The Beginning of a New System

Fate or Chaos (not sure if I like this name yet, but I’ve got the domain so whatever) is a game project that was born of me spending way too much time homebrewing stuff for DnD games.

After nearly a year of writing a bunch of rules based on things I liked from other systems and ideas about how to make attacks and weapons more interesting than others systems, I had the skeleton of a new TTRPG.

This game project gradually became more of a web project—I needed to make a digital character sheet if I was going to want to run this with friends. Many hours of coding, learning web frameworks and writing up the ruleset later, this website started coming into being.

I will start writing up little development updates on this site too, the first one will breakdown the tech I’m using to build this site and the challenges I face in the future.

For now most of the hurdles to get over to have a playable game are mostly design related (not to mention the investment to code it all up).

I’ve recently turned down a full time position at my work place so I can stay part time and pursue making over-ambitious things like this. I currently spend at least 2 days a week working solidly on this project now.

Maybe this is my latest ultimate white whale, but at this stage the investment has been larger than nearly any other project I’ve had in the past. I love working on it and want to share it with the world as soon as it’s ready.

Sadly, I haven’t played a game of DnD or anything similar for over a year now. Since this project transitioned from nebulous ideas to slightly more tangible ones, I’ve waited until the Alpha tests for this game begin to run a TTRPG again—and for that I need to finish the character sheet at a minimum.

I have no idea how much of the ruleset will change during testing, but I sincerely believe this system is going to be great and all the digital tools I want to build and host on this website for it will be a huge selling point. I want to do better than any other system in terms of what this offers for free.

Modularity is also a big part of what I want to bake deep into this system. The rules, tools and settings should be interchangeable in a way that doesn’t feel like things have to be shuffled around or hacked too much to work for very different worlds, campaigns and types of players.

If this game were only ever played by me and my and my small group of friends, then that’s all that really matters. The project just has to be fun.

Great effort for effort’s sake.

But it does make for a decent web dev portfolio piece, so there is that I guess.