Deciding the System...

First I want to say that I know three posts in one day is a bit much for a blog. I apologize for it to all you readers out there (my stats say I do have some LOL), and hope you understand that I am simply using this space as a way to think, practice my writing a bit, and provide a point of reference to as I go on. In fact I will probably do at least one more post before I am done today if not more.

I finished my last post with the decision that I am going to develop some kind of undead apocalypse game. Now I need to decide what system I want to use. I really think that a system should always help the feel of the game. If you look at games like 7th Sea, Werewolf, etc. You can see how this works. For this reason I really want to avoid the d20 system if possible. I like the d20 systems flexibility and ease of designing games around it, but it is better suited toward heroic style games and trust me folks, this game is not going to be like that.

I want my game to be dark, gritty, and maybe even a little painful. I want to capture a feeling of quiet desperation, of being a flicker of flame in the all consuming darkness. The New World of Darkness can definitely capture this feeling pretty well and it shouldn't be that difficult to make whatever changes I have to make. I considered Savage Worlds a bit, but again I think its a bit to heroic for what I am looking for. I also gave both Gurps and All Flesh Must Be Eaten, but I don't really have enough experience with Gurps, and All Flesh is a bit to focused on zombies.

In the end I really like the idea of using new World of Darkness as my base system and going from there. It's a good system for horror style games and it has plenty of rules for the modern world so I don't need to work to hard on that. Of course I am not going to use any of the particular setting info such as Vampire the Requium or Werewolf, but the system is pretty solid.

Now that I have both what kind of game I want to run and what system I will use to run it decided, the next step is to flesh out the setting a bit more and begin tweaking the system. I am going to take a slight break, then get back to this blog with one or the other (maybe even both)...