Hello to everybody! 

I'm Alessandro, a wanna-be tabletop RPG designer. I've dabbled with game design as a hobby for the last few years but I've never taken the bullet of trying to design for a jam. This one has been suggested to me earlier today, so I'm going to give it a try.

As suggested, I'll try to make a daily devlog about my current state of development.

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My day one goal is to have a clear pathway going forward, by setting up a list of focus areas for my concept and what I'd be required working at first to make it work.

• Core Idea

I took the Nature pitch and ran with it. I've been intrigued by a tabletop game where Nature exploration does play a great role in it, so I'd make nature exploration (or "nature delving" going forward) a core element. Thinking at vast hostile natural spaces that players have to tame, I'd consider designing a Prehistoric game, where there is a clear-cut separation between the hunting ground's hostilities and the safety of our little human village. The game will be currently designed top-bottom, from the game experience to the mechanics required. 

• Game Experience

In this yet-to-be-named prehistoric game,  the players play as hunters trying to gather enough food for their families and the whole village to survive. What sacrifices will they make to collect more food and what sacrifices will they make if they didn't collect enough?

• Focus Areas

I'd rather make it a short and concise game, in order for the project to be brought to completion. As far as the game loop goes, it's self-evident that the game will be played by nature delving into specific hunting grounds for food, then the players will bring the food back home, before going nature delving once more. The greater chunk of gameplay will be into hunting grounds, but what the players care about is back home.

1. Setting: I'd rather make it be a partially generic setting with blank spaces for the GM to fill. As far as things go, I'd like a small amount of magic as far as non-dinosaurs but still slightly fantasy big game creatures. The game would really benefit from a map and detailed places, but there is not enough time. I'd rather have a prehistoric painting aesthetic, which by the way would be much easier to make.
   1. Create a generic setting.
2. Hunters: Hunters are measured by how well they do things aren't they? I'd rather make a skill-based system over an attribute-based system here with a handful of very simple classes. Tools are important for prehistoric settings, so I threw an inventory system back there.
   
   1. Create a Skill system. (check Blades in the Dark)
   2. Create a Class system. (check ICRPG)
   3. Create an Inventory system.
3. Hunting Grounds: Hunting grounds are essentially re-flavored dungeons. I love the idea of making them turn-based pointcrawls (check Alexandrian), where characters have access to a set number of exploration actions each turn. Combat boils down to a simple skill check.
   1. Decide on Exploration actions. (check oD&D and games with explicit dungeon-delving rules)
   2. Create Pointcrawl creation rules.
   3. Create Wandering monster rules.
      
4. Food: Food can be harvested from animal corpses, big and small. I think it could be used as the main time-management resource of the game. Closer hunting grounds do require lesser food to travel to, while farther ones require more. Also, food allow people from Home to be kept alive. 
   1. Decide on Food costs.
      
5. Home: Home is the place the characters come back to. I'd love it the game had Home creation rules right at the start (check Legacy and A song of Ice and Fire), with named npcs and their role within the village to ground them and make them more real and potentially die if the food is not enough.
   1. Create Home creation rules.
   2. Create Downtime rules.
      

What I think to be interesting is that the system of the hunting grounds could be harvested easily for 5E players to design and run dungeons. I may come back writing a thing for dmsguild if it works in playtest.

• Concerns

I need to make an explicit point about animal abuse at the beginning of the game, being a topic of subject. This is a subject the game delves into and it's a deal-breaker if a player has issues about speaking about animal abuse. Also, I need to explicit that the game is a pulp non-accurate version of prehistoric life, so hunters can and should be both men and women.

Hope it'll go well!

this sounds like an awesome premise! I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Here we go again.

My day two goal was to have something that could be playtested, ergo a skeleton of a core mechanic and a basis for characters as soon as possible. I also called my playgroup and we're gonna have a playtest session on 18/01, so I really need to have something going on by then. Details can be filled in by brainstorming and fitting rules on the fly.

TL;DR: Now I have a name, dice mechanics, exploration mechanics, well-thought-out ideas about hunting grounds, and something vague about classes.

• The Name

Now the game has a name. It's Hunter's Cradle, sounds pretty dope. 

My current work-in-progress document is here! Please, feel free to add notes if specific sentences are hard to follow, I'm not an English native!

• Core Mechanics

These flew by very well. 

The gist of the system is that players roll a number of d6s equal to the sum of their Skill value and Tool value (e.g. five dice if they have a skill at +4 and a Tool at +1) and pick apart the lowest die roll. They succeed if they rolled a number equal to or lesser than X, X being 1 if the action was hasty, 2 if the action was controlled, X being 3 if the action was careful. On a failure, the GM gets to either introduce a complication or let the player succeed but puts a condition on the character.

Exploration is turn-based. Each player accrues 3 action points at the beginning of each round and can do actions when it's their turn; they spend 1 point if it's a hasty action, 2 points if it's controlled and 3 points if it's careful. (Mnemonically, it does help that the number of points you spend equates to the greatest number you need to roll to succeed) Turns go by until the round is over, then the GM may introduce a wandering predator. Rinse and repeat. The exploration actions are Search, Move, Fight, Sway, Pursue a Goal, Help, and Lead Ahead.

Combat is essentially just a Melee/Shoot action check.

• Hunting Grounds

I worked on Hunting Grounds a bit, but I've yet to put down my scrambly notes to actual decent google docs form. As it's possible to read above, I've settled down on some reasonable exploration actions in the context of exploration, and those are actually written down nicely.

About the point crawl, I concluded that hunting grounds must be broken down into sites that are special points of interest scattered around the hunting ground. Into sites, there are trails (such as footprints, scents, leads, dead bodies...) that hunters can find and, through their experience, lead them to the next site. The core dice system is designed to always allow the players to succeed, which means that even if those are gated behind a roll they at worst need to pay a price to get them, which should follow the well-known TTRPG principle of three clue rule. The loop of the exploration would be entering a site, dealing with hazards while searching for trails, then finally interpreting those trails (which can point towards more than one site to allow for the player agency) and going to the next site.

I introduced an option for a "wandering predators roll" at the end of each exploration round, but I've yet to really elaborate. As of now, it's a flat 1/6th each round for a predator to spawn unseen.

• Characters

I worked on characters a bit, but I've even less to show. I settled down on a pre-alpha skill list (Melee, Heal, Intimidate, Spot, Tactics, Craft, Conciliate, Lore, Finesse, Shoot, Prowl, Forage, Listen), I decided that attributes were a non-factor and I decided that classes should have animal names and represent the character's Totem Spirit so that they have a diegetic meaning. Classes should affect the starting skills and provide a handful of class actions?

My day three goal was to finish what I had for playtesting, therefore continuing to work on characters and the hunting grounds. I was a little bit under the weather today, so I didn't write as much as I would have liked to. 

I thought about the setting and I got around reading/watching something about prehistory,  which informed me that I want my theme to be a Pop version of it, so that people could relate easily without getting history classes. Dinos and Mammals, spirit magic, cave paintings and all that jazz, it's cool!

I created a handful of playable premade characters for testing, then I worked on classes (Spirit Animals now), but I was grasping at straws for the inventory system and the conditions (which is a way to handle HPs), but nothing I tried seemed to click. I had a lot of cool ideas for a random generator for a Biome though, from a 3x6 table that may be worth be put into the game!

Tomorrow night I've got playtesting night, but my day four goal will be to write down a preliminary draft for each chapter in the game.

Good news! The playtest went very very well!

I've got soo much feedback I'm overwhelmed. The core mechanic works frankly better than expected, so that stays, but I've written down a lot of things we discussed as a playgroup while handling scenes and discussing the themes of the game. Food (as a unit that needs to be tracked) goes.

I've now pretty solid ideas and a direction for the game, what I need is to rewrite and put down my scrambled notes together.