The Story of Simple System

Hi, interesting question. I don't want to write a novel here, so let me see if I can hit the highlights and answer any more specific questions you have later on.

My first roleplaying game was d20 Star Wars, and then Star Wars Saga edition. I had a ton of fun with it and read everything ever published for both systems. Then my d20 world was rocked when I discovered the Cortex System, and I mean I was really shocked to learn that you could roleplay without a 20-sided die. From there I got really interested in all kinds of different systems, and started dabbling with creating my own.

Simple System is not the first rpg system I've made. Not by a long shot. The reason that none of the others have seen the light of day (except for my poor poor gaming group who I forced to try them out) is that they didn't accomplish what I wanted, which was to keep things simple. I think the reason they all fell short was that they were all just re-mixes and re-hashes of things that where already out there - dice based systems with long lists of skills, feats, and tables for everything under the sun.

I actually became a little disillusioned with roleplaying games - the last time I went out to buy a new one (returning to the same universe I'd started with) I cracked open the source book only to find pages and pages of skill trees and I just couldn't read any further. Even if I were to get into the system, I knew it would be a battle to get my friends to play, just as it had been so many times before when wanting to try out a new system. It's not that they aren't good roleplayers and that they don't enjoy roleplaying, but there just wasn't a great enough return for the time spent learning a new system and creating a character for them to enjoy it. I wanted a system that got you right into the action without all of the homework and preparation. My wife (who is not a roleplayer) remarked that I spent more time preparing for my games than actually playing them; an outsider's perspective that opened my eyes to the disappointing reality. But roleplaying was just too deep in me to give up on it entirely, I had had too much fun in the past and still wanted share that with my friends. So I decided to start from scratch - to make something new that had everything I loved about roleplaying and nothing I didn't.

The very beginnings of Simple System were with a sort of "rock, paper, scissors" idea, where red beat yellow, yellow beat red, red beat green. I eventually added a fourth color (since three levels of fidelity were not enough). At this stage I was still working with dice, but colored dice with no numbers, just colored faces. Each die had a certain probability, you would roll and if any of the dice showed red you failed, something like that. The move to cards came to me (as most things do) at about 2am and I had to get out of bed and jot all my ideas down. From there it was really like a snowball effect as all of the possibilities opened up by the cards started coming to me.

The next big idea was to move all of the skills, flaws, items, and opponents to cards too. There are so many advantages to this, not least of which you don't have to have a stack of sourcebooks nearby or study them to see all the options you have as a player. After I'd played around with the idea for awhile, it struck me that there are so many advantages to using cards someone else MUST have thought of it too, and I went looking on Google for card based rpgs. Of course I found others out there, which was cool. I didn't bother looking into them since I was already quite happy the direction my setting cards where going, and I was happy that I'd come up with the idea independently of any other existing products.

I guess the next 'chapter' of this story would be Kickstarter and the incredible response from the community, but I can get into that another time...