A while back, my daughter got invited to attend a summer school at Durham University. She had a 'familiarisation day' first, and I drove her up there. Once I was there, though, it turned out that I also had to attend some talks... mostly a kind of recruitment drive, trying to sell me on just how great Durham Uni is. Oh, and it took over 6 hours to do it....
So, I was sitting there, in the lecture hall, going quietly insane through boredom, when the lecturer decided it would be a good idea for us to take notes - and handed out pads and pens. I didn't take notes - instead I started writing out some rules ideas...
I decided very quickly that I wanted the game to involve both players as much as possible. Games where one player's turn lasts half an hour, while the other player stands around waiting are not much fun for anybody. Fortunately, most games these days are leaning towards maximum player involvement. And Ravensrodd will definitely do that.
I went for alternate figure activation, so the players would take it in turns to use a model, swapping back and forth until every model had acted once, ending the turn. I wondered whether to allow some way of screwing with that, so you could maybe activate two models before handing initiative to the other player... but that feels like something I should ignore until the core rules are established.
I also decided at this point on the core mechanic of the game; it would be based around opposed rolls. That had a couple of implications - firstly, that both players would be involved at all times, and secondly, that every statistic I used on a character's statline would need to have an opposite statistic to test against. Some were pretty easy to work out - things like Attack and Defence, for example. But for something like Ranged, (missile fire) what would you test against? I thought maybe an Agility stat, which could also tie into climbing and difficult terrain tests. Pretty soon I'd got a big list of stats... too many, really. I'd have to start pruning them down. I had: Move, Attack, Defense, Thrown, Ranged, Dodge, Sneak, Agility, Strength, Toughness, Courage and Wounds. 12 stats is about 3 more than I really want.
Fortunately, the game's setting helps a bit with this. Because every character is a human, it means that I don't need a wide range of Strength and Toughness; everyone will be more or less the same. Exceptionally strong or tough people can be taken care of with Skills (more on Skills another time!) I also decided to lose the Wounds stat - instead of points, damage will be modeled by reducing the performance of the character. I also decided to combine Thrown and Ranged, and called it Missile; it just seems like overkill to have them separate. Dodge and Agility got combine too; again, they were really covering the same things in game. I was a little unsure on Courage; after a bit, I decided Will would be better. It would cover everything Courage did, plus some of the more 'mental' tests, like resisting curses and the like. Finally, I added in a Luck stat; something you could use to modify dice rolls.
Of course, all of these stats are just a starting point; as I get further into the game mechanics, they'll probably end up changing completely!