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Quinn McDonnell - Systems Designer
Rogue Magic
Brief Intro
Rogue Magic is a Chaotic Comedy short Tabletop Game about a group of Wizards breaking into places and stealing magical artifacts.
It's a pen and paper game meaning you can play it as long as you have access to the document down below
It started development in March 2024
It will release sometime in May 2025
Intent Statement
The Original Intent Statement was the following:
"My intention is to create a character creator and mini TTRPG system that is focused around magic. The intended experience is to create a tense and stressful experience that if the players succeed they are rewarded with the ability to improve themselves but if they fail or run into bad luck their characters can change for the better or for the worse, building their characters in different ways from the roll of the dice"
(Thank You Jack Carty, my Level Designer on Booklet's Big Story for Starring)
How it Started
I spent time looking through how a lot of rules light games balance their systems, specifically Blades in the Dark. They created the stress system when players want to push themselves to succeed. I took that idea but applied it to base rolls. So the players roll would also increase the chances of something bad happening.
First Version
At first I wanted this to be more long term. And so I structured the game in a way where you had an actual character sheet with different stats and different ways to develop your character. Even different ways of casting which affected how you performed Magic in game. And while this was interesting, it proved more problematic as players found it really daunting and really hard to get into as it proved way to complicated. They liked the magic system but they found everything overly cumbersome.
(The Original Character Sheet)
What Changed
Although the more system heavy designed version was what I submitted. I decided over the summer if I could slim down the design to its core essence. From my testing data I saw that most players found the really chaotic dice rolling a bit too chaotic for a long term game. However, they found it really fun for a single one shot where they could be as riley as they wanted to. So I shifted my focus and took my 28 page document and made it a clean cut 4 page document with everything the player could need.
Gameplay
The gameplay now is pretty simple. The players will give themselves a funny wizard name, a unique skill they can come up with, within reason, one negative trait, and three unique terms they can use for spell casting. They will also have something called their Chao Points or CP as it is known.
Whenever a player wants to make an action, they roll a six sided die (D6). The number determines the outcome of the spell and how much CP is added to your character. If a player ever reaches 10CP during the game, they roll a D6 and depending on the number something will happen based on what term they used for their spell.
The players ultimate goal is to go through the level made by the Game Master and steal as many rare artifacts as possible. And spells are the best way to do that, so the more your little wizards sling spells, the higher the chance something bad will happen.
(The Table of Contents of the 1st Version in May 2024)
(The Fist Page of the Revised Version in January 2025)
What I Learned
My Biggest Takeaway from this was that no matter what you do, the idea you conceptualize will always be much rougher than you expect, and the best way to create an enjoyable experience is to find what people like about the idea and trim off the fat as needed to create a more polished experience. The wise words "Less is More" are super important to game design especially with tabletop games where you are expecting a human being to be running these rules and not a program.
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