Problems I've run into. (Expansion books available)

Today I'm releasing both of the planned expansion books. They are technically unfinished, but my hope is that they contain enough content to still be fun to play.

The expansion books are now free and released.

The original intention was to keep flawk the system free, and charge for the expansion books, and I've decided I don't feel good about doing that. It's my belief that I was unable to deliver the quality I wanted for these expansions, which brings me to something else.

I am not planning on developing Flawk further.

I'm relatively new to tabletop design, in that I've never released a commercial tabletop game before, though this is my 4th tabletop game design. As I made Flawk it became clear that I failed in my goal to create a simplified tabletop system that practically anyone can pick up and play. There were two main issues in playtests:

1. Combat was tedious
   1. When I designed the combat for Flawk, my intention was to create a faster pace combat by limiting combat options and keeping creature's health points and evasion low. I thought that it would keep combat short (never taking up a whole session) but in reality it accomplished the opposite. By making mistakes so punishing, Flawk's combat ended up being hyper tactical, with players holding chokepoints to limit the amount of damage they could take a turn. Especially, it became clear that with health so low that ranged characters would beat melee characters every time. Additionally, the lack of opportunity attacks meant that players could backtrack without punishment, so the balance of combat quickly became to hold a choke point, and move backwards to limit exposure to enemy attacks. Adding to this was that there was several ways to increase a character's move speed, meaning that PCs could theoretically backtrack infinitely without ever being in danger.
      
   2. Another issue was the lack of turn order. Since combat didn't follow the dnd formula of 'move' , 'attack', 'reaction', All creatures could move, attack and retreat back out of range, meaning move speed was the KEY stat to win combat in almost every situation. I did design mages and rangers to counteract this exact problem, but both classes were more complicated than average and I did not have ANY players pick these classes in playtests.
2. WAY too much math, trust, and complications

   
   

   1. I really underestimated how much armor and advantages changed the complexity of combat. I will say I LOVE how complicated combat could get, but it was mostly playable when all players could be implicitly trusted to manage their time and mechanics effectively.  Anytime this broke down the time per turn exploded, killing almost all tension and excitement, which to me didn't feel ready for release. I still have not solved this problem, really. I almost feel like having a DM for this game was the wrong decision. But I'm not sure what the alternative would be.
   2. My vision for flawk was to eventually create a fully automated VTT, so all of the math and formulas would be greatly simplified and players wouldn't need to remember anything, but playtesting without that was crazy. Like, all players needed to be present and cogent 100% of the time because armor needed to be decreased, they might need to use a reaction / etc, which essentially meant any long sessions didn't have any built-in rest periods were a player could release tension and relax. This was a big problem that I just didn't see coming in the design phase. I can't count on all players of Flawk using a VTT that I might never find the time to develop, so I think having this constant barrage of calculations was a big mistake

Takeaways

Overall I learned a lot about why DND 5e was designed the way that it was, dancing around both of these big issues while still having effectively the same mechanics. By tying a lot of features to classes and heavily limiting customization outside of that, they made it easier to learn the game and less complicated to play. I still can't imagine designed a tabletop game in such a rigid way, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't appreciate the design of dnd more now that I've seen the issues it's dodging. Especially a big mistake I made was not coming at the finished product with a professional layout and style guide, making the whole thing look amateurish, because it is. If I made another roleplaying system I intend to fix all layout issues and actually use a professional layout software.

I still want to make my own roleplaying system, but I think Flawk isn't the simplified, easy to use experience I thought it would be. Still, it's reviewed well and found a modest playerbase, and I'm happy with that. For this reason I'm going to release all the work I've done on Flawk 1st Edition, so more people can enjoy it, flaws and all (maybe even some Advantages? haha). I might come back and try to fix these issues in a 2nd Edition, but I wouldn't count on it.