The Oblivion Engine Design Philosophy

The Oblivion Engine Design Philosophy

Many of the older "number crunchy" RPG systems have fallen out of favor with tabletop RPG players. The new blood of streamlined and more narrative systems have cropped up in the recent renaissance of tabletop RPGs. We love elements of both so we decided to take a new approach. Our assumption is that you are playing "Online First" and "Real Life" second.

What does this mean to you as a game master or player? The most important element is that the automated tools we create are the replacement for pen, paper, and dice. People might not be very good at numeric formulas to decide story outcomes but modern software systems are extremely good at number crunching. Our game mechanics are designed with this in mind. Right now, those rules and formulas are built into a Google Sheet. It is displaying a lot of data points and can be very scary/boring/annoying to look at if you are averse to the RPG systems of old. This is a temporary measure to be able to see and adjust the game mechanics while playtesting the game. Once systems have been finalized, many of the data elements will be moved into the background and the remaining elements will end up being displayed in a mobile-friendly format and released as open-source software for everyone to use and change to their heart's content. The end goal is the realism of older systems with the fast pace of the newer ones. The current version of the Oblivion Engine Character sheet is 0.55.

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