So, if you’re here from Boing Boing, I’ve got to plug my own Lady Blackbird hack, Old Mesilla. Same fantastic simple system, but with a Western-styled setting. Tell the story of a train job to get Billy the Kid to freedom, all in a free shareable RPG.

Expanding on some of what Jonathan said over here: when you’re making a new game, start with something you know. I take the dice mechanics from Lady Blackbird, start making something, and maybe later write new mechanics as needed. Hacking something else as a base gets you all the stuff you don’t want to have to design right now, so you can design the stuff you need.

I’m horrible about this, I always want to distinguish anything I’m writing by giving it every new bit I can think of. Things turn out a lot better when instead I, say, take the entire Lady Blackbird system, make my own characters, and layer on a few mechanics (which pretty much sums up Old Mesilla).

I’ve got something else in development that went the same way: with all new mechanics I was spending half my time writing a decent resolution system. Swap in some basic pool dice stuff and I can spend my time writing the stuff I really want to write.

In the long run, I think gaming as a hobby would do well to embrace the hack, just like mods and game engines for computer games. There’s nothing less awesome about a brilliant game that reuses some bits from an existing system (license allowing).

So: hack it.