Cosmic Confluences

Or maybe that should be influences. Game design doesn’t take place in a vaccum. We always build on what we’ve seen and heard, what we know works and what doesn’t. Here I’ll talk here about some of the RPGs that influenced me in my design on Cosmic Cutthroats.

One of the biggest is Champions 4th Edition. Sure, it’s math-heavy, has definite breakpoints, and is susceptible to min-maxing. It also supports a wide variety of power levels and genres, and is amazingly flexible. I wanted something like Champs, but without multiplying by fractions, maybe with less spotlight-hogging by high-SPD characters. There’s still a lot to like here, and it’s still one of my favorite games. Lots of other games, like BESM and Wild Talents, have followed in the well-worn point RPG path, but Champs is the gold standard.

The OSR was a game changer for me. I realized when I first purchased Labyrinth Lord that I’d been running D&D according to OSR principles for years, and that modern D&D worked far and away best when run this way. My favorite OSR games now are Swords & Wizardry Complete and Dungeon Crawl Classics, but the principles of accepting imbalanced encounters, rulings vs. rules, simpler NPCs and critters, creating challenges instead of stories, and allowing active input from players in running the game, all appeal to me greatly. You can see this in CC in the open-ended way PCs and GM together interpret Triumphs and Mishaps, and how players are encouraged to build new Packages as needed to build out the setting.

Games like FATE and their “hero point economy” interested me greatly. FATE itself didn’t really grab me … no offense, I just like things a little more crunchy. Some meat to sink my gaming teeth into! But Strands of Fate really appealed to me. I’ve never gotten a chance to run Strands as much as I’d like to, and I apply Fate Points a little less as a scene-editing tool and a little more as an in-game concentration/effort mechanic, but the roots are there.

Finally, as I’ve mentioned, CC is based on my work on Invulnerable, Metagene, and Wormholes & Waystations. Invulnerable works as a multi-genre game, but CC has the simpler task resolution system of Metagene. CC includes some of the races and locations in W&W.

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