Here at Happy Bishop Games, we love roleplaying games. Not just for how they create socially acceptable environments to say things like, “I disembowel him with my pinky!”, but for all the different ways rpgs have to resolve conflicts. From rolling a single d20 to throwing some coins in the air, there are a lot of fascinating, innovative systems out there. (And lots of boring, derivative ones as well.) To help explore all of these, we have created a new page that lists resolution systems.

We think this list would be helpful to game designers by letting us see how other games handle resolution, to see if our “great idea” has been done before and to see how we can tweak a given system to fit a game. (Remember kiddies, systems aren’t copyrighted.) For example, when we began work on Triune and wanted to decide on a system, we looked at other systems to help us decide which would be best. In the end, we decided to create our own system since no other system had what we were looking for. Still, a list like this would have been helpful, so we made that list.

We’ve also set up a forum to discuss this list. If you want to add a system, please do! Post it on the forum and we’ll eventually get around to adding it to the big list. You can also complain bitterly about how we screwed up on any number of details, such as our classification system and our omissions. We get it–we’re stoopid. And, we’re OK with that.