I feel that I have really benefited from the creative environment here at RPG Laboratory. The ability to attach documents directly to our posts makes the whole process of submitting creative works for review effortless. The ease of this process and the feedback that I have received here has kept me on task in the development of my latest game project, and I believe this project may evolve into my finest work. Looking back on this, and because it could serve to encourage others, I thought it might be fun to look at elements that contributed to the evolution of Supers-Brawl.
I started with Duel Blade. Duel Blade was a quick one-shot combat system inspired by a review of the Playstation game "Bushido Blade." It was small, only 3 pages. I just threw it together on a lark... I started thinking about a method of combat that would work the way that the reviewer had described the PS game. I had never even played or seen the game, I just thought it sounded neat. I ended up submitting Duel Blade to Keeton because once all was said and done, I thought that I had come up with something pretty cool.
The feeling that Duel Blade was a good mechanic didn't leave me. It kept bouncing around in the back of my head. Then I got some feedback from some of the 1km1kt forum crowd confirming that there were others who also thought Duel Blade had some good things going on. This inspired me to push the system forward to try to evolve Duel Blade into a proper RPG.
My next work was Prometheus Blade. It was based on Duel Blade, but with character creation and a proper background. New ideas were introduced. Key among these are the rules for Guns and Bullet-proof. Intended to give Prometheus Blade a special mechanic that would make it work better in a modern setting, these rules were important because they created special exceptions to the basic mechanic. This would become very important later on...
The word Blade was dropped and the word Brawl was put in its place as the next stage in the game's development saw an emphasis shift from weapons combat to a combat system not dependent upon equipment. I typed up "Basic Brawl" as a 1 page RPG. I became frustrated with Prometheus Blade as I found myself beating my head against the wall trying to evolve that game to add a magic system. Finally, I scrapped Prometheus Blade and went back to Duel Blade to get a cleaner basic system. This was "Basic Brawl."
The simple foundation of Basic Brawl lends itself well to expansion and I knocked off a few more 1 page expansions quickly... including, "Super Basic Brawl." Super Basic Brawl took advantage of the special exceptions introduced in Prometheus Blade to create Super Powers. In addition, Super Basic Brawl added the POWER die, an activation mechanic that could help regulate power levels. This information was ported directly to the game's next (and final?) incarnation...
Supers-Brawl is the super powers combat RPG that I am currently developing. It abandoned some of the key features of the former game versions, key among them being body parts. The reason for this major change had to do with complexity and speed. The predetermined targeting of body parts was the main aspect of Duel Blade that was inspired by the original Bushido Blade PS game review. But at the tabletop, it slowed things down and confused some players... it cleaned up the combat sequence considerably to allow an attacker to declare the area that would be damaged in an attack only after the attack successfully hit it's target. But in this event the body part references no longer added anything to the system or even made sense.
So I replaced the body part references with terms specifically designed to describe that value's specific function. This made the combat sequence easier and faster... time spent referring to character sheets to find numbers was more than cut in half. I took advantage of the new simplicity by adding more powers and rules for movement that would allow me to play with miniatures.
And here we are... the game is looking pretty good. The differences between Duel Blade and Supers-Brawl are pronounced, but a comparison of the two systems will reveal their similarities. Look at the documents that have evolved from Duel Blade to Supers-Brawl. My hope is they may reveal something about the creative process.
Regards,
Jeff Moore