And I Never Did … Okay, I’m a Liar

When I started playing TTRPGs, I seriously told myself I should never design a game. Which I know is a weird thing to tell yourself. But after a few decades on this planet, you start to get a sense for the kind of person you are. I’m the kind of sicko who dives whole-heartedly into a hobby. It’s why I can’t actually have that many hobbies, because I crave depth over breadth.

And for a while, I was true to my word.

For a while.

But to explain what broke my willpower, we need to go into the wayback machine. We need to talk about my history with TTRPGs.

13 Years Old … D&D 3.5 Edition

Y’all hear about this Dungeons and Dragons thing? It’s wild. Here is how it works. You and 7-8 middle schoolers gather around a parent’s dining table and manage to play 3 sessions before you all realize that none of you can drive, you can’t schedule sessions because you’re trying to balance the lives of a bunch of kids AND their parents, and you never play again for twenty-some years. Classic D&D experience!

But I never stopped pining. I was somehow chosen to be the Dungeon Master in those few games (a dark omen if there ever was one) and even after, I would reread all the books and imagine the adventures I could one day go on. I had a CD-ROM that let me build characters for the game. I thought of it fondly for decades.

Eventually, I realized I was in my thirties and if I ever wanted to get back to playing, I’d have to make it happen. It wasn’t going to fall in my lap.

I started trying to find games as a player via the lfg subreddit. What a nightmare! I did literal interviews, filled out forms, etc., trying to get into these games and FAILED. I eventually did stumble on a discord where I could find games much more easily and started playing one shots of 5E at a local store. That was unfortunately also a bit of a train wreck.

I joined an online campaign this rando started in her “worked for years on” world, except she only communicated heavily with one player, so the plot was about that one player and everyone else kind of existed on the side. We tried to address this with her, but then she had a mental breakdown and cancelled the campaign. Classic.

The one shots were good, but they eventually made me realize that I sure don’t give a crud about D&D. It seemed like people only wanted one specific type of play experience, and wanted to repeat it over and over and over. Which, hey, good for them. They found what they like and did it. Mission accomplished–for them.

The Twist … I’m A Giant Nerd

I did like TTRPGs still, but I figured I should try something more up my alley. And my alley was hours and hours of JRPGs in my parents’ basement growing up. So I started a group on that small discord and ran the first non-D&D game on the server. I was very nervous. I had never GM’d for not-13-year-olds, but the Fabula Ultima Press Start (free here) is such a great tutorial and it made the experience smooth.

That ‘one-shot’ went really well. I could barely sleep at how excited I was after. The players had such a good time they asked if they could turn it into a campaign and I said yes! But I still wanted to play the game as a player as well, so I found another group on another discord. I played one whole session before the GM said he was out of ideas and asked if anyone else wanted to run a campaign.

You can see where this is leading, right?

So now I’m running two Fabula Ultima campaigns. Dear reader, that’s a lot of Fabula Ultima. I genuinely believe it is a great game, and the tools and support from the community is fantastic. Especially Fultimator, which helps you design enemies within the rules very seamlessly. But after a year of two campaigns, I started noticing where the seams frayed–at least, for me.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, just some of the highlights:

1. Roll to Hit – Fabula Ultima does a neat thing where your roll to hit is used to calculate damage as well, so if you do succeed in attacking, bingo-bango (very common phrase, don’t @ me) damage calculated. Except, I cannot express the sorrow and disheartened sighs of my players when they did miss. Shit sucks. Fabula Ultima does have the option to spend Fabula points to reroll dice, which led to another issue: my players wasted their Fabula points on rerolling missed combat rolls (which led to even more groans if the second roll also missed) instead of using the much cooler mechanic of altering the world and adding narration. Also, in a standard JRPG you almost never miss unless there is a special reason (cactuars!).
   
2. Combat Turns – You know what’s cool? Your players versus a bunch of baddies. You know what’s not cool? When your players have killed almost all the baddies, one or two remain, and they have to go through the motions of curb stomping these stragglers. Combat stops being engaging, there’s no risk, it’s just … going.
   
   Fabula has a nice system where, if it’s your party of 4 against 6 foes, everyone takes a turn before a new round starts for all combatants. So large numbers of enemies is very concerning! But once you whittle down the numbers of regular foes, it’s 4 player turns and 1 little enemy turn. Combat’s just rote at that point.
   
3. Length – Rules as written, these combats go on for a while. I had to start reducing my enemy’s health, as I didn’t want combat to be such a big focus. It wasn’t helped that there was no incentive to pay attention on other people’s turn. I was constantly corralling players to get them to update their health, take their turns, or pay attention to what was going on. It became a feedback loop of combat going on for too long, players losing interest, making combat go on for longer, and more interest lost.
   
4. Did You Die? Have Fun on the Sidelines! – In Fabula Ultima, when you get knocked to 0 health, you get to make a choice of Surrender or Sacrifice, meaning you can go out with a big bang or your character can live but there is a cost. It’s good, but glosses over what the player does when their character is knocked out. The battle continues without them. They just … sit there. Fabula doesn’t have easy mechanics to revive people mid-combat. I eventually added homebrewed items that acted as phoenix downs, which to me is wild that this wasn’t included in the game to begin with. That revival item is a classic jrpg item, so why not here? It also made it where I had to be so careful when crafting enemies, because I couldn’t have them be TOO strong, which reduced the excitement of combat as well.
   
5. Fabula Points – Remember above, about spending these points on rerolls? I cannot emphasize this enough, the players should have been able to add cool details and take the plot in interesting directions, but they didn’t want to beef it in combat so they never did. Then they eventually forgot they could do this. The world became mine only and I was just dragging the players through it.

I want to make this clear, because it sounds like I’m trashing the system. I’m not. I still think it’s great. I own every product they have released thus far. It’s just that when you have GM’d 2 campaigns for a year, you notice the pain points. I wouldn’t have played Fabula for that long if I thought it was a bad system. I just have things I would have done differently.

Yeah, that last sentence? “I just have things I would have done differently.” That’s how we ended up with me designing my own game.

My Take

I’m not going to go wildly into depth here, I’ll save that for another time, but I want to talk about how all that GMing of Fabula led here, to these choices in Blightfall.

1. Roll to Hit – This is an easy solve and done frequently in other games. You hit. The end. The enemy hits you. Also the end. Combat suddenly means a lot more being dangerous, and is faster as a bonus.
   
   But what if you roll and you’re sad about your weak damage result? Make a deal with the GM, who represents the dark infection in your soul. Huzzah!
   
2. Combat Turns – The pressure never ceases in Blightfall. A player from your side takes a turn, one of the enemies takes a turn, rinse and repeat. Doesn’t matter the number of enemies. I don’t care if this isn’t ‘realistic’. I want the pressure to be constant and I want the players to push themselves to end the fight faster, even if it means relying more on their dark power and furthering its grip on them. That’s the whole point of the game.
   
3. Length – You notice how those two points above mention how it makes the combat go faster? Exactly. In addition, the enemies don’t have exorbitant health bars and there’s a mechanic for you getting more powerful when you hit zero health, speeding things up more.
   
4. Did You Die? Have Fun on the Sidelines! – No sidelines in this game! When you hit zero health in Blightfall, you get closer to your ‘final death’, but you aren’t kicked out of combat. As stated above, you get stronger! And if you do ‘die die’, you still get to play in that battle, and then turn on your own party members! WE LOVE TREASON HERE.
   
5. Fabula Points – You’ll be shocked to learn that I don’t have Fabula points in a game that’s not called Fabula Ultima. We’re all shocked. Hold your loved ones close tonight.
   
   That’s not what I’m actually trying to say. What I mean is, the characters in Blightfall have powers that are so strong that they can wildly change the narrative. In the two campaigns I’ve playtested, the games have gone off in wild directions I could never have predicted, and it was better for it. I love not being in charge of everything, and I could tell that the world mattered more to the players when they got to help build it in session zero and could shape it during gameplay.
   
   One of my players stole all the bad guy’s power, became an evil god himself, and set a hurricane on his hometown. DAMN. Dealing with that was so wild and fun.

I’ll talk more about Blightfall, both its strengths and weakness, who it’s for and who it is not for another day. But this is how I broke my own promise to myself. I got way too familiar with a TTRPG, found some flaws, and wanted to give fixing them a go. And now I have multiple games I want to make.

I played myself.