Why do I design games?
In the past people have asked me, why I bother to write games? There a already hundreds of roleplaying games out there and since I don’t intent to sell them and make some money, why bother? The reason is pretty simple: it’s fun!
There is actually a bit more to it. I am sure every GM worth his salt has already thought about writing his own game. And sometimes you just want to challenge yourself, see if you can really pull it off and design and write a game that works. If someone else enjoys the work you’ve done, great, but usually it’s sufficient to know that you actually pulled it off.
That was what motivated me to write Warrior, Rogue & Mage in the first place. When I was under the shower I had an idea about using the basic fantasy RPG classes as the attributes of a character directly. And so I started writing down my ideas. The initial idea was to write a game similar to one of the Microlite games. But soon I realized that I wouldn’t fit all my ideas to just a single sheet of paper. And when I have a burst of creativity I try to put it to good use. So I challenged myself to release the game the next day!
Its a bit different with my other project, Gears. With Gears I want to create a free game system that I can release together with the campaign settings I’ve written. I want that people can download Ad Astra and start playing because everything is already included.
But the most important part is that it’s fun to throw some ideas around, mix and match elements from games you love and to create something new. It might be far from perfect or perhaps not work at all, but you made something yourself!
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