Clarification of Purpose

I have been not promoting or posting much on social media over the past few weeks, as I have been experiencing some sort of intense desire to get the game done. It is surely a good thing, as I finally have the rough drafts for 3 of the 6 chapters complete. In the process, I have consolidated and eliminated 5 file folders of ideas and two 3-inch binders of paper cluttering my life.

In this same spirit, I wanted to kind of do a kind of consolidation of my purposes for writing the game. As of late, I have been fatigued by the onslaught of a-dozen-a-day new RPG Kickstarter projects crowding the net. It has soured me to the thought of crowdsourcing and made me review my focus and purpose for continuing this project. As I reviewed my various blog entries, I noticed that I have peppered my points with bits and pieces of my intents, desires, and reasons for continuing to write the HiBRiD™ game rules. As I am currently consolidating the rules themselves, I thought it would be a great time to take a minute to reflect and also consolidate and clarify my own (selfish) purposes for writing the game. This might provide insight for any of you who recently started reading my blog but have no desire to dig for the answers to the unstated and overarching question of “Why create HiBRiD™?”

At First…

I’m not writing the game to take over the market, make money, or even to be the next best thing since sliced bread. I have said this much before.

At the lowest level, I want to directly demonstrate to players the level of simplicity I like and the very core mechanic I prefer to use when I play a roleplaying game. I want to share my preference for the d20, a simplified mechanic to cover all situations, the separation of skills from attributes, and the simplification of supernatural abilities into a single system.

At the next level, I want to show my aesthetics of what I like to reflect in a roleplaying system. For example, I love the metric system and the integration of the trades, the arts, and the natural sciences into the skill system. I love defining a character’s attributes in a way that allows them to be used as easy uniform handles for the game mechanics to reflect BOTH physical and metaphysical abilities.

But Then…

As the years have gone on and I have brought others into the HiBRiD fold, I noticed something else. Players get an intuitive feel for how the game works, even without ever having ever seen a ruleset! Those who come back to the game, whether at my house or at the various conventions again and again intuitively have a feel for how I like to play the game and we share that aesthetic sense. The rules, regardless of the level of crunch, have always come second to the tasks they want their characters to accomplish. This style of gameplay, as I have observed its development over the years, in combination with this sense of urgency I have recently begun feeling has led me to a higher goal of bringing players to intuitively understand the specific style of play I just mentioned.

Finally...

Intuition, however, is difficult to teach. With this in mind, I want to, at the most basic level, codify the situations in which I use a rule and those when I choose not to use a rule. This will enable experienced players coming from mechanics-heavy games to begin the process of weaning themselves from the fears, uncertainties, and doubts of not having a crunchy mechanic for every situation. It will also provide a simple structure for using the Ité Gaming Engine in a balanced way to prevent those coming from more freeform games from feeling inhibited. For beginning players, I want to bring them into the fold into this style of play as soon as they sit down to play.

Ultimately (and ideally), as players continue to play the game, they will begin to develop the intuitive sense of how I play the game and carry that sense to their own games.