Webcomic Discussing RPG Design

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

[Rob Lang]

It's really not that hard - if you use your imagination a lot.

[Onix]

It's probably true that it's easier to homebrew than try to shoe horn a setting you have in mind into an existing system. The main problem is the unforeseen emergent property that a player will discover and spam. At that point the GM needs to have the ability to squash the spam at least until the next game. Now it's something that the player probably enjoyed doing so you don't want to completely kill the effect but you do want to make it either harder to do or cost something.

Of course that's when you're simple streamlined system starts to take on feature bloat. It's probably okay though because the players are learning incrementally. No individual step is really hard to handle so they are able to absorb it.