Rise of Champions: A Senior Thesis in Game Design

While writing yesterday's post, I realized that I hadn't mentioned, much less discussed my senior thesis. I spent several months designing, resigning and revising Rise of Champions, as well as writing several pieces the history and design of other tabletop RPGs. I've just grabbed a couple pieces from the final hundred-twenty-five pages describing what I did and my intent while working on the project. If you're interested in reading the whole thing, it is currently available here.

The first piece I've included is my introduction to the whole project:

Many Role Playing Games (RPGs) require a significant amount of reading and time invested before play can begin. This project presents a new RPG, Rise of Champions and contains research examining the new system within the context of the history of RPGs, how Rise of Champions stands alone as a game, as well as developer commentary on both the system and testing. Rise of Champions is designed so that new players have easy access to the game and that experienced players can go through initial set up quickly, without losing the depth of play available in other games. A variety of significant RPGs from the past forty years were studied, with the strongest designs and characteristics being examined and refined. Focusing on making player choices matter through tactical play and developing some of the weakest attributes of RPGs, Rise of Champions is the culmination of this research. While Rise is a step towards making RPGs simple and accessible, the design can still be honed.

The second article attached is a small paper, talking about the game, without reference to other games, and bringing up what makes Rise different:

What is the purpose of Rise of Champions? What makes it different? Why would a player play this game over another Role Playing Game (RPG)?

The purpose of Rise of Champions is to provide a simple RPG that retains depth and variety of options available to other more complicated RPGs. Character creation is seven simple steps, and can be completed in less time that it takes to read the instructions for other systems.

For each of the steps, there are slightly more base options to consider than most other systems, however, they are much simpler and shorter, each taking half a page or less. Additionally, when combined, there are myriad possibilities resulting in more total results. For example, there are over a thousand possible ways to combine the Traits that create the races.

Working symbiotically with the simplicity, Rise is intended to be modular, so that more content and options can be added, further increasing the depth and number of important choices available to the players.

There are several reasons a player would pick Rise of Champions over another system. To newer players, the simplicity offers the ability to quickly jump into an RPG without an overwhelming amount of material to study. Additionally, the combination of the depth offered by the numerous layered options as well as the base simplicity allows advanced players to begin playing almost immediately with the level of detail that they are used to enjoying.