Singularity

The beginning

Over the past couple months, I've been thinking a bit about self-publishing a book. I have always struggled with writing and wanted a project that would help improve it, but it also needed to be fun. This seemed like it might be a little ambitious, but even if I didn't finish writing it, I should at least become a slightly better writer. One of the problems, however, was not being entirely sure what type of book it would be. I was originally was inspired with the idea to write a book by Robert Nystrom, whose book I am currently reading, titled Crafting Interpreters. I love that it is published open source under a combination of a Creative Commons and MIT Licenses. I don't necessarily want to use the same licenses that Nystrom used but I at least want to capture the spirit of what he is doing with it. The other thing that I appreciate is he keeps his source material on GitHub. As a software developer, this frames the "development life cycle" of the book in a way in which I am comfortable with. As I mentioned above, I don't see myself as a strong writer and spent most of my academic and professional career in developing code, not writing. Being able to iterate using GitHub made this seem a lot less daunting than trying to write a book from front to back.

That said, I still didn't have a topic. In terms of non-fiction, anything I could write about has already been written to death. I've recently started working a lot with Machine Learning, but I'm too new to the field to contribute anything worthwhile. Plus, I wanted it to be fun to write, and even though I find the topic interesting I could easily burn out on it between that and my day job.
Okay, what about fiction? A novel was out. I didn't want that to be my first writing project. Short Stories? I don't really read them, so that was out too. As I was thinking about it one day, I happened to look over at the core rule book for Cyberpunk, and Ding! Ding! Ding! That's it! A tabletop RPG (TTRPG)! I've played Dungeons and Dragons on and off since I was a teenager and lately started branching out into other systems. This felt like the perfect project for me, and because I'd be designing a system in addition to writing some fiction, this presented even more like a software project. Perfect.

Next up, what was it going to be about? I'd grown bored of fantasy settings for the most part, and the market was already pretty saturated. I loved cyberpunk settings, but Cyberpunk Red was fantastic and already scratched that itch. That left space. I was sure there were already space-based TTRPGs out there, but I hadn't looked for any and was blissfully ignorant of what was already out there, so I could approach this with completely fresh eyes.

So, once I knew what I was going to write about, I needed to decide on the criteria for a minimum viable product (MVP). I wanted:

• to outline the setting.

• for it to be structured in a way I could add more content easily.

• a basic combat and skill system.

• a complementary system for spaceships.

• 5 distinct roles that characters could play.

• a single shot adventure.

• it to be no more than fifty pages.

• a name that would be remembered.

Let's go into this in a little more detail. I want to outline a campaign setting, and at its core I'll probably design it around what I like and what I think my friends will like. As of right now, I don't really believe this will take off, so at the very least I should consider my play group my core audience. I also don't want to go in-depth with it to start. I plan to get the bare minimum published and leave plenty of opportunity to iterate and expand later.

That leads into the next point; I want it to be structured in a way where I can easily distinguish between core rules and supplements later on. I have a vague idea how to package them together in what I'm loosely calling modules at the moment, but I will be thinking hard about this as I go on.

A basic combat and skill system is the meat and potatoes of any TTRPG; we need a way to do things. This might change by the time I publish a first draft, but I'm entertaining the idea of using a d100 system (using two 10-sided die.) My gut is telling me that this will make it easy to play around with balancing the mechanics, where it is essentially raw percentages. As part of this system, I really want to focus on politics and relationships. One of my favourite aspects of sci-fi as a genre is its ability to extract facets of society or the human condition and explore it through the lens of the world the author crafted.

I intend to develop a complementary system for spacecrafts. When I think of space sci-fi TTRPGs, I think of one thing: spaceships battling it out in space. This is the whole reason I settled on space as the platform. It also feels like it will be the hardest thing to capture in a tabletop game.

I am fashioning the system and gameplay as a single shot adventure. I would like a lot of my world building captured in this to start out.

For character building, I chose five distinct roles, because that is how many pre-made characters I want for the included adventure.

I want to keep this all around fifty pages of material to start simply because this is already a ton of work. If I structure this correctly, I should be able to expand it into a core rule book relatively easily. Or at least I feel that is the case. I'll probably get a dose of reality later on, but that's future Jake's problem, not mine.

Lastly, I need a name. Right now, I've given this project a code name: Singularity. It broadly captures what I want the feel of this game to be. Singularities have a few different meanings depending on the context, with the most obvious being a gravity singularity. In terms of technological singularity, I think it also loosely captures a cyberpunk feel to the game, which I want it to have but not be the dominant theme. While writing this post, I did a bit of searching, and to absolutely no one's surprise, a TTRPG game system already exists under that name. So, Singularity will remain a code name for the project and I will hopefully have settled on a permanent name before my next post.

As a bonus challenge, I want to see if I can come up with a progression system that doesn't focus around improving a character via leveling up. If this proves impossible, that's fine, but constraint breeds creativity, and I might get something good out of it.
Even for an MVP, that still seems like a lot. Especially considering I don't have much writing experience. As part of this project, I'm going to do my best to document my thoughts along the way.

If you like the idea of this and want to follow along with me as I make progress on it, follow me on Twitter / Reddit for updates. I made add more socials in later, but those I plan on being the most active on for now.If you want to check out the progress of System Theory I have a draft of the site deployed here. As of now it only shows the latest version but I hope to add a way to check different revisions eventually.

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash