I’ve always wanted to write my own ruleset, and have started a few over the years which never fully saw completion. It’s time to change that!

The Setting

Firstly, I need a theme. This could be either Fantasy, Sci-fi or Historical. My gaming tendencies have always leant towards Fantasy rather than the other two, and the appeal of building up a world from scratch (or better yet, letting the players build their own worlds) really called to me.

Decision: Fantasy

Grand Battles or Skirmish Based

I’ve always loved films that have a good battle scene, and I’m hoping I can recreate that cinematic feel on the table top.

Decision: Grand Battles

Scale & Miniatures

What scale though? This was more difficult. As I certainly don’t have the cash to create my own miniatures, the final game would have to rely on players using models from other companies. Therefore it would have to be miniature agnostic, and possibly scale agnostic also. So I need a ruleset that can work at any scale and can use any miniatures in a players collection.

I have three options here, I can either build a ruleset where players have rules to create their own races and units from a number of modules or special rules they can combine to make an army that replicates their model collection. Or I could build a number of ready to go races such as Human, Dwarf, Orc, etc. Or I could do a combination of the two.

One thing I have decided is to use centimetres for games at a smaller base size and inches for games with a larger base size. But more on this in a future post.

Decision: Scale and Miniature Agnostic

Other Decisions

There were a number of other decisions that I decided on as well before going much further. The first was that the game should incorporate an element on command and control via the characters on the battlefield, where the characters order the units around the table.

Secondly, I didn’t want lots of downtime for players where they’re sitting and watching the other make all their moves without much interaction. So, I want to lose the IgoUgo format of most well-known wargames. I do like the system in Bolt Action with a number of dice equal to your unit count. I think perhaps that this could be a number of dice for the total number of orders you have instead.

Decision: Random player activation based on number of orders

What do you think? I’d love to hear your feedback.