What next?

BCG and BCZ are out, and those the primary reason this blog exists. Now that they're done, I'm left wondering what I should be doing next with what I've learned. I'm not going to lie, I was close to burning out a few times during the last year and if you had asked me a few months ago, I'd have said I was quitting it... But it is highly probable that even if I were to quit, I'd end up coming back.

I say this because I know myself: I was in elementary school and I would draw these maps of places to explore and I would invite my younger siblings to do adventures there. Likely inhabitants and challenges in each area would be planned beforehand, but they would have the freedom of choosing where to go. I was GMing before I knew what GMing was. By high school, I was experimenting with RPGMaker and making custom Magic: the Gathering sets and I realized just how much I liked tweaking rules and structuring gameplay around having specific experiences. So I might take a break but, if I do, it is going to be temporary.

This brings me, at last, to the subject of "what the crap it is I'm going to be doing next???" To be honest, I'm not quite sure yet. I'd like to do something smaller than BCG, large projects need an important time and money investment and I'm not in the position to do that right now even if I wanted to. It is probably going to be anime-themed and action-oriented, because that's the kind of thing I like doing.

BCZ explored a lot of what you could do with the BCG rules, but there's a few things that didn't pan out and I would like to explore them with a system of my own or hacking someone else's. One of the things I really want to try was a game where you don't just control one character, but a character and all of their minions, most likely some kind of summoned monsters a la Pokemon or Shin Megami Tensei. I tried to include that in BCZ but it didn't work out and it got removed - much like the hack for giant characters if you remember that draft I posted a long time ago.

There's also the things that BCG and BCZ already do but don't focus on, which is to say, most kinds of non-mecha action. You can use it to run anything from Sailor Moon to Saint Seiya with transforming heroes, and it will work just fine. But imagine if the whole system was designed around them or even around characters who don't need to henshin at all.

Then there's the robots. I don't know if you've noticed but I really, really like robots y'all. If BCZ hadn't tapped out most of BCG's unused design space and included all the hacks I could fit that don't need rewriting the whole thing, I would be looking for More Cool Things To Do With Robots within BCG.

For the time being, I think I'm going to write a series of posts about how many of the rules in BCG + BCZ came to be & how they evolved over time. That should push my brain into figuring out what to do next and provide you all with something interesting to read.

Gimmick Out.