When last we left our intrepid game designer, he was blathering on about some dream, completely unrelated to the task of creating a gaming system. After several months of not much progress, a recent visit from a close friend and play-tester yielded an unexpected result.
"Dude, you're making things way too complicated."
Faced with the accuracy of the statement, the game designer leapt to his mental feet and declared, "I have so much work to do!" before collapsing into the fetal position at the prospect of the undertaking now at hand.
Outside the city, in a remote location, our hero worked tirelessly at his task. Though he'd broken the archetypal classes into their base components already, he still had ended up with what was essentially a class-based system, one which dizzied the mind with its complexity as he strove to make a fantasy gaming structure more realistic. Taking up the tools of his craft, he tore this structure apart and rebuilt it into something simpler, cleaner, more fluid. The basic details and abilities of a character could be seen with a single glance. He had done the unthinkable.
The System was reborn. Three stats, from which all else derived. No classes, nor class-fragments, but a comprehensive list of skills to govern the abilities of a character. And yet this simplicity maintained, at its core, a means to fit within the dynamics of 3rd Edition rules, providing the ability to use available Monster Manuals.
The game designer sat back to survey his work, making small adjustments. He found it to be shiny. But there were still questions to be answered, regarding how much of a role the character's level was to play, in contrast with skills and ability scores.
And so he sat, fondly inspecting his new creation, awaiting the chance to see it in action.
