Snake Eyes
After all these years, we’re finally breaking down and developing our own RPG system. For most of our gaming career, there hasn’t been much call — we love plenty of systems and play them a lot. But unfortunately, none of them are open source! When running the campaigns at home in our own living room, that’s no issue… As soon as we write about them here, though, or publish a book that discusses copyrighted material, things can get messy.
It’s become harder and harder to talk in depth about how we run games while not putting at least one toe into legally murky waters— critique and review are places where we are allowed to talk about someone else’s stuff — so the time has come! We need our own system that we can write about without getting our butts sued.
One of our favorite systems is Big Eyes, Small Mouth. When Guardians of Order folded, BESM was picked up by White Wolf. Aron and I tried like hell to purchase the rights from them, but White Wolf wasn’t interested. Can’t really blame them… Why would they take their time dealing with a couple of nobodies? Next to Wizards of the Coast, White Wolf is one of the biggest names in TTRPGs.
But here’s some of the fine print — you can’t copyright rules. I’m not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but that seems to be the basic deal. Game companies own plenty of material; you can’t copy the text of their manuals, their art, named characters who are not part of common culture — you can talk about King Arthur in your own game manuals, but not Drizzt — or any of their copyrighted terms. But the actual rules? Those are a process, and you can’t copyright or trademark a process.
Does that mean we’re just going to rip off BESM? Hell no! But are we going to take a lot of inspiration from our favorite game systems and cobble together our own? Hell yes! Our derivative of BESM was so house ruled up anyways that it was almost already a new system. Some of the work is already done!
The new system is tentatively named Snake Eyes, because we intend to use a 2D6-based ruleset — much like the D6 version of Big Eyes, Small Mouth. (There’s a D20 version, too, but that’s another post.) A roll of two ones is commonly known as “snake eyes.” We can’t be the only gamers out there home-brewing their own system, so we’ll post as much about the process as we can. There are numbers to juggle, play-testing to do, and much more.
I’d be lying if I said it’s not a daunting task, but it’s an exciting one, too.
