RPG games were invented by kids sitting around a fire some 200,000 years ago.

They took turns describing how each would have handled the day’s hunt.
They shouted, gesticulated, interrupted, building the dramatic story to a heroic pitch. They were wide-eyed & intense describing dangers, then laughing at slapstick fumbles. They had no dice, published no game mechanics, invoked only one rule; the Rule of Cool.
They invented the most perfect RPG system in history, and none have ever done better.

Table tops were invented about 150,000 years later.

This was written as I was drafting an intro for One Game. There seems to be an idea that somebody out there “invented” the idea of a game that kids and probably some adults have been playing since humans could harness enough language to toss ideas and images back and forth. Likely 100,000 to 250,000 years past. We’ll never know the people or kids who were the first to discover the wonder of describing something that existed only in imagination, and the wonder of realizing that others could receive that imagined creation. That must have been one amazing day.

Tabletops and dice have been around for thousands of years. Museums have some nice d20 from ancient Egypt. Its not likely that anyone enjoying games of story and imagination were going to demure over tables. I mean, what was the better option? Tables were everywhere.

The One Game is a TTRPG, a tabletop role playing game. It is similar in nature to many other TTRPGs.

This website is the home of The One Game, and also thoughts and rants about TTRPGs or more or less related things.

So why does this exist? I wanted a rules-light game system that could be learned quickly, and played with just enough detail to make it exciting and fast moving. I previously had run Starsworn and Magical Kitties Save the Day games for my son, and they were fine, and manageable in scale. But my son wanted to play D&D because it’s impossible to avoid arriving at D&D’s doorstep if you are interested in TTRPGs.

Two things became obvious quickly. One, D&D (5th edition) required a decent amount of time to learn – it was much more elaborate than our previous games. Two, I didn’t have a decent amount of time to read the absurdly huge rule books. I also don’t have time to try a dozen other systems, even if I could find anyone to play them with. I listened to podcasts, read what I could, and it seemed clear to me that D&D suffered from disorganized bloat. As Ash Barker put it – D&D fails the Christmas morning test, meaning it is not possible to read the rules, set up and play in a reasonable amount of time.

It was quicker to write a rule set from scratch (with some theft) than to learn D&D. The critical mechanics are, as far as I know (because I’m not going to spend time researching this), original. Some mechanics are based on or inspired by various TTRPG pundits and designers. While Shadowdark is still too fat for my needs, it was inspiration.

The One Game has more than zero rules, so in that sense it’s a failure like all other modern TTRPGs. But it is quicker to play than most.

I don’t believe The One Game will rule them all, it’s just that it’s the one game I have time for. I’ll be adding a PDF to this site at some point – it will not be definitive, more of an early prototype I will be modifying, trimming as we use it. Hopefully it will make TTRPGs a realistic option for others.

Break a leg.