Unbound Legends is a tabletop role-playing game designed to increase the interaction between the game master, or narrator, and the players. It is designed to build off the framework of those games that have gone before it with a goal of scalability and flexibility in the core design. While it is designed with an open genre in mind, the basic rules will assume a generic medieval fantasy setting scaling up towards space fantasy akin to Star Wars rather than the cool structured view of worlds such as Star Trek or The Expanse. That is not to say that games of that genre could not be played with this ruleset, but rather it is geared towards the fantastic rather than the technical.

The game is designed in two parts. The first is the main game, the larger more complex rules designed for players of more traditional tabletop RPGs such as D&D or Shadowrun. Second is a lighter, more board game-like experience, aimed towards those who are less familiar with traditional tabletop games, players without someone to run a game, or want a self-contained game to play with their friends in one sitting. 

This case study is designed to show the game's design process and the game's evolution as the design concepts required adaptation.

Unbound Legends started before I even had the idea to do an Independent game. Throughout my time as a Game Master for various games, but most often D&D, I found myself homebrewing more and more rules to help keep the flow of the game going and to reflect my own design choices. Those design choices helped to shape the game for a feel that I felt reflected me more, but that is secondary to the mechanics that I implemented to help the game run more smoothly.

One of the larger influences outside of rules to help the game run more smoothly was the history of tabletop gaming. D&D, as the first true tabletop role-playing game got its start roughly 50 years ago, but it is not the origin of tabletop gaming. D&D was a set of rules adapted from the game Chainmail, developed in part by one of D&D's founders Gary Gygax, a tabletop game based on medieval combat where armies fought against each other, which in turn was based on traditional tabletop gaming that has been in existence since the mid 1700's. The basic rules for D&D in its earliest form were designed around large-scale combat. When adapting the rules for a new type of tabletop RPG, I looked back at how these rules evolved and thought about what worked best for large-scale and what didn’t.

One thing that many games today are doing is incorporating more and more role-playing elements into the game. While this helps to create better games it does come at a downside. These games were created and based on war games, and they have evolved from that point as role-playing went from a bonus that many players added to their character into something that players expect to be part of their character. Many of my design choices reflect making sure that we look at the war gaming roots while expanding the role-playing aspects that help to flesh out characters. Roleplaying aspects of a character will not come at the cost of combat, and vice versa.

My primary goal with Unbound Legends was to speed up the combat rounds and to increase engagement for martial characters. As I ran different games I noticed that one of the biggest detriments to engagement was the length of combat, specifically player turns at combat. Many times players would leave the room or stop paying attention when it was not their turn because they knew they had time to get something else done, or should the immediate combat not involve them, many players would begin to have side conversations. With the popularity of web shows running games, this can be seen in a variety of instances as well.

Tabletop games have been run for years now, 50 years as the subset of RPGs, and it has seen its fair share of changes, but generally, outside of the initial creation nearly 50 years ago, basic combat has not changed much. For the most part, every game made has one standard melee-centric character that just rolls the dice to hit and then rolls for weapon damage with little variation, and that is the core of basic combat. Since magic, or something analogous to magic, is more interesting, most games seek to enhance that aspect of the game and ignore the basics of combat. I want to make sure that if basic combat is all you can do, then you will still feel like you can do something worth doing.

I also plan on taking this version of the game and distilling it down to its most core elements, removing the need for a game master to run it, and creating a short 2-3 hour version of the game that could be played by 3-5 players. This would include a basic ruleset that players would purchase, along with a link to the official rules for any minor changes, and one play module included. This would be roughly $30 and include a basic map and token for all included characters. Then for roughly $5 each, players could buy a module that would be its own encapsulated story. The module would be designed to use the basic characters included in the basic rules and might also include 1-2 new characters to use in the module as well as maps and other needed resources. These modules would mostly be one-shot stories so that players do not feel like they have to purchase all previous modules to enjoy the game. 

Most of my design choices came about to try and address failings in existing tabletop games, most commonly fifth-edition D&D as that was the game that I most often returned to when choosing a game system. While there are games that have better mechanics, other games that incorporate theme in both the setting and the mechanics, and many much simpler games, I found that D&D 5e gave the most player engagement with the most overall versatility. It is simple enough for most players with complex mechanics that can engage advanced players. So using D&D 5e’s basic ruleset, I used that as a starting point and moved on from there. While I did fully plan on using D&D as a base so to speak, I also planned on letting the game develop from there into something unique that would have a similar feel but should overall work better.

To implement faster combat, the main idea that I came up with was action points. The idea behind Action Points (or AP) is kind of a combination of stamina and reflexes. Rather than a turn order or Initiative, where players and the game master take turns controlling the pieces on the board, Action Points has the player with the highest total go first, spend the appropriate action points to do an action, then whoever has the highest action point after that goes next. Players can also take reactions and spend their action points should a specific reaction trigger occur. While in concept this might seem like it is more complex than back and forth turn taking, players can no longer take their turn and “check out” mentally, they implement their turns in pieces throughout the round, and at any time they will be expected to take their next action as part of their turn, or react to something that is happening near or to them. Players are also no longer expected to come up with all the actions their players will take on their turn so making a quick choice is much simpler than trying to optimize their single turn in a round. 

This leads to another design change of Active Defenses. Most current tabletop games have a derived stat for defense or armor that is passive in that once it is derived, it is more or less static. While there is nothing wrong with this, it can sometimes leave the player feeling helpless when an enemy has an overwhelming advantage in offense and they are targeted. Active defenses are where the players choose to avoid an attack, as a reaction, spending their action points, or they can choose to let the attack through their defenses and rely on their passive defenses to deal with it. This synergizes with the action point system while giving the players more control of the fate of their characters.

Another large design change was the division of combat roles and non-combat roles. Most modern games are designed with a lot of non-combat elements in mind, treating non-combat elements as important as combat elements. While in concept and design, they should have the same importance, depending on the situation they will have different weight. For example, a player chooses a class designed to excel in social events while the rest of the party has a high focus on combat. While this does create a balance in roles, it often means that someone is bored while playing the game as intended. The social character is underwhelming in combat and feels like they cannot contribute to combat. In contrast, the combat characters are bored with the social interactions and oftentimes will lash out to turn a social event into a combat one.

To counter this I split classes into combat classes and job classes, or just class and job. The combat class is completely designed around making sure that the character is effective in combat and can contribute to combat in a meaningful way. The job class is built to generate non-combat skills for the player and to give out-of-combat abilities for the players to use. This doesn’t mean that either cannot be effective in enhancing the other role, but rather the primary purpose of that class or job is to enhance that area, and any synergies that come about from overlapping the two is a bonus, and for the most part, intended.

Other minor changes include dividing player hit points into Health and Vitality where health is your physical condition and hard to heal while vitality is your ability to just barely avoid injury and replenishes faster. This allows unique spells and abilities to “hit harder” by allowing part or all of the effect to target health and feel more impactful. Races, or Origins as they are now called, are now divided into Ancestry, Lineages, and Heritages with ancestry and lineages being physical attributes and heritages being cultural attributes so players can create hybrid characters raised in different cultures. Skills are divided into groups and players can specialize in a specific area of that skill group. Players can spend skill ranks to increase skill groups and skill boosts to increase sub-skills. Just as combat and non-combat classes have been divided, spells meant for combat and non-combat are divided up as well. Many ideas and names have been changed for clarity and simplicity. While I plan on taking lessons from old war table gaming, I don’t need to use old archaic terms left over from that era of gaming.

Playtesting for Unbound Legends has mostly been small-scale to test concepts without having a chance to test it in a large-scale group setting. Development is now at the point where the game will require feedback on the created rules so far to iterate and adjust for future versions of the game. In essence, the game is still in early alpha stages, but should still be in a mostly playable state. Further testing should help reveal those ideas that work best and those that seem good but don't work well.

What has been the most interesting about the design of this game has been the unique ways that new mechanics have come about from adapting to changes needed to make the game work. Since I have wanted to develop and use the Action Point system to create player engagement, this led in part to the creation of active defenses and player reactions, which led to using active defenses and reactions to define combat roles better. The archetypal tanks would use reactions like block to defend and new reactions for classes like the Champion and Berserker were created to build on this. Then other reactions for classes like the Assassin and the Hunter were designed to allow them to execute their roles in the party better, all from the design of Action Points.

I also hope that the way that I have divided up attributes can help shape the future of tabletop gaming. D&D established many common ideas that as still being used to this day, but concepts such as Wisdom and Charisma are not well defined or utilized, and the attribute Dexterity is more useful than it should be.

My goal with this game is to make two versions of a tabletop game that caters to advanced players, new and inexperienced players, and those looking to play an engaging tabletop game without the need to have someone to run it or prepare heavily in advance. I tried to introduce ideas that elevate the game but do not take away from those simple elements that give most players a visceral reaction.