I am a firm believer that a rising tide lifts all ships, and that other Game Designers are not my competition, but my colleagues. I buy their games, they buy mine. We all benefit and we all enjoy.
Naturally, I also feel that a good gaming experience can be had by looking to see what others are doing and seeing what I can bring into my games when I am running them.
When we were working on NIGHT SHIFT we had a fairly strict "no looking at other games" policy. We really wanted our game to have it's own unique feel and direction. But that was last year, and now NIGHT SHIFT is out and I am pulling out all my other games to see what each one has that can help NIGHT SHIFT and what Night Shift has that can help them.
Old School Roots
Jason and I have worked on a lot of games. Both together and separately for dozens of publishers. But the one thing we both enjoy are old-school games. This doesn't mean we don't like new ones, quite the opposite in fact. But it is the old-school design aesthetic that keeps us coming back and saying "what else can we do with this?" NIGHT SHIFT covers both halves of our RPG hearts.
The mechanics in NIGHT SHIFT (what we call O.G.R.E.S. or Oldschool Generic Roleplaying Engine System) are firmly rooted in the Old School mechanics of the world's first popular RPG system. What does this mean? Well if you have been playing RPGs for any length of time since 1974 then chances are good you can pick up the rules for NIGHT SHIFT very, very quickly.
Also, it means that out of the box, NIGHT SHIFT is roughly compatible with thousands of RPG titles.
Appendix A of the NIGHT SHIFT book covers conversions between NS and the Oldest RPG, it also covers conversions between the O.G.R.E.S. of NIGHT SHIFT and the O.R.C.S of other Elf Lair Games products; namely Spellcraft & Swordplay and Eldritch Witchery.
It is no great secret that I LOVE games like WitchCraft and Chill. I have talked many times about my love of both games. Chill was my first Horror RPG and WitchCraft might be my favorite game of all time. Jason and I met while working as freelancers for Eden Studios, the company that made WitchCraft. We worked together on Buffy, Angel, and Army of Darkness. I helped him with his All Flesh Must Be Eaten books and he helped me on Ghosts of Albion. A lot of what is in NIGHT SHIFT came out of our conversations of things we wanted to do in those games.
I guess then it is not a shock or surprise that I see NIGHT SHIFT and the spiritual successor, at least on my shelves and table, to games like Buffy and WitchCraft.
Buffy and WitchCraft defined horror monster hunting for the 90s and into the 2000s. NIGHT SHIFT takes this to 2020 and beyond. With NIGHT SHIFT I want to be able to play anything those other games offered me. Sure the playstyle will be different. WitchCraft is more about the machinations of the Supernatural World. The Gifted (WC) for example are all covered by the Witch Class in NIGHT SHIFT. In WitchCraft though there is a HUGE difference between the Wicce and the Rosicrucians. In NIGHT SHIFT those differences would have to be played out by the players in role-playing. NIGHT SHIFT also is more Normies and Weirdos vs. Dangerous Supernatural types. More like Buffy or Ghosts of Albion in that sense.
All Souls Night
Some games, like say Call of Cthulhu, fit their niche so perfectly that I would not want to run a "Mythos" game with NIGHT SHIFT, but I certainly could borrow ideas from CoC for my NIGHT SHIFT games.
In many ways doing a Plays Well With Others and NIGHT SHIFT is a cheat. One of my own design principles for the game was to make it as flexible as I could so it could cover a wide variety of game and play styles. I am happy in my belief that we succeeded in that.