I'm in the process of writing a story that will most likely go on for quite a while, and it's designed to have a bunch of complex systems like an RPG. Right now, I have plans, but first, my character is a 12-year-old earth pony female, who's also dead. And she's getting reborn, with new parents because her old ones were killed by bandits. I've decided to have her have a new race, but it's going to either be a dragon or a hybrid of a dragon and one other race. What I want help with is choosing what she'll be a hybrid with, if she will be at all. I have a [url= https://strawpoll.com/54pxwf5p]poll for this, and I have a spreadsheet detailing the races and their various statistics. Please vote on this poll.

6643604
Your primary focus as a writer is to tell a story.
Everything else you use, RPG systems or other stuff should be in service of telling a story.

Why can't you choose which hybrid that best fits your plans for your story?
No attack, just wondering.

6643736
Because the story works with any hybrid, albeit it will change certain aspects, and really I'm hoping that the poll doesn't choose channeling because that's the weakest physically, but otherwise I can go with any of the hybrids.

6643604 Make a hybrid of a tentacle pony.

She'd be a tentacle dragon:

6643604
Stories shouldn't have "RPG" systems, because RPG rule systems are abstractions meant to quantify certain things down to numbers or simplistic rock-paper-scissors matches. Those are useful as far as they make it possible to decide outcomes in a game, but they're not good for engaging stories because reality doesn't work that way. The best RPGs in terms of narrative engagement, in fact, are the ones that hide the details of their systems and let the players immerse themselves in the story, rather than forcefully expose a bunch of numbers and statistics, or mechanics, or skill names, or what-have-you from the rulebook.

Stories should have nuanced characters and a well-constructed world, not a system.

Make your characters the ones the stories need, not the ones that readers think they want. Readers, who are necessarily naive about the needs of your story starting out because they're not the ones writing it, will inevitably choose "rule of cool" characters because they have little other basis for guiding their selection. You're the author, you know way more about what your story actually needs because you (should) know where it's going in terms of plot and themes.

I'm saying this as a longtime RPG player, the current GM of an ongoing MLP RPG campaign, and an author interested in writing good stories: please don't write a story like an RPG.

6644304
Huh. I worked backwards really. I wanted to design a set of complex RPG systems meant to be realistic, I've sort of failed the realism considering how ridiculously powerful things can get, but I basically worked from the perspective of "let's design an RPG, and then use this for the basis of a story." That's why I have four separate spreadsheets that I've spent dozens of hours going over to finely balance it to be usable as an actual RPG. I didn't really consider that it could work without an RPG system in place at all. The thing is, I'm an editor for two gamer stories, one of which is called "My Little Pony: The Game" by DoomedPonie, a decently popular story with 3k views, and a different gamer story, that isn't yet released. Both are based on the Korean manga called "The Gamer" which is a manga that I read and got bored of after about a hundred or two hundred chapters. Again, I decided to make a complex RPG system, as in, extremely complex. There's probably about 100 equations, many of them feeding into other equations, with a stupid number of base numbers. I spent way too much time balancing and deciding on things like if it should be linear or exponential, and when I went with mostly exponential I had to find ways to balance that. I was so caught up in it, that it's the primary part of the story. Really, it was going to be along the lines of a gimmick, but a gimmick that was nearly everything and had an insane level of effort put into it. At the same time, that insane level of effort was because it was what I really wanted to do, and it was what was motivating me to do it. Still, I've already got a world thought up, and a beginning, and a motivation for the main character and a base idea of said character, and it's not really that far written out, so I think I could probably convert everything to just a story without all of the numbers.

Still, I'm going to stick with this poll, at least for now. If it gives me the result I dislike (changeling) or the result that really just doesn't feel like it'd matter that much (thestral) both of which are tied in the lead, I'll probably just go with no hybrid or make it part unicorn.

6644364
Since you said what you don't want, I hope nobody trolls you and pushes the worst case.

It's the Internet so you need to be careful.

I use some D&D terms for my magic, but the system isn't very complex because the story isn't about how magic works.

I worry that if you work on the RPG systems, you'll be tempted to explain how things work and get into a lot of info dumps.

Have you seen Barry Sanderson's work on writing magic systems?

6644454
I have not. As for info-dumps, I wouldn't talk in-story about it much. I'd mention the numbers, maybe have the characters note how stupidly complex it is, but I wasn't planning on going on for pages talking about the RPG mechanics. I have four separate spreadsheets for that, meant to be used for people who want to see how the systems work and potentially create their own story.