Sunday, March 25, 2018

Effective Immediately: BttDRPG is on Hiatius




Well there are times in life where you have to just stop what you are doing are reexamine what RPG Projects you are working on and if they are even viable anymore. 

Purpose of BttDRPG and Why it was  Written


I started writing BttDRPG during the D20 WTF age. The D20 craze had brought back the RPG industry. It also brought a level of complexity that crushed many a future gamer and crushed games. With the OGL one could create their own D20 content and people did. Some Gamers started wanting something without the unnecessary bloat of rules started making their own stuff. The OSR (indies, story games, ect) was born out of that or some say that they have been and always will be playing the more nostalgic versions of the game. At that time I discovered the OSR Blogs, OSRIC, and C&C. I saw the creative closed door policy of C&C on outsiders as well as the system was not what I was looking for. I saw many of the same old systems retold anew but still the same systems. I saw level limits and class restrictions come back as sacred cows and it kept coming back. I saw many a post on many a forums wanting a system with the simplicity of old and the innovation of the new. I saw it was my time to write my own version of the rules for The Fantasy RPG!I just wanted to save the gaming world!

The Long and Horrible Trail


If any of you have ever tried to write and RPG, it's fun and exciting! It also can give you great agitation, heartache and pain. Work on something and it never gets played, or even worse nobody even wants to play it. If you have been gaming as long as I have and have written as many unpublished RPGs as I have before and after the Advent of the PC and printers, you find it's a passion and curse, it's enjoyable and taxing! You also end up with huge piles and files of unfinished shit.

The Universe Strikes 5E


Well the announcement of 5E and it's plan to do what I was going to do kinda made me say damnit! I was going to throw in the towel until I saw what their final product was going to be. Not as Simplified as I and the world want. Still really good though. I kept on going and started a local group of BttDRPG. Plus 5E had a year or two before it came out.


The Local Plan: The Gathering of the Game Master's FAIL.


Well I started a group and things we're going pretty good. A gathering of old friends. I started to look at the history of old expeditionary campaigns of old and how they did it and I got excited!
I decided to branch out to another few GMs and groups to get a real multiple GM campaigns going and many of them were really good players. 


THE Entire Universe is Against Me. 


Then my job for at least 6-8 months went full retard and we started working 13 days on and one off. When the job calmed down, everything that could and would break broke.  My dad needed some surgery. 

I spoke my Oracle (The Wizard of the South) and he said that it was in the cards to make this decision. He let me know that I could continue on but just more failure and more of the same. Real good there. SHit I already knew. BTW the Oracle TWOTS is really good at advice but very few people can contact him. 


So it's over until...

We here at LFR Game Studios have decided to put BttDRPG on a hiatus to begin working on other projects.
Lord Eldrad Wolfsbane of LFR Studios.



So I started writing Classic Fantasy RPG and then changed the name to Back to the Dungeon RPG. I wrote the game that most of the discontented people of the OSR talked about and supposedly wanted. I also read about people complaining about he modern versions having too many  rules. I saw an opening for something that people supposedly wanted. I sent it around to a few friends with a few good reactions so I kept going. 

This was in the age of 4E and the group I was playing with was 4E only, play nothing else so we broke up. 

I finally released BttDRPG to the world with the answer to all gaming for both the old school and the new school, heck I might even just make a few bucks! The game table would once again not be divided by editions. 

THE GREAT VOID

The reaction was incredible! Absolutely nobody reacted! Well maybe a few. Crickets! Reshashes of various older version with almost verbatim copies of the old rules came out with hundreds of thousands of likes and hits. My "Neoclone" in it's B&W primitive zine form just ripened like a tomato in summer. Still I kept writing and tweaking the system. Hell, 4E was bombing. I am in the perfect place.


What if I could get a few of the most skilled GMs in the area to join with me? One of my group members was formally (or supposedly) one of the best GMs in the area so I tried to recruit him and tell him my grand plan! He sadly now is mostly an online gamer and only wanted to use older editions of the rules because he already had all the books. 

I made him copies of my game and explained how it was far Simplified compared to his favorite edition. I noticed that months after the booklets were sitting where they were laid and he had not even looked at the rules or even tried to create anything but an old map for his favorite edition but never even finished that. After quite a few months I just gave up on him and just kept chugging my way towards GM burnout. 

Even though I ran and wrote some of the best Adventures of my gaming life but over cautious party of played make a game not as fun as it could be. It may have been some of my fault as the struggle was real and maybe I wanted it too much. 

A few of the GMs were also some of the best in the area. Sadly one of them who is a fantastic GM would not even look at my rules.  

They did play and that game went pretty well. We had a successful romp back to the dungeon. It just might work.

My gaming group has began to try other rule systems in my absence and are as far away from my plan as possible. Even playing way more painful and complicated systems instead of mine. Switching systems and RPGs every few months. Guess my plan for a multiple GM mega campaign failed.   

In my very rare spare time I edited, wrote and improved Back to the Dungeon RPG. Wrote a few modules. 


We think you are being a DICK Eldrad!



In between all of this I made a few blurbs or advertisements. I have seen a few other people put out their blurbs one after another and everyone celebrates. I put out a few MORE than the invisible rulebook says I am allowed and now I get accused of spamming. A few say a few rude things but at least they have failed ( I like to watch and follow my critics online to see i they can saty in the kitchen) at even barely getting anything done. A few people download the PWYW basic version but sales are slow. 

Even a local FB group who is gaming group decided to have a few choice words about my blurbs. It was all mostly in jest but it was the final straw. 

So what am I even doing wasting my time with my system? I am a gamer who creates, writes, and thinks games but I don't get to game. I am going to start clearing my slate and just make time to play. I ain't running or offering to do shit. 

The secret behind the scenes stuff that I have been and trying to do for the TTRPG community around here is not even noticed. I am just going to study 5E and go along with the flow.      

Feel free to use the BttDRPG rules to make your own modules and settings. 

For for now I am going still screw with with DUNGEONPUNK RPG, some 5E stuff, and some other weird projects but at a very limited capacity.

What I am going to do is start to just simply play and have fun. 





1 comment:

  1. I am just going to play (maybe run) what everyone else in the area seems to be playing/running which is 5E. Not really a bad system at all.

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