My attitude toward game design is very heavily rooted in industrial music — not merely in its themes and tropes, but in the methods of producing it. It is said that all the best artists steal, and industrial takes that maxim as far as it can. Since I started amassing my game collection, I have been mining games for data and ideas and sampling rules and thoughts for my own use, modifying heavily to make it all fit. The theory is that I can build the game I want to out of parts of all the other games out there. Free software development uses the same methodology.
At any rate, I was doing some of my game research and found a lightning-bolt epiphany in a very strange place: GDW’s Twilight 2000. I’d looked at the game long ago, but I slagged off its stodgy wargame approach and often cumbersome system. Looking at it with a fresh eye and informed by all the ideas and goals I’d developed in two years, I found elegant solutions lurking in all that staid text.
For now, suffice it to say that the core game system just got scrapped for a new design. Firefights are going to be intense — and FUN — in Deathwish.
I’ll write much more later about the system, GDW, and my own background in these things.
-Bullet Bill
23 May 11 at 19:38 |
Seems eerily similar to the Alternity system, but on a much smaller scale.