Design Philosophy

This page summarizes the design philosophy that was used to create the Etherole TTRPG system.

Design Goals

These are the goals around which we designed our RPG system.

These goals are interconnected; for example, fast resolution factors into the system being fun.

Intended Genres

This system is meant for games that fall into the following genres:

• Fantasy
• Science Fiction
• Science Fantasy
• Anime
• Comic Book Superheroes

Power-Fantasy

This system is meant for games in which power-fantasy is a core component.

Elegance

Elegance is the combination of simplicity & beauty.

A simple TTRPG system must be as uncomplicated as possible, while delivering on all of its other design goals.

A beautiful TTRPG system must have a logic that connects all of it’s sub-systems in a way that just clicks.

Minimalist Design

Minimalism means trimming away everything that is not completely necessary.

Minimalism guides the design of both the website that this TTRPG system is hosted on, and the system itself.

Fun

Fun is the ultimate goal for any game.

A fun TTRPG system must have systems in place to determine the outcomes of conflicts, violent or non-violent.  Without systems you have pure improvisational acting, which can be fun, but is not a game.

A fun TTRPG system must, in many ways, ‘get out of the way’ to allow for your table to cooperatively create and tell stories.  A system can get in the way of story telling by being too rules heavy.  That said, a system can also get in the way of story telling by not having rules to adjudicate certain kinds of conflicts, for example: a chase scene.  Without a system to determine the winner of a chase, the GM just has to choose the winner or flip a coin.

A fun TTRPG system must be made out of fun sub-systems.  Combat needs to be fun.  Social interactions need to be fun.  Character creation needs to be fun.  Investigations need to be fun.  Etc.

A fun TTRPG system also has to deliver on these other design goals: Fast Resolution, Flavorful Characters, and Balance.

Transparent Mechanics

Mechanics should be simple enough that anyone can make a good guess about how a conflict will be resolved if they know the stats of the parties involved in the conflict.  Sometimes the dice will do something wild, but on average, you should be able to tell how a test will go before you’ve made it.

Balance

Balance is of primary concern to the writers of this system.  We continually tweak the system & make regular balance updates.

Balance is easier to achieve when you have very transparent mechanics.

Balanced Character Creation

A balanced TTRPG has character creation that is fair.  Fair character creation requires:

• Minimizing the likelihood that someone can make a mechanically bad character.
  • No trap character traits, skills, or powers, can exist.
  • Simple, transparent, mechanics that someone with a very low level of system mastery can comprehend quickly.
• Maximizing the likelihood that someone can make a mechanically good character.
• Points spent at character creation need to provide equal value, regardless of what they’re spent on.

Balance does not mean that all characters should, mechanically, be identical to each other.  This requires asymmetric balance; characters must have different capabilities, but should have roughly equal influence on the overall narrative of your fiction.

Balanced For Narrative Power

Narrative power is what this system is balanced for.

The ability to influence the narrative of your game is what players are buying when they spend points at character creation, or spend experience points to advance their character traits. Winning in combat is one way to influence the narrative of your game, but it is not the only way.  While our combat system is robust, elegant, and allows for tactical decision making, it is not the sole focus of this game.  Most of the powers in this game are not combat related.  Many powers have to do with social actions, interacting with the spirit world, practicing medicine, investigating crimes or similar events, etc.

Balanced Encounters

The system needs to be easy for the GM to create fun, fair, encounters.  This requires:

• Mechanical transparency
  • The GM must know the capabilities of the player characters, and their opponents.
    • This gets difficult in games where a single character has dozens of spells or powers that all do different things.
  • Predictability
    • The GM must be able to make an educated guess about the outcome of any single test or roll that is made.
      • The simplicity of our dice mechanics make this easy: on average, about half of your dicepool will be hits.
        • You will have individual rolls above and below the average, which adds some unpredictability, but also adds some fun.

Flavorful Characters

Creating flavorful characters requires a number of things:

• A connection to a person, group of people, or place.
• Mechanical distinctiveness
  • Characters should not be copy-pasted in terms of their character sheet & mechanics.
    • They should play & feel different because they are different.
• Giving players cosmetic freedom.

Many systems require the player to make large mechanical sacrifices in order to create a fun, flavorful, character.  With good game design, this should be a false dichotomy.

Our power-limiter mechanic provides an incentive for players to add fun & flavor to their character by rewarding them with a reduced buy-cost for their powers.

Fast Resolution

Time spent resolving mechanics should be minimized.  This allows you to maximize your time spent on the fun parts of the game, namely: the story.

The amount of time between when a GM calls for a test, and the results of that test are known, should be minimized.  We have used stop-watches during our playtesting to optimize our mechanics for this metric.  This testing resulted in 3 major changes to minimize time wasted on resolution.

Ease of Access

Printed books are expensive, cumbersome, and difficult to search for quick rule references.  PDFs sometimes feel even more cumbersome; searching for specific rules requires an exact character match.

This system is hosted on etherole.com in a wiki format, which allows you to use Google search on it.

Google Search

This website & system has been designed & optimized for easy search-ability.

The search bar on the right-hand side of any page allows you to search our site with Google.

Design Not-Goals

The goals listed here are things that we are explicitly not trying to accomplish in our system.  Many of these goals are antithetical to our design goals.

This isn’t intended as an indictment of games which have these things.  Some of these things can work in a game that is designed for it.

Realism

Simplicity is often sacrificed at the altar of realism, despite the impossibility of approaching realism within a table top role playing game’s systems.

This system is not attempting to simulate real life.  If it is trying to simulate anything, it would be popular fiction.

Mechanical Novelty

This system isn’t explicitly designed to have unique or novel mechanics that you, the player, has never seen before.  In cases where our system may appear to have mechanical novelty (power limiters, social system), it came about organically, not by contrivance.

Unique Dice

We’re not creating new dice for our system.

By default, our system uses D10s.  We have plugins for D6 & D20.

Unique Dice Mechanics

Our system does not use dice tricks.  Nothing modifies the target number (7+), or causes you to reroll dice, or causes you to subtract 1s, or similar.  Dice are only ever added or subtracted.

Survival Games

This system is not designed for gritty survival games.  It doesn’t force you to track ammunition, food, or water.

Selling Books

Selling books is a primary goal for most TTRPG systems.  This incentive can lead to things like bloat, power-creep, and all of the other problems that come with a high word count.

Our system does not have this incentive.  Instead, we’re funded by patrons.

Word Count

Authors are sometimes incentivized to write as many words as possible.  This is how you get RPG core books that are 300+ pages long.

Bigger books can lead to a variety of problems: Overly complex systems, difficulty in finding rules references, lack of balanced character options, etc.  Less really is more when it comes to TTRPG systems.

Note: Setting information is genuinely valuable, and word count spent on settings is almost never a bad thing.  It is word count spent on system mechanics that should be minimized.