While contemplating the mechanics for this game, I began to think of all of the different styles of mechanics that I've seen.  They run from completely free-form to being so rigid as to require time on a super-computer to determine the outcomes.  Everything from dice to cards to a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors has been used to determine random outcomes.  I think that is a real key, taking that level of comfort and certainty away from the player gives the game some element of risk.  It is the risk that makes the game part of an RPG interesting.

One of the things I really like about 4th Ed. D&D is the inclusion of the power cards.  I have been using power cards of various types for most of my role-playing career.  I am notoriously bad about having exactly the right power and not using it, so I made lists that were easy to read, and had all of the related material summated on the cards.  This made it easy for me to help the GM out, as I could explain the rules and even hand the text of the rule when I was about to do something really creative.

So I think this game will use randomized decks of cards which are related to the skills and powers that the characters have as well as cards simulating their flaws and weaknesses.  At the beginning of a story the cards will be shuffled and placed into the appropriate stacks.  I'm thinking that each character gets a certain number of cards in their  hand  based on their stats.  At any point when a player wants to take control of the story, he plays a card from the appropriate deck I'm thinking Skills, Combat, Magic right now and puts it on the top of the main play stack, and refreshes his hand.   He then takes over the story with the new element.

The neat thing about this type of give and take means that the GM will always have a ready supply of cards to introduce new monsters, mooks and traitors, just like in a classic Conan story, anyone could be a potential threat and everyone was looking to betray him.

We will play with this in more detail as we further develop the system and the stats, but it will help us to tailor the system to the mechanics.  I would never design a game like this for publication, but I don't have to publish hundreds of cards for this game because it is only a thought exercise!

In April of 2001, Ron Edwards of the Forge wrote an article in which he described what he called the Fantasy Heartbreaker game. These games, he said, had some nugget of greatness buried in a collection of intense combat rules and following the tropes set in stone by D&D.

During my youth I had spent many hours editing and extensively houseruling the AD&D Second Edition rules published by TSR.  I really enjoyed the game, but it frequently left me with the feeling that I could do more.  I went back to the original D&D and First Edition AD&D books (also published by TSR) to try and build on the Second Edition Rules.  I tried incorporating aspects from other games I played, but always there was this nagging suspicion that I could do more, that the Rules As Written were incomplete.  The rules were strangely absent on how I should actually utilize Non Combat Proficiencies, and while I enjoy a good fight now and then, all of my favorite fantasy stories rarely had more than a handful of actual fights.

I eventually built an entirely new game that looked an awful lot like D&D, but wasn't really.  In the early nineties I took that a step further and wrote out a complete game that looked a lot less like D&D, but was, at its core, very much D&D--Races, weapons lists, armor lists, experience point growth.  I thought about publishing it, but by that point other games had come out that did essentially the same things.  These are the games that Ron Edwards refers to in his article.  Gamers like myself who thought, "This game is awesome, but it should be more complete."  Then Wizards of the Coast put together 3rd edition D&D, which would eventually be overhauled into the gargantuan game called three point five.  This essentially buried any hope I had of publishing my little game.  But now I am going to build a new game in this series of articles, which will basically serve as a bridge between now and when we release new Terror Thirteen material and other games, and build on the experience I had of writing my own fantasy heartbreaker.

With D&D now in its 8th or so incarnation, despite being called 4th edition, it is interesting to see how many of those innovations have eventually melded into the actual game.