We’re getting very close to our beta version of Told now, and we have decided that this would be an excellent time to talk about what you can expect from the game.
We started making Told because we had some very disappointing experiences with previous pen and paper roleplaying games, and knew that we could do better. Of course, when we started, we didn’t think it would take very long to get it done. We thought would just finish it quickly and use it in our group as a home-brew system. As we got into designing it we had many major revisions as bugs would come up during testing, but each time it got a little more fun to play.
The goal for Told is to provide roleplaying groups with a sustainable game system for long-term tabletop campaigns. To achieve this we set out to provide as much flexibility as we could without making the game more complicated than it needed to be. In addition to providing this flexibility, we’ve kept a watchful eye (and used a lot math) to stop characters from exceeding a maximum bound of general usefulness. It is possible to make an awful character; you just can’t make one that will make everyone else in the party worthless – unless they all decide to be awful, but then they deserve it.
The first release of Told, dubbed the core system, will include what we have determined to be the most ubiquitous fantasy elements. We will be offering the core system on some sort of “Pay what you want” basis to allow whoever wants to play it to get their hands on it. There will be several large expansions coming after the core system which will include campaign settings as well as additional options for all characters. There will also be some smaller expansions without campaign settings which may be set to a specific theme.
Also, since I know that I can’t possibly have answered all your questions. The three most popular questions asked about Told between blog comments, emails, and facebook will be the subject of our next blog post!