From Player to Parent: Why I’m Making My Own TTRPG

I have always enjoyed tinkering with games, ever since I was a kid. Working out what I liked about them, and constantly wandering “what if it did this, instead, would that make it better?”

I’m now a parent with a newborn child of my own, thinking about how I’ll introduce them to this wonderful hobby as they grow up, and realizing that the game I want to play with them doesn’t quite exist yet.

So I’m making it. Or trying to.

Before I dive into any design specifics like dice rolls or ability scores, I think it’s worth explaining why I’m doing this, and what I’ve learned along the way about what makes TTRPGs so magical to me in the first place.

The Joy of Innocence

I started playing D&D about a decade ago, shortly after 5th Edition was released. Some old high school friends reconnected and invited my wife and I to join their new campaign. Our DM was narrative-focused with a flair for voices and storytelling, and honestly, none of us really knew the rules all that well.

And it was really fun.

We played mostly theatre of the mind, only pulling out the battle grid for epic, often dubiously balanced boss fights. We didn’t optimize our character builds. We didn’t carefully measure movement speeds or worry about maximising action economy. When someone wanted to do something cool, they’d just describe it, and the DM would either say “yeah, that works” or ask for a roll and let fate decide. We treated the system like a playground or a sandbox: a framework for telling cool stories together, not a set of rules to be mastered.

Looking back, I realize we may have been playing D&D “wrong” by many standards. But we were playing it right for us. The game felt like pure imagination and improvisation, the way I remember playing pretend as a kid, but with just enough structure to keep things interesting and engaging.

The Paradox of Rules Mastery

As we played more, I got more interested in trying my hand at GM’ing, so I started learning the rules properly. I ran a few one-shots. Other players in our group did the same. We “peeked behind the curtain,” as it were, and discovered how the mechanical systems actually worked.

Then COVID hit, and we, like many, moved online to Discord and a virtual table top. We put our previous “main campaign” on hold, and spun up a couple of new ones while we waited for it to all blow over.

With everyone knowing the rules better, and with the screen always showing a battle map, our games unexpectedly transformed. We became optimizers. Power gamers. Combat often became the focus. Even roleplay moments shifted from narrative play to literal on-screen button-pressing: “I’ll roll Athletics to jump over that chasm!” sometimes without waiting for the GM to actually call for a roll.

We were still having fun, but it was a different kind of fun. The magic and wonder of our main campaign wasn’t there. The game had become more like a tactical combat simulator with a few story beats, rather than this emergent story we were all trying to tell together.

It took one of my good friends dropping out of a game, and us having an honest conversation about why, before I fully recognized what had happened. We’d traded imagination and improvisation for mechanical mastery and optimization. Neither approach is inherently better, but we’d lost something, and we found ourselves actively trying to re-find it.

The Search For Fun

We made changes. We ditched online and went back to in-person play. That helped, but it was only part of the puzzle. We tried other systems like Dungeon World and Ironsworn. We spun up new campaigns, big and small. Most importantly, we started talking about what we liked and didn’t like: what worked in particular sessions, what felt flat, what brought back that spark.

When I GM’d 5e, I leaned hard into keeping things rules-light, hacking it to simplify, remove friction and increase fun. “Let them do cool stuff” became my guiding principle. If a player wanted to try something creative, I’d let them describe their approach and maybe ask for a roll, but I tried not to let the system stand in the way of their innovation. This felt closer to what we wanted.

Dungeon World, though we didn’t play too much, taught us a lot. The “conversations, not mechanics” approach, where you lead with the fiction and only roll when the outcome is uncertain, reminded us of those early sessions where we didn’t know the rules well enough to let them get in the way. The principle of “be a fan of the characters” gave us permission to say yes more often.

Ironsworn went even further. It is an intentionally GM-less game where you cooperatively build the story. There’s no one “presenting” a prepared narrative, everyone at the table has equal authority to shape what happens next. Player agency isn’t just encouraged, it’s the entire point.

What Makes TTRPGs So Special

Playing these different systems clarified something for me: the magic of TTRPGs isn’t in the combat mechanics or the character builds or the epic storylines. It’s in the player agency and collaborative imagination.

A TTRPG is not a novel with a fixed plot. It’s not a perfectly balanced video game. It’s not a film with a predetermined ending. It can be those things if your table wants that, but what makes the medium special is its flexibility.

You can do almost anything. The story can go anywhere. If you want to befriend the dragon instead of fighting it, you can try it. If you want to start a bakery instead of going on the quest, well you can do that too. The game adapts to your imagination, not the other way around.

This is especially important to me now as a parent. When I think about introducing my child to TTRPGs, what I want to give them is exactly that sense of possibility. I want them to learn that their imagination matters. That their ideas can shape the world. That play—real, improvisational, “what if we tried this?” play—is valuable.

Existing Games Don’t Quite Fit

So here’s my challenge: I want a game that’s:

Simple enough for kids (and adults!) who don’t want to memorise giant rulebooks.
Flexible enough to support many kinds of stories - not just dungeon crawling or combat.
Structured enough to create tension and meaningful choices - not just freeform role-play.
Designed to encourage player agency and creative problem-solving - not optimization and button-pressing.

D&D 5e, while I have a soft spot for it, is a bit too complex and too combat-focused. The OSR games I’ve explored are simpler, but often still assume a certain style of play (resource management, deadly combat). Narrative-focused games like Dungeon World, Ironsworn and Daggerheart get closer, but they have their own quirks and learning curves.

More importantly, I’ve realized that part of the magic of our original campaign was that we were playing with our version of the rules. House rules, misunderstandings and all. We’d accidentally created something that worked for us.

So why not do it intentionally?

A Game for My Table (and Maybe Yours, Too)

So that’s what this is all about. I’m designing a TTRPG for me and my kids, inspired by:

D&D (it’s the game most people know, and the one that got me into the hobby)
OSR (its simplicity and “rulings over rules” attitude)
NSR (games like Into the Odd, Mausritter and Runecairn that refined those OSR principles)
PbtA’s narrative focus (Dungeon World’s “conversations, not mechanisms”)
New-wave accessibility (Draw Steel and Daggerheart trying to make D&D-style games more approachable)

My goal is a system that gets out of the way and lets people play. I want rules that are simple enough to teach in ten minutes but robust enough to handle a long campaign. I want mechanics that encourage creativity rather than optimization. I want a game my kids can pick up when they’re ready, but that won’t bore adults.

I’m still mid-design. In fact, I’m actively working through core mechanics in real-time. The plan is to document that process: the decisions, the iterations, the inspirations, and the lessons learned. I’ll talk about ability scores, resolution mechanics, character advancement, monster design, and all the nitty-gritty details that go into making a TTRPG work.

But more than that, I want this to be a conversation about what makes tabletop RPGs special. About how we create space for imagination and agency. About how rules can enable play instead of constraining it.

I don’t know if anyone will play this game besides me and my friends (and eventually my kids). But I’m excited to figure it out, and if that sounds interesting then you’re welcome to follow along.

If you’ve got thoughts, questions, or your own design experiences to share, I’d love to hear them in the comments. This is a learning process for me, and I’m always interested in other perspectives.

Welcome to the journey.