In contrast to the Too-Hard Basket thread:
what have you worked on that you are extremely pleased at how it turned out?
Mine are my classes for OSR Spaghetti Western and Victorian as well as the firearms rules. They work damn well in combat, not overly complicated, and they seem to satisfy without making firearms too powerful or too weak.
What's in your Happy Basket?
A few bits and pieces here and there.
I was fairly happy at the time with the first game I did which was a sort of T&T/player's option mashup. Could be nostalgia though :)
A few bits and pieces here and there. A MSH-derived powers system from something else, and weapon system based off that, a strength requirement system that balanced TWF vs. two-handed weapon use (adding together Str requirements). Wrote a sourcebook for bad horror adventures on Pluto years ago that had a few bits I was quite happy with - not mechanically or layout wise so much though.
I've very happy with both my House Rules for HERO and my homegrown rules for High Fantasy. And I refuse to accept any blame for damages inflicted by the latter.
Learning how to love the bomb.
I made a decent rules for "epic magic" for BRP, that are still around here though covered in dust, and giving them a fair playtesting, I can say they quite work. And I've been playing with Pickman's Model inspired Cthulhu adventure of my own, that I like to think is my little own "scenario opus".
Well one mechanics thing is the way that simple levels for hit points / damage level and my stun worked out in my old game. so taking 25% of total was a light stun but was also the level of being severely damaged and heavy stun was half of hit points or when you were moderately damaged. happened completely by accident.
Campaign design wise figuring out how religion worked out in my 3.5 D&D game.
Basically doing a good or bad thing gave the gods their power so telling a little white lie gave a minuscule amount of power to the evil god of lies but considering how many little white lies are told added up.
So evil gods didn't need tons of temples and worshipers to function / have power.
It also explained why paladins and clerics took their oaths so seriously. A paladin usually avoided lying as to avoid giving power, even small amounts, to an evil god.
It made acting in order of your God make sense.
I also had a campaign reason Clerics had healing and turning. Mainly to fight the god level Necromancer's minions off. It makes sense. Of course I rewrote spell list for each god so clerics of fire had fireball as a spell, at a higher level. but it allowed battle clerics to be nasty but have little supplementary healing, they could cure wounds but not cure disease, poison, raise dead etc. But had serious buffs and fighting spells. worked out well.
I built a simple mapless vehicle combat system that works just as well for spaceships as it does for submarines, and can be used to quickly set up and run large battles. It's somewhat abstracted but there's still plenty of detail if needed, and surprisingly produces results similar to what would be expected in the real world. That was happy basket material.
My mass combat battle system.
Sounds a bit like Travellers chase sytem (I use a hacked James bond kludge for that by the way that also works well).
Wrote originally for an Amber card game. Ported it over to a colaborative game we were mucking about with on here. Then I ported back to my heartbreaker ran it for real in that space the other weekend and it really felt like it worked.
Enough tactics and skill interaction and the whole battle took 50 mins with newbie PCs 2000+ troops on each side. felt like a game in that it was fun but also felt like it mirrored the game world.