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 What Makes Amazing Quests!
so Special?
Since Dungeons & Dragons started it all,
there have been many RPGs—good ones and bad ones, with good points and bad
points. And for as long as
professionally published RPGs have been out there, people have been coming up
with their own RPGs. With the explosion of the World Wide Web and the power of desktop publishing, the numbers of RPGs skyrocketed from
the mid-1990s on. So why would anyone play
Amazing Quests! when there are so many other options—including those slick
games from the big publishers?
Rolegamer Democracy
First, I created this game through a process I
refer to as "Rolegamer Democracy." I first began designing this in 1983,
and began seriously designing it in 1993. But through all my years as a rolegamer, I have always asked others what they liked and disliked about various
systems—about every RPG system I've played (and I've played a lot of
them) and about systems I hadn't played but others had. I jotted notes and kept mental tallies of what people said. When I finally
began to assemble those years of opinion polls into a system in 1993, I had a
lot of ideas about what would make it the best system possible, done through
incorporating all those ideas over the years.
Of course, ultimately it was
my creation, so how I built the core rules was based on my choices. Needless to say, just because I thought something was great didn't mean the playtesters agreed,
and didn't mean it worked particularly well. More of my "brilliant" ideas were excised from the rules in favor of what the majority thought would work
better. This carried over to a wider selection of playtesters, and by the time I
had people around the world downloading and playtesting, the process had worked.
There were very few complaints, although there were plenty of tweaks.
Imagination
Overload
But there's more to being special than Rolegamer
Democracy. There's also the incorporation of another term I use:
Imagination Overload. I wanted to give players as much creative jumpstarting as
I possibly could. I wanted a set of core rules that would cover any genre, and
not limit its size just because it cost a lot to print. I wanted to cover
magic, technology, psionics, powers, mutations, and more. I wanted to appeal to
gamers who liked simple character creation as well as those who liked lots of
numbers and complexity.
And that's just the tip of what AQ!
offers. Read more here!
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