Introduction Appendix 4: Because apparently I cannot have enough projects to work on, here's another. This one is a tabletop roleplaying game called SpaceCraft. It's a "universal" or setting agnostic rpg system with a bias towards science fiction. For example, you can run a fantasy game fine with it, you just have to ignore the rules about space travel, and robots, and computers, and nanotech, etc.
"So why not put those things into a separate book, like GURPS?" Mostly because I don't want to. I know that'll hurt the marketability, but I don't have high hopes for this game making any money anyway. I'll probably have to end up releasing it for free, which honestly would be my preference anyway, if I wasn't so damn poor, so I at least gotta give it a shot. Unless things change for me dramatically before I finish it. Who knows? I'll probably try an alternate way of setting it up just to see how it looks and decide for sure then.
So why make this system at all? Basically it's a story much like the one behind my novel (see Intro Appendix 3): I've done plenty of house-rules over the years, but never my own system. So one day, as a mere intellectual exercise to pass some time, I started thinking about what a game would look like if I designed it from scratch. And just like with my novel, it was like breaking a dam of ideas that just wouldn't quit. I've since fallen in love with what I have and deeply desire to at least see it finished, even if no one else ends up liking it.
So what's so good about it? Well, as the years go by and my experience with both playing and running games grew, I started increasingly making house rules for the games I played. It was a sort of exponential progression, only little bits here and there at first, filling in gaps that the rules didn't cover, but later progressed to improving some of the more egregious problems in the games. I started to notice that I was good at it, and even more that I liked it. It was like my brain is somehow optimized for turning abstract aspects of life into playable game mechanics.
But this isn't supposed to be about me. My point is that game mechanics have progressed over the years, and while there is a great deal of subjectivity in the community concerning them, there are some things that are just objectively better (or worse) than others. As I started getting more comfortable with modifying the games I played, I also became less tolerant of what I considered "bad rules". So basically this game is my attempt to make the best game possible, from a game mechanics point of view. Yes, that does make the game somewhat "rules heavy", but I've kept that complaint in mind from the beginning, and have taken several steps to help alleviate any such problems.
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