When designing a system, create a few (I pefer as few as possible) generic 'rules'.

For example, you might say (Levels in skill) - (levels of difficulty) = levels of success.

It doesn't really matter too much what you decide on, as long as it's easily understandable.

Then, you create your basic set of rules. Hopefully this will cover all the bases your game will cover, to give the players an idea as to what's 'allowed' or expected

Now, here's the clever bit. You create a mechanism for the creation (or 'discovery') of new skills. It could be through research, downtime, whatever, and you tell the players about this.

This way, as the game progresses, the players can push the game in whatever area interests them. So they can 'discover' advanced combat skills, or new spells, new crafting skills, whatever they want (within the bound of staying within the game's 'feel' 

Basically, they tell you what they want, and with their input you can create the rules to suit your players.

The beauty of this is that because the players are leading the way, they'll feel a lot more involved in the system, and you're encouraging them to be pro-active about getting involved in finding out about the world.

Thoughts?

If you were to employ this, I'd suggest very strict rules about the way it works to prevent abuse. Maybe some form of strict vetting system by a small group of refs. Maybe the players can come up with the idea for skills but not the actual rules behind them? So, player says 'I am researching into methods of cracking secret codes' and the referees say 'Ok, after x hours of downtime research, you work out the basics of a skill called Cryptography which allows you to...' followed by a description of what the skill does. So the players only decide the broad remit of the skill the referees tell them exactly what it does, how it works and what needs to be done to get there.

I have always been in favour of the creation process being a two way process. In general, world writers can only ever give the barebones of a world with very little detail. It is usually the players who fill in the gaps and flesh out the world properly. This applies to rules as well. I tend to have a rather open attitude to rules writing. If the players come up with good ideas for new skills I tend to implement them. There is no real formal system for this to happen but usually it is a case of: Player comes up with idea, discusses it with referee when both are drunk, referee thinks about it a bit and then sits down and fleshes out the idea into some form of coherent rule. There are just as many of these ideas that have been rejected than have been accepted but there are some excellent ideas which have come from this set up.

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The Whispering God is your friend... trust the Whispering God...

Ruins of Empire

1st - 3rd Feb, 2008, Gladstone scout centre, Chester

what I imagine is close to Balor's example. A player comes to you with an idea for a concept. You discuss with them how it could be implemented into your game (or not). Then, it's up to the rules person to decide what form this new skill might take - taking into acount balance. Meanwhile, the character is 'researching'. Then, you tell the character the results of his 'research' (which could be that you discover that it's not possible).

The reason for a few 'fundamental' mechanics would be have new rules use one of these, so that they are easy to implement and fit into the rest of the rules.

I've seen it work well for spells, and I'd like to see the idea broadened to rules at large.

In a similar vein, you could allow people to research their god/origins of magic/whatever, and in doing this collaborate in writing the background to the system.

so you could have a briefly sketched out god of war, and let those who are interested do 'research' into the god, and help in the writing that fleshes the god out.

Obviously you'd need someone keeping an eye on things to make sure that you don't let through anything that would break the game in any way, but I think that getting players involved can only be a good thing in the long run.

(the IC time spent researching = OOC time spent making sure that it won't break the game in any way)

The difference is that the rules haven't been written yet.

To put it a different way, what you do is create a basic ruleset that is designed so that additional rules can be added (hopefully using the same fundamentals) to expand the rules.

By getting the players to 'research' areas that they're interested in means that you know with confidence that the new rules you add to your system will definitely be used by the players. (so you don't spend ages creating something that the players just ignore). 

I don't see this as a problem.

Hmmmm, I can see you what you mean, but I think that with some care this shouldn't happen.

The way I see it working is that a player comes up with a new rule idea (say a new spell, or the ability to do strikedown, whatever), then talks to the rules writer about the idea. The player says what they'd like to be able to do, and the rules writer translates that into what is achieveable within the game using the same basic set of mechanics used to create all the other rules.

This should ensure that the rules have an interplay with what is already there (so any new spells will have the same requirements as all other spells, strikedown might be tied in to weapon skill, strength etc.).

It is slightly extended in that created play methods (for instance magic) are known only to those who use them and not disseminated to the rest of the player base until they are used.