King’s Quest: History & Concept

Escaping reality to be or do whatever you want is what I believe is the basis for all RPGs. It’s the reason I became so fascinated with Dungeons and Dragons. You can be a dashing fighter or a wise wizard. However as I played 5th edition of dungeons and dragons, I was still confined by the limitations of vanilla D&D. When I played more often than not I wasn’t the only rogue in the party. Oftentimes me and this other rogue had almost identical abilities, similar stats, and weapons. Bad luck with rolling stats had made me the least useful of the rogues. Important tasks like sneaking into a dangerous area were often given away to the rogue with the highest sneak stat, this was never me. I wanted to stick out, while still playing what I wanted too, a rogue. I didn’t need to be the only sneaky assassin on the team. I just wanted a moment to shine. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way either, many of my friends shared the same feeling towards D&D. That is why, in 2019, I started development on a tabletop system that could do just that.

Art created by Ace Van Schijndel, a member of the King’s Quest community.

This system, was known at first as the Concordia System, however it was later changed to King’s Quest. King’s Quest could solve the problems I had with my favorite game. This new homebrewed system would retain all the parts I enjoyed about D&D but allow players to customize their characters on a whole new level. The one main change is the removal of what I felt was a restrictive class system. Sure, in D&D, you can get variants in the class system that eventually let my rogue differ from the other, but I feel that often doesn’t help too much if you start at level one. In King’s Quest, there are no classes, instead you start off with Talents. These are unique abilities that you as a player (and with the close guidance of the DM to avoid them becoming OP) would make up. Having abilities that are solely unique to your character makes you feel like you feel special in a group of other rogue-like characters. In my system the entire party could play as a rogue-like character but because of Talents and other customizable things you can do during character creation in King’s Quest , each of these characters will play completely different.

In later posts, I will take a deeper look at other core functions of my system, such as how magic works, how character’s level up, and even talk about the parts of my system that need a little touch up.


2 responses to “King’s Quest: History & Concept”

  1. Emily Quamme says:

    I’ve never knwon much about RPG and Tabletop. I’ve known it was a thing and that people would do tabletop D&D, but beyond that I haven’t known much. I like how you really went through to explain this even so someone like me, who doesn’t know much about the topic could still try to understand what is happening and what it’s all about.

  2. Carli Podella says:

    Nice post!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *