Born Traveler : Framing
Context
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In 2021, I started creating my own paper JDR (Role Playing Game), as one of my Game Design teachers advised me to do so in order to develop useful Game Design skills.
I was lucky enough to have a friend who was an MJ (Master of the Game) and who was able to introduce me to the world of RPGs.
I then set about creating a universe from A to Z, from its narrative to its rules and so on.
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I loved playing RPGs straight away, but I didn't expect to get so caught up in creating them.
In fact, I thought I'd just be doing another exercise to see what would happen, but I got so caught up in it that this simple exercise revealed a genuine passion within me that drove me to create my own JDR, which would become 'Born Traveler'!
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In 2023, I finished my Bachelor 3 in Video Game Creation, and with the experience I'd gained, I decided to start my JDR from scratch.
There was a lot to improve/change, and I wanted to start from a clean slate.
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Planning and Organization
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I absolutely wanted to give my work more structure than when I first created the world, and to do this, I took a step-by-step approach.
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I created a task board dedicated solely to this RPG project:
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Task managers - RPG
Next, I established a hierarchy/organization to sort my future notes:
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Folder hierarchy - RPG
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File hierarchy - RPG
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Framing the first ideas
Next, I started by writing down several ideas in various areas such as narrative, gameplay, art, characters, magic, and so on.
These weren't just new ideas; I also took care to note down the elements I liked from my old world.
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I also researched everything I could think of, whether artistic, narrative or gameplay.
Once there were enough ideas to my liking, I grouped them according to their commonalities.
For example:
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Idea 1: Beings from outer space crash-land on Earth and turn it into a resource…
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Idea 2: Integrate a dragon people.
These two ideas can be linked by making dragons a threat from outer space.
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After noting and sorting out what I had in mind, I wrote down my intentions for the gameplay, narrative, and art direction as a whole.
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The main thing to remember that links all the above areas is: "Duality".
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Framing the project
To guide my work, I started by creating the most important elements of my RPG.
Those that represent my RPG the most and that will be the heart of the experience for the players, as well as the essential tools for the GM.
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So I listed all these elements, and here are a few of them:
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Create a viable character stats system.
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Create a viable combat system.
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Create an immersive game environment for players.
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Sort characters so that they are easily accessible to the GM.
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Iterate on several ways to create player-readable dungeon maps.
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List key narrative elements.
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Create a macro game system highlighting key narrative elements.
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Etc.
Once I'd listed all these elements, I decided that even if I created them all, I'd still have to test my work to see if it was viable. So I selected some of these elements as the pretext for an initial stress-testing session to determine their viability, and then started work.
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Here are the 4 main elements to be tested and their more detailed descriptions:
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The global character stats system:
As the peoples of my universe are hybrids between humans and animals, I put a lot of thought into how to transcribe the peoples' abilities into the gameplay, and this led me to this result:-
8 stats common to all characters, allowing them to stand out according to the value written in them. To maintain the notion of duality, 4 stats represent the BODY aspect: Strength, Speed, Agility, Sense AND 4 stats represent the Spirit aspect: 6th Sense, Charisma, Intelligence, Mental.
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8 skill trees linked to the 8 common statistics, allowing each character/species to distinguish itself through its choice of skills, in addition to the value entered in the statistic in question. Depending on the character's species, certain skills become accessible or inaccessible.
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Combat system:
Unfortunately, I'm not going to talk about the combat system here, as I don't want to give it away.
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Immersing the player in the universe:
​For immersion, I focused on the representation of the universe and interactions with NPCs. I therefore wanted to test 3 different ways of representing the game environment:-
3D image tales-pire
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2D photoshop image
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The third is to give the paper map to the player.
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For immersion, I also used Illustrator to create a magical artifact that doesn't exist in the real world.
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To ensure interesting NPC interactions, I created a small panel of NPCs of varying degrees of importance, depending on their level of interactivity with the player.
The important characters have been fairly well-developed in terms of character, objectives and background. The more secondary characters, though less developed, had to at least meet this criteria sheet:
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Once all the elements had been completed, I needed one last thing: a test questionnaire to get feedback from the players.
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Next, I had to find players, and I wanted a varied audience in terms of experience. The people who have tested my JDR so far range from :
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Never played JDR
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Has already played JDR
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Has already created a JDR and is MJ
At present, there are still a few volunteer players to whom I need to test this.
As for what's next, I've already started sorting and organizing the various answers to the questionnaire and creating tasks based on them.
Thank you for reading.
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Below, you can consult my working method which completes what you have just read:
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