The West That Wasnt - Rulebook
The West That Wasnt is the Old West, or is it? This is the system that started with Future Imperfect. When we determined that the scope of FI was too large to easily fix, we developed TWTW as a scaled down version to facilitate easier project completion.
Contents
The Setting
This is a description of The West That Wasnt, including geography, history and important elements.
The West that Wasnt (Basic intro-original version)
The West that Wasn't: The History of the DTI
Here are descriptions of the types of gear and weapons that are available.
The Rules
What follows are the rules for playing a game set in The West That Wasnt. A current rules pdf is located here.
Character Generation
The West That Wasnt - Character Generation
The West That Wasnt - Skill List
Task Resolution
This section discusses how to interact with the environment, as well as use skills.
The West That Wasnt - Action Resolution
The West That Wasnt - Advanced Action Resolution
Conflict
This section discusses conflict of all types, physical and otherwise.
The West That Wasnt - Conflict - Action Points Complete page - in progress
The West That Wasnt - Action Point Combat System Initial proposal
Old Versions
The West That Wasnt - Conflict
The West That Wasnt - Basic Initiative and Speed Rules
The West That Wasnt - Initiative And Action Speeds
From The Bench: The Judge
The West That Wasnt - The Judge
Interaction
Movement and the Environment
The West That Wasnt - Interacting With the West
Playtesting
The West That Wasnt - Sundown On May 5th, at 1:00 PM, the DTI heads to Tombstone, Arizona for a spell.
The design goals from Future Imperfect were ported over the PP, and then to TWTW. Eventually, they became more and more well defined. This is the first attempt to put them all down for perusal.
Design Goals
The first set of design goals focused on Action Cards: Action Card Concepts. They are:
1. Use what you need, ignore everything else.
2. One card, one resolution.
3. Leave the rulebook on the shelf.
Actions cards are designed to deliver exceptional detail, very quickly. They are loaded with information. They require a short learning curve to master. Because they have so much information, the rulebook is rarely necessary after the first session or two.
Action cards are also extensible. Even though they are designed for one card, one resolution, once they are mastered it is easy to customize the game experience for your group. In fact, the extensibility and modularity make it simple to customize the game experience to each player, so that individuals at the same table can tailor their own experiences to the level of detail and mechanical depth they prefer. This leads to arguably the most important design goal:
Play the game that you want!
Just about every game has a section discussing the idea that the rules are just a guide, and the players should work together to craft the best game experience. TWTW (and the other tenses) take this one step further. Most rules in the game are designed with a set of goals (that you are reading) but they also are created in a modular fashion to facilitate easily swapping out and customizing rules as you see fit. The game also has multiple appendices dedicated to doing exactly that, providing suggestions for using the rulebook as a road map, showing you many paths to the same goals, and also illustrating how different players can take their own road without impacting the others.
Mechanical depth is important to the design. This is clear in all facets of game play. Most of the choices themselves are relatively simple, but the wide variety greatly increases personalization and flavor. The game is created to provide mechanical support for many different play styles. These choices need to be simple enough to implement that they never block the delivery of satisfying narrative.
While the game does not attempt realism, it does attempt to simulate the kinds of choices that bring a level of tactical verisimilitude to the shared hallucination that is created at the game table. This is especially true in combat, where concepts regarding action speed, covering fire, and tactical movement are implemented so that they are easy to use, rather than fully grounded in reality.
Speaking of combat, why does every game have a combat minigame of some kind, but few other interactions are afforded such a level of detail? The tense games attempt to provide optional minigames that allow diverse characters to have dedicated and mechanically deep minigames to enrich the experience.
