point and from a practical playing stand point. Can you make a game so small that is still worth playing and why should a game take 200 pages to explain how to play? I’d guess that most RPG players use only a small core of the rules of their favourite game most of which could be summed up in less than 10 pages.

Now to see if I’m right.

The high points are the birth of my son, my awesome wife, my cheeky doggy, my daunting mortgage, my first new car and leaving the continental America for the first time in 20 years.

The low points … pretty much the rest of the decade. I kid, but sometimes it feels that way.

Things I want to do in the new year in no particular order:

A) excel at a new job
B) eat less red meat
C) skip empty calories
D) spend more time with family and friends
E) redesign this blog
F)launch my other sites and ideas
G) play more games

Iain.

So why do I think that hundreds of Android phones won’t kill a few iPhones?  (Re-read my question before preceding.)  Android is an operating system that will run on many different combinations of hardware.  There is no guarantee that any two android devices have the same specs and therefore it will hard to develop (killer) apps for Android.  I had a Palm back in the day and when you went to download software there would be a list of devices the software would work on and devices it wouldn’t.  That was by one company who controlled both software and hardware.  It means that a killer app for one Palm often did not run on the other Palms.  And unlike PCs, apps for smart phones don’t have an adaptive OS or device drivers to help them out.

The iPhone is often mistaken as a smartphone.  In actuality, like a Mac it is an experience.  Yes, that sounds a lot like I’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid, but it really is the only way to describe the Apple philosophy.  Apple treats the iPhone as both a personal computer and a console.  The former is illustrated in that some models of iPhone have capabilities that others don’t.  This is mostly because of actual hardware differences in the different iPhones.  But by treating the iPhone as a video game console developers know they have a fixed target to develop for.  They always know the screen resolution and the input method.  There are no questions about what devices the program might end up on.  All iPhones have a minimum base level with a few more options on different models.

Of course this prediction is beased on Apple sticking to the formula it has.  If it creates a iPhone 4G with a higher resolution display then we get into the situation with Palm and start down the same path as Android.  Change too much of the underlying hardware and you fracture your own base.  Luckily there is only so much you can do with an item that is constrained by its own size.

So what about the rumoured iTablet?  It’s not an iPhone in the same way that the iPhone is not a Mac.  The tablet platform may have many things in common with the iPhone (an OS and input methods for instance), but the tablet will have its own App store and ecosystem.  See the way to get away from having multiple devices running the same OS is to differentiate the devices into different categories.  I love my iPhone and I use it for email, browsing, tweeting and even making phone calls, but a tablet would be much better for reading and writing documents.  DocumentsToGo on a 10″ tablet is a viable alternative to a net/notebook.  I can do more real computer stuff on it, but it’s not an iPhone.  Developers will be familiar with programming for the new device, but it will have it’s own base level that all developers will be able to develop for.  Another similar platform, not another device running the same OS.

Iain.