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A large part of role-playing is creativity. People have a desire to build, to create, and gaming with friends offers various outlets of this drive. Game masters produce entire worlds for players to exist in. Players in turn, establish roles and enrich this newly established existence. The ultimate innovation, however, comes in designing a set of rules for this universe to subsist in. While the majority of people use one of the many systems available, others have a passion to create one of their own.

The task is a daunting one, with little reward for countless hours of work. First ask yourself "why am I doing this" and if the answer is anything other than "fun" you're going about it the wrong way. If you need a system for a scenario, and you believe nothing available is good enough to tell the story, you just aren't looking hard enough. The new book, d20 Modern, is usable in any "modern" setting, with supplements to allow for a futuristic feel. Fantasy will always have a near infinite number of systems, from the famous Dungeons and Dragons, to the not so well known Earthdawn. Finding a system which fits your needs is far from impossible. So with this in mind, we can take our first step into creating our own role-playing game.

While I will be providing examples for most of the steps, for various copyright issues this tutorial will not introduce any original ideas. Instead, I will simply be taking bits and pieces of already existing systems to create a Frankenstein-like design of my own. As with any project, the first step is always having an outline, or design scheme to follow. These are the pieces which make up a system.

Universe
You can also call this the setting. This is probably the simplest and most important aspect of your design because it determines the rules you must set for your system. If the universe deals with sci-fi space exploration, then you have no need to create horse riding rules. If the universe is a modern day mafia setup, then magic rules don't exist. Also, keep in mind the larger the universe, the more rules you will have to setup, and the more mechanisms there are, the more balancing will need to be done. Initially, keep the universe small, and add as needed. It is far easier to add more components later than it is to take then out when you have already incorporated parts of them.

Character Development
Now the world is born, but how does it live and grow? Your characters will not remain static, so a system is needed to allow them to expand their knowledge and expertise. This is also the reward the players get from playing in your system. Money and equipment go only so far before a player desires a more personal gain. It can easily be the most difficult portion of creating a system simply because it the hardest to balance. How should actions be rewarded and to what extent? Experience for combat, quick thinking, and leadership all need to allow a player to grow at a steady pace while ensuring that they are unable to exploit the mechanics of the game.

Character Creation
The first step of playing any game is creating a character. How will characters be made in your system? A large portion of this section is deciding which attributes there are and how these attributes affect game play. Is the game a hack and slash with no need for physical aesthetics such as hair and eye color, or is the game more player interaction oriented, requiring a background description and a list of contacts? Another hurdle lies in deciding what type of die scheme to use and how your character's attributes, abilities, skills, and weapons relate to this setup.

Character Add-Ons
Now it's time for all of the special things that make your system different from all the others. The universe we have already set up determines the type of skills a person in the world might need, any abilities a character has from birth or training, and how combat will progress. This section is especially important because it can either give a player a sense of independence, or the feeling that characters are all made from cookie cutters. Although the more effort is put into this, the more material there is for gamers to play with, a very necessary feature, it can be one of the more enjoyable to create, simply because it allows for so much freedom on the designer's part. Anything can be done in your world, so long as you write the rules for it.

World Interaction
With the character's layout finished, players have to have rules on how they can interact with the world. The most common type of interactions will be social and combat. The skills are in place, but now you have to decide which abilities affect which attributes and how they can be prevented, if at all. For every action there must be a reaction and duration, be it in physical damage or emotional attachment. For every action there must also be a cost, with the most traditional being a loss of manna for magic use, or a loss of stamina for a special melee attack. If players see only certain attributes are required to perform a majority of the skills and abilities available, concentration will gravitate towards those and the rest of your carefully crafted system will become ignored.

Equipment and Property
A world is empty without possessions. Players need items to help them in their journey and you need to make statistics for them. Many popular role-playing series dedicate entire books to the available equipment, but the important thing to remember is necessity. If players don't need it, don't waste your time creating numbers for it. Also, it is easy to use the stats of one item and put them in another. Have numbers for the damage of a thrown brick but need one for a full beer bottle? Now they do the same thing, how convenient.

This outlines the basic steps for creating your own gaming system in seven not-so-easy steps. Again I reiterate the time involved comes no where near to the reward given, but for you masochists out there, my next article will plunge into the first phase, your universe.