Why Do I Keep Doing It?

Anyone that has been reading the blog for a while will know I am a long-time sufferer of Gamer ADD. I've pissed and moaned about it enough that it is impossible to miss. One of the casualties I haven't talked about, though, is any development of a personal set of rules. Over a course of time I have talked about several attempts that have quietly disappeared. Usually, my internal reasoning is the same: Why fret over making it work when I can just use <insert title here>?

Well, the answer hit me today. It is so simple, and like most simple answers it hit me like a bunny-punch to the back of the head. Why do I keep fretting? Because I want to play my rules. I want character creation to work the way I want it to. I want combat to work the way I want it to. And so on.

Of the last four computers I've owned, I built two from the ground up, and pulled two out of the trash and restored them. The reason I prefer to build my own computers is that I decide which corners to cut, not some engineer at Dell or Gateway. Very few people have the means and desire to throw vast sums at a computer to make it precisely what they want, so corners must be cut in order to meet a budget. I want the ultimate authority to decide where the skimping will go on. Period.

I bring all that up because it directly correlates to gaming for me. When you build a computer what you're really doing is assembling components. I don't craft my hard drives out of raw materials, I order one and plug it in. What I do have to do is make some decisions on what I want the computer to do, then match the components to that desire, and match the components to each other.

I want to approach designing a personal set of rules with the same mind-set. I'm going to do it so that the areas of the game that are most important to me get the most coverage. I'm going to design it to do what I want it to do, specifically. I'll use "components" from other games where I can, polish them where needed, and make up the rest whole cloth.

I'm not talking about a new OSR release or anything. At its most basic, it will be more like a house rule document for stitching together various subsystems into a more-or-less cohesive whole.

Of course, this all looks good on paper. Who knows how it will hold up over time. And by "over time" I mean the next 3 or 4 days. Damn ADD.