Announcing the publication of The Chimera RPG (Huzzah!)

By now, you may have heard the happy news that The Chimera RPG is complete, released, and available on this very website. That the game is done hasn't quite hit me yet; it's been a long undertaking, with many twists, setbacks, innovations, revisions, and discoveries.

Depending on how you look at it, Chimera took 12, 6, or 1 year to complete:

The game's first incarnation, Jabberwocky, was started in 1994, and it presented a not-too-useful morass of rules for fantasy roleplaying. In 2000, when Jabberwocky was scrapped in favour of Chimera, the rules' scope shifted to generic and streamlined a few aspects at the expense of muddling others. In May of 2005, Chimera suffered (?) a sea change and consequently was rewritten to accommodate the more familiar conventions of Wizards of the Coast's System Reference Document.

Thanks to my penchant for procrastination, coupled with my not-always-helpful INTJ tendencies, compared to other life accomplishments, Chimera shares the distinction of taking the most time to finish:

• Chimera RPG: 12 years
• Compulsory education: 12 years
• Eagle scout: 7 years
• Graduate degree: 5 years
• Longest time employed at same job: 5 years
• Undergraduate degree: 3 years

I point this out, not to somehow equate years spent with quality, but instead to demonstrate how badly I underestimated the labours of game design when I started this project over a decade ago. Put another way, it takes less time to earn a Masters Degree than to write a new roleplaying game.

Like many gamers in the early 90s, I found myself disappointed—almost indignant—over how much the AD&D product line had declined. I put away my 2nd Edition books and returned to my RPG roots—basic D&D. Armed only with a copy of the Rules Cyclopedia, I created a new campaign world, established kingdoms, added peoples and monsters, wrote histories, and drew maps. The nicest part of all? Everything I needed was in one easy-to-use rulebook.

Still, after a few sessions, our group began to embrace certain house rules and mechanical tweaks, and because this was basic D&D, it was easy to add such elements without unbalancing the game or making things unnecessarily complicated. Before long, the Trid Campaign, as it came to be known, morphed from an "official" D&D campaign to one only based on the published rules. I was churning out new classes, new magic items, new spells, new monsters, new ways of handling combat, new skills, new rules, new everything—and I'm not talking about being merely prolific. I'm talking about keeping things balanced and consistent throughout, all thanks to the flexibility offered by the basic D&D guidelines.

When I wrote to other gamers about it, everyone seemed to agree that the rules were sound. What's more, the modifications addressed some of the general issues held amongst those who had grown concerned with what was happening to D&D. Plus—the biggest factor—these rules were fun to play, made sense, and were easy to adopt. Publishing sounded like a good idea.

However, that would have been illegal. At the time (mid-90's), TSR had developed a reputation for vigourous protection of its copyright, and even releasing the material for free would have invited the unwelcome attentions of TSR's League of Cease And Desist.

So began Jabberwocky, which grew innocently enough from our Trid Campaign rules, but written with the idea of getting published. Necessarily, we had to change D&D's familiar conventions to stay legal: armour class became Defensive Strength, "to-hit" became Offensive Strength, hit points became wound points, etc. Seemingly innocuous, these changes led to bigger, more drastic alterations: using 3d8 to roll eight (not six) ability scores, skills and abilities based on a number of dice rolled instead of a single modifier, etc. The more we steered away from D&D, however, the more unwieldy, difficult to learn, and ultimately unplayable the game grew.

The shift to Chimera's generic model in 2000 seemed like a good opportunity to get the ruleset back under control, with the logic that a generic scope would require us to be more general and thus avoid getting bogged down in the level of detail that had doomed Jabberwocky. Our goal was to create rules that applied consistently across settings and genres, yet provided passable outcomes without too much overhead. Somewhere in the process, the Trid Campaign was left by the wayside, and there was a general understanding that Chimera was to be a totally new and innovative animal.

Good ideas, but poorly executed. By this time, the Open Gaming License and the SRD were out and gaining popularity. But instead of considering how these tools might be useful, I subjectively avoided them for fear of what I thought they represented—apparatus of the WotC machine. And, having blamed WotC for what had become of D&D, I certainly wasn't about to embrace the legal provisions of their licensing, free or not.

So Chimera was written for generic use, and over the next five years, was revised, tweaked, re-written, at times variously over- and under-developed, scrapped, resurrected, held in limbo, broken, repaired, shifted, slid, skimmed, and abridged. On and on and on and on. Playtesting had become a chore, and there were times when, knowing that a given mechanic was flawed, we'd actually try to rationalise its inclusion rather than revise it (yet again).

Looking back, I recognise that part of the problem was my attitude toward the competition, namely D&D, for it drove me to do the opposite of what I expected from Renton. Still (inexplicably) bitter about TSR, WotC, and Hasbro; D&D 3.0 and 3.5; unnecessarily complicated rules (what does flatfooted AC really do for the game?); offensive product marketing; disappointing D&D movies; poorly written DRAGON articles (don't get me started on gender-neutral pronouns); subpar rulebooks with horrible layout, almost zero legibility, and flashy, anachronistic artwork; low-quality OGL material with a d20 logo; spotty product support; and a host of other perceived shortcomings, my (subconscious) response was to stay as far away as possible from anything remotely related to what D&D had become.

The other part of the problem was my perfectionist bent—which doesn't mean that the final product is perfect, just that it satisfies my criteria for what's fit to release with my name on it. Naturally, hammering out every dent and straightening every kink makes for a long process, made longer by the fact that this isn't math or science—it's entertainment and therefore devoid of any objective yardstick by which to gauge quality.

Yet, after five years of inconclusive game design, Chimera had not developed to my satisfaction. It got to the point where I would work on my Trid Campaign to take a break from Chimera. There, at least, I was having fun—the rules were simple, the mechanics were familiar, I could roll up a character in 10 minutes, I could add and tweak and modify to suit my campaign and creativity. Things got bad when I realised that I couldn't wait to finish Chimera so I could devote more time to my Trid Campaign.

In May 2005, when my editor, William Littlefield, asked if I wouldn't rather just play [another generic RPG], I was at the point where the only reason I wanted to finish the game was because I had started it. And Bill's challenge pissed me off—another RPG, indeed! But his question was well-stated and perfectly timed: Chimera had become a game that I didn't want to play. Just a little disappointing for what was then 11 years in the making—if I was angry, it was because I had lost sight of my original goal, not because Chimera didn't "work." Time for a long, hard think about where the game was headed.

I was toying (sulking?) with some Trid stuff when I picked up a copy of Troll Lord Games' Castles & Crusades, to which some of my basic D&D friends were giving high praise. Here was a rules-lite system, built with flexibility in mind, designed to be easy-to-learn and highly playable.

And, to my shock, C&C was based on the SRD and OGL. Even Bill wisely noted the fact, stating something along the lines of, "anyone could revise the SRD to create their own system."

Given Chimera's doldrums and my satisfaction with the Trid material, the SRD presented itself as the answer—the way to publish an RPG system that incorporated what I knew worked well and made sense and was playable. The trick was adapting the SRD to generic use, keeping the system rules-lite, and incorporating the Trid concepts, as they had already been tested and proven.

In late May, 2005, Chimera was re-written to include things like hit points, saving throws, levels, armour class, and weapon damage dice. A new character creation system was developed. SRD spells became Chimera powers. Monster templates were adapted and incorporated, using Chimera traits. House rules from the Trid Campaign found their way into the Chimera canon, and they fit in surprisingly well.

The end result—12 months later—is a generic RPG with all the ease and flexibility of the games I used to play. Is the final product worth 12 years? Who knows—what is the value of an RPG you love to play? Was the SRD/OGL route the best way to go? We'll see—at the very least, they let us incorporate game conventions familiar to just about every gamer in the hobby.

There are probably several morals I could draw from the whole development experience. Some would be about the irony of using the same SRD and OGL that I decried in earlier posts, when d20 was just being released. Others would be about the folly of understimating what it takes to write an RPG—definitely, I have an appreciable respect for other designers, whose workload is broad indeed. Still other morals would be about finishing what you start, prioritising one's work in life, and balancing professional and personal pursuits.

All these lessons, I trust, will become clear in time. For now, though, I'm just very happy that my 12-, 6-, or 1-year project is done.