Hammersmith

Hey there, I’m Hammersmith author Rich and this is the first blogpost in what I imagine to be a somewhat personal journal about ttrpg-related thoughts and ideas that I have. I mean, everybody needs a space to dump all that nonsense they come up with at midnight, when instead they should be sleeping, right? And since my hard drive is full, I thought the internet should be a good place to store all that stuff.

Okay sure, but what on earth, might you ask, do we need yet another blog on wordpress about fantasy role playing games for, don’t we have enough?

In short: Nothing. You’re right, you don’t. Stop scrolling, go back to work, Jared. In order to gain experience, you have to actually do it instead of reading and then forgetting it.
And that’s exactly the reason for my blog. After spending years frantically and obsessively consuming ttrpgs like they would somehow enhance my nutrition and years of slowly realizing that there is no perfect system out there, I have now come to the same irrational, hardly sane and undoubtedly unoriginal realization as many others before me: “I can do better.”

2 years ago, I came up with a mathematical approach to a problem I saw with the popular Dungeons & Dragons ttrpg. It was beautiful, solved the problem elegantly without forcing the player to carry calculators to their table. But it had one other problem: It meant that every sub-system of the architecture that built on that -in my eyes- faulty system had to be rewritten to be compatible with the new foundation. Hell, one might even say I had to write my own ttrpg to make that work.

Yeah. I did.

As you can imagine, after seeing the pile of sh…work that I had just loosened uphill, I took a breath and began digging. Digging for what I now envision to become my own personal ttrpg, a game that no matter what party or style I can whip out as-is to house the stories me and my party write. Thus was born Hammersmith. And with it the question What would your perfect system look like? because let’s be honest, if you’re rewriting 80%, why not make it 100%?

So I invite you to follow along on this journey of exploring what I like and dislike in the world of ttrpgs, how we can fix it and distilling it into a system that satisfies my ever-growing standards.