Back in the early 1990s, I had a couple of roommates, and one of them went back to California for a six week visit with his old friends and family. My other roommate and I decided to create our own role playing game and see what we could come up with while the other was out of town. We came up with some basic rules, basic stats, some spells many skills, and all of the other parts that go into making a role playing game. We thought we had done quite well, but we never had a chance to playtest it until the missing roommate came back into town.

We we broke out the notepads, pencils and dice we found quite a few flaws with the system. The list is really too long to go into here, but I’ll share the most hilarious one with you.

Some setup: There are hit locations in the system, and we decided that each location would have its own hit points to reflect the fact that an arm could be disabled before a person goes down for the count. We also decided that we didn’t want people to track overall HP along with locational HP. It just seemed too cumbersome. All good thoughts, but the end-result was, well, flawed. Any experienced gamer out there will see the problems right away, but we were too close to the project to notice.

The end result was a system in which a character could have their arms and legs cut off without suffering any form of death. Only if the torso or head were destroyed could someone die. Yeah. Not quite right. We didn’t give up, though. We went back to the drawing board and revamped the system to keep the hit locations, but make HP work more logically. In the end, we came up with a decent system that we actually played for about a year.

I’ve recently revisited the system on my own and totally rewritten it with a new method of approaching the dice rolls. I’ve put lots of time and math into the game to make sure it’s fair and balanced, and I think it’s a good one. I hope to get my current group into the game in the near future to see what they think of it.