Not Doing What I Should

The long powerless hiatus sticks with me in terms of not getting done what I should be getting done. I need to finish my script for this year's radio show, and I need to get back to work on one of the novels I started a few months ago.

But instead, I'm still concentrating all my fire on building up this role-playing campaign world I started noodling with a few years ago. It's really taking shape and I'm getting really excited by the possibilities. But I'm still trying to decide on a rules system.

I've got basically five possibilities right now. I had been looking at FATE Core. I just finished reading through the system rules a couple of days ago, and while I think it looks like a fascinating and flexible system, the concepts are so counter to what any of us are used to playing that I'm scared to pull the trigger and run a playtest.

Then there's Hero System. I actually statted out some NPC's in Hero long ago, but the amount of work it would be to run the entire campaign in Hero just boggles my mind.

That's why I tried to write a stripped-down version of the Hero engine specifically for this game, but got bogged down trying to figure point costs for the radically different rules I was starting to develop. And in the end, it didn't look as if they would turn out to be that much less work.

Then there are the open-source game systems, Open d6 (which is based on a rule system first developed for West End Games James Bond series, and later adapted for Star Wars), and Action System, which is a weird second-generation spin-off of Fuzion, which was an amalgamation of R. Talsorian's system and Hero.

With the exception of FATE, they're all kind of old-school crunchy, which I like, but...

With the exception of Hero, I've never played any of them, so I'm uneasy about trying to build a campaign around them. It seems as if FATE would be easiest, followed by Open d6, probably, but I just don't know for sure. But it seems as if I'm getting close to the point where I need to start putting down some actual numbers instead of just brainstorming ideas.

And meanwhile, I need to break past my reluctance and get some actual work done.