0) Prehistory
As has been noted elsewhere on the site, the general notion to create Arpeggio was spawned by
hegel5000's Allo's Town RPG. Several years ago, I, the Grate Oracle Lewot, as well
as BlueKara and Bizz (then known by the longer title Bizzaroo-Chan), began participating in the
original version of Allo's Town, run by Hegel but largely based off of BlueKara's
Beautiful Buzzy comics. After a few years of playing the game, Hegel decided to
overhaul its system to an extent drastic enough to warrant beginning the plot anew. This was
convenient enough for me, as my player character, Project U, had been playing based on his
portrayal in a tiny, horribly programmed and barely begun Game Maker game of mine, but by the
time that Allo's Town v2 started, he had acquired a starring role in a new game of
mine that, at the time, looked to be my life's greatest achievement. This game, upon reaching the
disturbing realization that I was not giving up on it, promptly developed an incurable glitch and
forced itself onto the chopping block. I of course plan to resurrect it with the latest and
greenest form of black magic, but that is a tale for another website, and one that is not yet
born.
With Allo's Town II in progress, I apparently developed the desire to try my hand as
a regulator in addition to a participant. This process went as smoothly as my Game Maker career:
lots of incomplete, failed attempts, all backed by passion but wrecked by one to infinity tragic
(but inherent) flaws. As anyone who knows me (at last count, about five) could guess, I was
determined to base my RPG system at least in part off of Paper Mario, it being my
favorite video game of all time, and that for its number system.
It seems so natural in hindsight, but here is the course that my efforts took. Originally, I
developed a system that was similar to Paper Mario but had one particular addition
which managed to throw things entirely out of balance by definition; this I do not really count
as an attempt, because I never got anywhere with it (beyond about five enemy sheets), and I
salvaged the plot elements to create one third of the complex storyline of the aforementioned
game starring Project U. So, in what I am referring to as my first attempt but which came after
the thing I just mentioned, I tried simply to use Paper Mario's system in its
exactitude. This failed during character creation, when Hegel wanted to use guns. I had not any
method available of accounting for their ammunition, and though I tried connecting it to Flower
Points, I quickly decided that that would not work and that my copied-and-pasted system had the
inherent flaw of not being able to account for all means of attack. So, naturally, the second
attempt went in the other direction—throw in every feature from every game I have ever seen and
then some. This one never even got off the ground in a test-flight sense, because I could never
have done the necessary calculations as a regulator. Even using a calculator, it was far too
complicated.
In my Game Maker life, these sorts of cycles repeat themselves many times over, but there are also
many of them, swirling around each other like live, half-eaten fish drowning in the space/time
continuum. But as has been established, everything about a text-based RPG is far slower than its
correlate in a video game. This is fine—in fact, in this case, advantageous, for, although these
RPG system ideas took place over a long time, the third attempt turned out to be the charm.
This is Arpeggio, as detailed on this website, Ostinato. Share and Enjoy.