After spending a lot of time with my homebrew system, I have a newfound respect for the “with a twist” trend in current TTRPG. Like you can really blow the doors off a setting or subsystem if the frame is sturdy and/or familiar. If things are too alien everything is hard to learn and it’s hard to get to the good stuff.

For me I read a lot more indy games than I get to the table, and I like to read the novel and innovative, but I’m actually not sure that something wholly new is what I want at the table most of the time.

Not that I dislike the game I made, it’s just that maybe smaller iterative design has the potential to be stronger where it counts?

I wrote a bunch about the specifics here. With a special guest appearance by Mark Rosewater via his blog.

Curious about folks experiences with innovation, complexity, scope, and being “too original.”