Handheld stat bonuses are items that help with actions the player was already likely to perform by making them more effective or increasing their odds of success. The classic +1 magic longsword comes to mind, it just lets you slice people up better which was something you were going to do anyway, but a regular longsword also fits in this category. You were already able to strike someone, but now you can do it better.
A key part of the definition here is that the player was already likely to perform the action that the item helps with. For example, consider a pair of sticky gloves that make climbing much easier. Those wouldn’t be a handheld stat bonus, unless they were placed in the kind of game where climbing was already a common strategy that players use to overcome problems.
I generally dislike this kind of loot, because it doesn’t offer the players new choices and in many cases doesn’t even ask them to reevaluate their current choices. I do think they can be nice if you’re throwing so much loot at your players that you need some of it to be dead simple, so they’re not overwhelmed. They can also be a nice secondary function for items in the next category.

Engine pieces are items that interact with the rules of the game in a more complex way and encourage the player to find synergies between the item and other items or parts of the games’ rules. Consider for example an axe that enhances the potency of your critical hits. This item could just be treated as a handheld stat bonus (critical hits are something the player wants anyway) but a clever player will pair it with other items, special powers, or unique strategies to increase the frequency of critical hits, which allows them to get more value out of the item. There’s a certain kind of player who really gets off on this sort of stuff, we all know the type. These items are almost exclusively found in games with more robust rule sets, usually centered around combat. I quite like these engine piece items, but I am rarely designing for the kinds of games where they thrive so I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them. Which means it’s time to move onto my favourite kind of loot.

Toys are items that encourage players to engage in lateral thinking, and to come up with totally unique approaches to problems that they wouldn’t have considered otherwise. A certain degree of creativity is required to utilize engine pieces effectively, but that mostly consists of analysing the rules of the game and seeing where the piece can slot in. Toys ask you to consider not the rules, but rather the environment your character finds themselves in and the specific threats they’re up against. Their usage is extremely context-dependent and not very rule-dependent, you’ll need to use the item in very different ways in different situations. I just made a bunch of these for the last Mothership adventure I wrote (The Black Box), so I’ll give you a sneak peek at the back cover as an example:

The thing that draws me to this type of item is that they build on what I love about games that are both strategy focused and light on rules. These kinds of games are great at asking open ended questions. Not asking the players to pick between a set of options, but instead asking them to come up with a solution based on where they are and what they have on hand. Each group will do things differently and each situation will demand a new plan of action. Whenever I design a piece of loot I always ask myself “do I know exactly how my players are going to use this?” and if the answer is yes I’ll usually go back to the drawing board.

I don’t want you to think this attitude applies exclusively to magical, supernatural, or high-tech gear. Giving your players access to a highly flammable oil, a vial of acid or a smoke grenade can all lead to surprisingly interesting situations. However, if players already have a lot of versatile and powerful tools at their disposal, you’ll need to make some pretty flashy and powerful toys if you want them to see some use. This is why I usually have less interest in games with powerful player characters - they tend to encourage players to repeat the same reliable strategies again and again, and they create little need to adapt to the specifics of the situation.

Speaking of the specifics of the situation, I also don’t want you to think this approach to design applies only to items that the players can carry around. Features of the environment can also create opportunities for creativity. The Black Box features a lot of heavy vault doors that slowly close and open electronically using key cards, which can lead to a lot of awesome action scenes. In one play test I saw an android player jam their head in a door to keep it open. Electronic systems like security cameras, magical elements like hexes and wards, and signs of disrepair such as a rickety bridge can all be a part of really novel and engaging plans of action.

I think that’s all I’ve got to say. Try not to come out of this article with ideas of which kinds of items are good and which are boring, instead try to think about how each type has its pros and cons. For an article that’s ostensibly about loot, we sure did get into a lot of my personal design philosophy. Hopefully that was enjoyable. If not, back my adventure, maybe that’ll be more fun for you.

We often think about game mechanics within a particular framework: creating problems for players, and then giving them the tools to solve those problems. Here’s a demon, and here’s a gun to shoot the demon. Here’s a chasm, and here’s Mario - he’s very good at jumping. A lot of mechanics fit into this lense, but I’ve noticed that some have a lot more in common with a restaurant menu than they do any problem-solving tool. These systems aren’t about challenging you or restricting you, they’re about showing you what your options are and suggesting things you might not have come up with yourself. I’ll explain what I mean using some examples from both tabletop RPGs and video games.

The Sims 4 shipped with a feature called whims (now replaced with a similar system called wants) which shows a trio of activities your Sim is considering. These are influenced by your Sim’s personality, mood and surroundings. For example a goofball Sim or a Sim in a playful mood might want to play a prank on someone, and a sim who owns an easel might want to paint. Fulfilling a whim grants ‘reward points’, which can be spent to buy some neat items and upgrades for your Sims, but as I see it that’s not really the point. Most players don’t care about reward points that much. The more important purpose of whims is to suggest actions that seem fitting for your sim and to remind you of context-dependent actions you might have forgotten about. This is pretty useful because the game has a huge variety of actions your Sim could take, spread across countless sub-menus.

Let’s use my new Mothership supplement, Stress Vents, as another example. It offers each character a list of check boxes that looks like this:

That little number in the box shows how many stress points the character heals by performing that action for the first time in the session. Crucially, healing one or two stress points isn’t a huge benefit but it’s just enough to encourage players to look at that list a few times per session. If the reward for fulfilling a vent was too great, players would go out their way to make sure their character was checking the right boxes at exactly the right time, which isn’t what I want. Mothership is a very
high-stakes and strategic game, so sometimes things like characterization and relationships fall by the wayside. I made Stress Vents to help players keep those things in mind, not to prompt them to strategize. The only reason there’s any reward at all for checking the boxes is because players tend to prioritise remembering rules above remembering pieces of advice, so my player aid wears the skin of a real game mechanic to help it catch more attention. If I may be so bold, this sub-system is a little more elegant than The Sims’ whims because it rewards the players with an existing system (stress) rather than inventing a whole new one.

The xp system from Blades in the Dark is another good example. It takes a similar approach by rewarding players for performing actions that help to flesh out their character, as well as their role within the team and the world at large:

Experience points are a bit more of a substantial reward than I was offering in Stress Vents, but that works out fine because the system doesn’t care as much when you meet the criteria so annoying meta-gaming and over-optimising still isn’t an issue. For those who haven’t played, it’s important to note that ‘heritage’ and ‘background’ are both specific character traits players were asked to outline during character creation. That second item on the list would be way too vague otherwise.

As seen in that last example lot of these reminder mechanics end up serving double-duty, filling some other role in the game as well as acting as a player aid. The challenges in DOOM (2016) do a good job at this:

The main purpose of challenges is to provide an optional goal for when a given player finds the game’s fights too easy or too simple, but they also provide an excuse for the developers to keep an array of useful tips on the map screen at all times. They also give the player a reason to look at the tips. I don’t know about you, but I almost never find myself reading advice or info presented to me during a loading screen or pause menu. But if it’s a challenge? Well, now I’m interested. For most players the “Find 3 Secrets” challenge is how you find out that there are secrets in the game. The game explained earlier that different angles of attack provide different Glory Kill animations, but you probably didn’t read that (and if you did, you probably forgot). Killing two weak enemies with a single shotgun blast is a hell of a lot of fun, and a nice way to increase your ammo efficiency, but a lot of players wouldn’t ever think to try it without challenges to prompt them.

We’re very used to thinking about game design in terms of incentives and storytelling, but I’d also encourage you to think about your player’s memory and how you want to manage it. Is there a way you can offer some suggestions and reminders to help them enjoy the experience better? I bet there is.

If you’re a Mothership player, Stress Vents is free for its first week so give it a try at your table! Also, I’m going to point you towards the kickstarter again.

Have a good one.

Despite how it seems when you see ‘looking for group’ posts on discord servers and subreddits, most RPG players care more about who they play with than what they play. This should make sense to any well adjusted person, playing a mediocre game with people you like is always going to be more worthwhile than playing a great game with difficult or boring people. This means that a lot of people with very different tastes in RPGs can end up at the same table.

Enter Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, the ultimate middle ground. It has a robust and complex combat system that lets you crunch some numbers and burn a whole session on long fights if you want to, but it’s also simple enough that the less combat-focused players won’t get lost. Characters can die suddenly, but they can also come back just as quickly. Regarding the game’s setting, world building lead Chris Perkins has said that “One of the great strengths of the Realms has always been that a million stories can take place there.”2 Even ignoring the game’s default setting as many people do, the world as implied by the game’s mechanics is so tonally ambiguous that it essentially functions as a blank slate. These days you can find a product online that lets you reskin the game to fit pretty much any genre.

To a lot of RPG fans fifth edition seems to lean heavily towards a rules-dense, combat centric playstyle but compare it to previous editions, and to popular games inspired by those editions like Pathfinder and Lancer, and you’ll see how it serves as an inoffensive compromise between a lot of different playstyles. The inherent flexibility of tabletop RPGs serves to enhance this; you can run pretty much any style of game in any system and have a good time, especially when it comes to a game that has fairly generic mechanics outside of combat. Classic detective noir, Victorian romance, GMless post apocalyptic exploration, you name it and with a little extra effort it can be run in fifth edition without anything going obviously or tragically wrong.

Even just trying out a new game is a big commitment. RPG sessions are a hot commodity; If you’re reading this I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how challenging it is to get your friends around the table on a regular basis. Even if you’re lucky enough to be able to play every week or two, it still feels like precious time you can’t waste. Then consider the fact that most people playing D&D or a similar game tend to play very long campaigns, many of which intentionally don’t have an end in sight. Playing something new would mean saying goodbye, or at least taking a break from, a beloved cast of characters and a world they have spent years with or intend to spend years with. People used to that playstyle might assume that playing a new game means a giving it a similar time commitment. So if you’re trying to get your group on board with trying out a new game, consider giving it a prescribed length; “Let’s try playing Delta Green for two or three sessions” can sound a lot less scary than “Let’s try Delta Green”.

That last paragraph is a pretty easy concern to address: unless your group has found a game that’s a perfect fit, it’s probably better to play shorter adventures in a variety of systems to see what works. The harder pill to swallow is that there probably isn’t a perfect fit, and there might not even be a good fit. You and your friends might not be able to find a game that all of you are a big fan of. Which means you might just have to continue rotating between playing different games that appeal to different people at the table.

While I’m sure a lot of groups do this, I get the impression it’s not as common as it should be because it requires a certain level of maturity. You’ll eventually have to show up to the table for weeks or months on end to play something that really isn’t your cup of tea, and if this is going to work you’ll need to engage with the game sincerely and be an attentive player instead of being shitty about it.

This is sort of how my RPG group works. Our main GM Beth is running Blades in the Dark in the Shadowrun setting. She’d rather be playing the actual Shadowrun system but the rest of us wouldn’t, so she’s settled for this. I’d much rather be playing in Blades’ default setting of Doskvol, but I put up with the cyberpunk elves without complaining too much. I GM sometimes and there’s compromises there too. Things like snacks, hosting and scheduling can all have a role to play as well.

So you’ve got some options here. You can perpetually play a game that nobody is 100% happy with but everyone finds acceptable, you can rotate between different games to cater to different members of the group, or you can use a little bit of both approaches like my group. If this article encourages at least one RPG table to sit down and have a normal adult conversation about this sort of thing, that’s a huge win in my book.

Check This Out

RPG Trader just opened up, it’s an online storefront made just for TTRPGs. Itch.io is great but to me it seems like it’s primarily designed for the video game crowd, so it’s exciting to see something open up that’s just for us. Check it out and see if there’s anything there you like. I’ve made all of my work 60% off until Sunday to celebrate its launch.

Also, if you’re looking for Part 1, it’s here.

You wake up in a hospital bed with a killer pain in your neck. You have no idea how you got there, and you have no memories of your life before this moment. When you find the strength to get up and start looking around, this corporate memo is the first thing you find:

That is, usually, how my Mothership scenario More Of Me begins. The intention is for the warden to print out a physical copy of this memo and hand it to the players when they find it. More Of Me contains 4 other handouts like this one, and the first scenario of my next adventure The Black Box contains even more than that. Let’s go through a list of reasons why I love these diegetic handouts and what I think they add to a scenario. Along the way you’ll learn a thing or two about how to write your own.

Reason 1: It engages the players without pandering to them.

I hate to write what Matt Colville calls a ‘theme park game’, where it feels like the whole world is tailored for the players and serves them information and opportunities on a platter. Of course, we are tailoring a lot of things to the players, but they shouldn’t feel like we are. They should feel like they’ve stumbled into a world that existed long before they got here. To achieve this I always make sure my handouts don’t feel like a straightforward explanation, but rather a slice of an ongoing conversation. If we turn out attention back to Prechburg’s memo above, we can see that despite having none of the necessary context for the conversation, players can learn a few important pieces of information:

• We are inside the Prechburg Eternalism Institute, which seems like a workplace where some locations (but not this one) are under surveillance.

• Someone named Elon Prechburg is in charge here.

• We are in the ‘medical wing’, implying there are other zones with their own purposes.

This memo also raises a couple important questions:

• What is the “transcendence project”?

• What are the “revolutionary ambitions of the institute”?

• The surgical team has encountered “unprecedented and unpredictable complications”, what does that mean?

That’s a lot of information, and most groups will pick up on all of it. They’ll also learn a little about Prechburg from the way that the message is written, which is nice because they’re likely to meet him in person towards the end of the session.

Reason 2: The immersion to effort ratio can be huge.

These handouts offer this incredible level of synchronicity between player and character that you don’t usually get in RPGs. The character is holding and reading the exact same piece of paper that the player is. This is why corporate memos and research summaries work so well here. They’re very easy to emulate visually, because they’re not designed to look pretty or unique. Mothership’s retro-futurist elements also work to my benefit here because communications, documentation and advertising from the early/mid 20th century are usually a lot easier to emulate than the modern equivalents. That’s how I end up writing a newspaper for a city-sized space station that looks like it’s from the 80s:

Regardless of how much useful information is actually conveyed in your handout, they can also be great just for worldbuilding purposes. A lot of players will find it super fucking cool to read even just a snippet of something written by a character in the world they’re supposed to be in. There’s a reason why when you see this stuff in video games, it’s usually the ones with unique and powerful settings like Skyrim and Dishonored.

In theory, it could be a bit of a bummer to present the players with a place containing lots of documents and only allow them to actually see one of them, or to only allow them to see the front page of a newspaper and not the whole thing, but in my experience that hasn’t really been an issue.

Reason 3: Players get to control their attention and
the pacing of information to suit their playstyle.

We all know there’s a demographic of players that mostly or entirely care about strategic concerns (reaching the end of the dungeon alive, solving the mystery as fast as possible, etc.) and aren’t super worried about the narrative, especially when it gets in the way and slows things down. I have another article on how to use the environment to tell interesting stories to these players, and these handouts can be great for that.

They can also be a great litmus test for an RPG group, as players will naturally end up using a diegetic handout in the way that fits their playstyle best. Groups who are less character and lore focused will skim the handout so they can get back to the action. Groups who love learning about the world and the scenario’s backstory will carefully scour each handout to eek out every little detail.

What if your group is a bit of mix? Let’s say we have a group where one player is super interested in the environmental storytelling, and the other is mostly just there to kill the bad guys. That first player will probably be the one reading the handout. They might read it to themselves and summarise the important bits to their partner, or they might read the whole thing out while the other player gives half of their attention. Even in the latter you’re still creating a ‘best of both worlds’ experience, because presenting information through handouts instead of NPCs encourages a ‘less is more’ approach to storytelling. When done right, players with itchy trigger fingers will be thankful for this brevity, while the rest of the table will always be left wanting more (in a good way).

I am oversimplifying things by talking about it exclusively from the strategy vs narrative angle, players could also be skimming handouts because they prefer a fast-paced experience, or because they only care about the parts of the story that relate to their characters and a scenario’s backstory is less appealing to them. Regardless, they have control over how much and how closely they want to read.

I think that’s a wrap on this one. If you GM regularly, I’d encourage you to try using this kind of handout at least once and see how your players like it. It might be a hit. If it is, come back and leave a comment to let me know. I do like to see the blog’s subscriber count go up, but I love to hear about people actually being inspired to write or play their games differently because of my articles.

The Watchdog Magenta

The Watchdog Magenta is my new supplement for the Mothership module A Pound Of Flesh. It includes nine handouts, each one being the front page of the local newspaper. You just saw one of them earlier in this very article, because I’m sneaky like that. You can get the whole thing for free for the next week.

The Brief is the handout you send to your players before the story begins. It lays out who the player characters will be, and the circumstances they’ll find themselves in when things kick off. Matt Colville has a video on this kind of handout, and he discusses how one of its main purposes is to set expectations. Players should know what world they’re in, how they will be perceived by ordinary people, and how their character creation choices are going to play into that. General playstyle expectations can be good to mention too: how lethal the game will be, how light/dark the tone will be, will there be much politics or social drama, etc.

Setting information can be really helpful. It saves you from explaining a lot of that sort of stuff during play, and it’s the kind of info that’s good to have on hand because players might need to reread it several times across an adventure or campaign. I also find it helps with immersion to have players enter a world with some of the context that their character would have.

While setting information is most needed for campaigns set in worlds other than our own, that’s not the only time you’ll need it. If the story is set in our world, but in a time or place that the players are not used to, it can still be worth filling them in. The last time I wrote a brief for an adventure, it was a Kids on Bikes game I ran last year which was set in the fictional town of Southridge, California. Three of my players’ characters grew up in this town so it was important to me that they would have some knowledge going in, otherwise there would be this dissonance where the location felt very familiar to the characters but entirely unknown to the players. It was also important for this adventure to enable the players to direct themselves around the town by checking in with familiar people and visiting familiar locations, without me having to prompt them. That’s why the second page of the handout looked like this:

I assured my players that they could investigate anything on this page whenever they wanted and it would lead somewhere interesting. That’s how I run a small town sandbox adventure where it feels like the players are actually initiating things instead of going through a pre-planned decision tree. I wrote this handout after character creation, so some of the information directly refers to player characters and their friends, and my players came up with some of the rumours. Obviously you wouldn’t do that in most sci-fi and fantasy settings, because players would be making their characters based on info from the handout, but for a contemporary small town it works great. You can see this approach more clearly on the next page:

The premise of this adventure involved our player characters each returning to Southridge, California after leaving for many years. I needed to lay out the timeline of events for that so we were all on the same page, but I also sprinkled in a few larger world events: the invention of the iPhone, Instagram entering the mainstream, and the official end of the Iraq War. I chose those three because I felt they’d help my players understand the technological, social and political situation of being a Californian teenager in 2013, so that they could better get into character. I think a little historical context goes a long way, whether you’re in a fictional setting or not. It’s easy to go overboard, though.

Speaking of which, let’s make sure your players actually read this damn thing (and not just physically look at it with their eyes, but actually internalize the information). I agree with Colville that handouts should be short and sweet, and that one page is usually a good restriction to put on yourself. The aforementioned brief was three pages, but I think it’s still very easy reading for any player. Part of that is that the art and headers are nice. When you’re writing a handout that you’re only showing to a few friends, you can steal art from wherever you like (the art you’re seeing here is from the Kids on Bikes books). I don’t have that luxury when I’m writing for my actual RPG products, so I make sure to take full advantage of it for home games and you should too. This handout was also my first attempt at using Adobe Indesign, but I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone who doesn’t need to use it for work. Just make things as pretty as you can be bothered using Google Docs or whatever else.

The other thing I want to mention in terms of readability is to try to use bullet points and lists whenever you can. In an old blog post of his, Sean McCoy said: “Can this text be bullet points? Can these bullet points be a table? Can this table be a diagram? Can this diagram be an illustration?”, and I try to follow that in my work. If you’re just making something for your home game, diagrams and illustrations are probably too much but you should embrace bullet points whenever you can, and a table might work well from time to time. Blocks of text are often necessary, but they’re the most boring and stale way to present information so if there’s another way that will work, do that.

I think that’s all I have to say on non-diegetic handouts. This was originally just meant to be a preamble for next week’s article, but I decided you folks would probably prefer two short articles to a longer one. So here we are. See you next week.

Check This Out

Friend of the blog Skinkworks Games has a Mothership scenario that just launched on Kickstarter. A murder mystery on a haunted space yacht. Not sure if it gets cooler than that. Give it a look.

Solo role playing games. When I was only an occasional hobbyist designer, they never really interested me at all. I just had a hunch they weren’t for me, and I wasn’t even sure if they could be any good. They’ve always been the weird cousin that I never really talked to, but in real life I’m the weird cousin, so now that I’m taking RPGs more seriously I thought it was high time I gave them a fair shot. I reached out to some solo RPG designers, I played their games, and I interviewed them about their experiences making solo games and their thoughts on the medium. I played:

• Detective game Caught in the Rain and conspiratorial reverse horror game Space Vampire, both by Nicholas Robinia of Ravensridge Emporium

• Map-based world building game Cartograph by Brandon Lee of
  Ravensridge Emporium

• Autobiographical game LOGAN by Logan Timmins

• Riot grrrl inspired political piece Looking Presentable by Robin Small

• Relationship focused superhero game Do No Harm by Comprehensible

(Some of these games were provided to me for free by the designers.)

I learned a lot about what solo games are like to play and what kinds of stories they are often used to tell. Do I like them now? No spoilers. Keep reading.

Emergent Narrative

One of the things that turned me off of solo games is that you have no one else to help you create a story. It’s just you, spinning a narrative out of thin air all on your own. Except that not true, it’s you and the game. What really surprised me was how much a solo game can work alongside you to create narrative twists and satisfying resolutions that you did not see coming, even though it’s up to you to interpret things and decide exactly how the story pans out. A well made solo game can work with you, but it can also throw a mean curveball.

How does that happen? If you read the rules before you play, how can the game itself surprise you? Nicholas Robinia’s Caught in the Rain does this very well, and Robinia explained how:

“There is a general need or tendency for our brains to identify patterns and create connections and create meaning. … I think the player, in bringing in those connections, is also bringing in moments of surprise as well.”

A good solo RPG design is really leaning on that pattern-seeking neurology that we all possess, and working alongside it to create a totally unique and emotionally resonant story with the player, rather than telling a story to the player or expecting them to come up with it whole cloth. My game of Caught in the Rain ended with the unraveling of a police conspiracy, and a race to save the last clean cop from sniper fire. My Cartograph game included a huge cult-city that terraformed the landscape with black magic. None of these are events built into the game, and I don’t really feel like they’re parts of the story I decided on per se, they just sort of emerged out of thin air. Like magic.

Is this style of game more work than playing a group RPG? Yes, I’d say in my experience it is. While it’s not a perfect comparison, it feels like I am using more of my GM brain than my player brain during most solo games. Brandon Lee makes this connection as well:

“I think generally you’re taking on more of the role of the game master than the player. … You’re not really taking on the role of this character necessarily, as you would in some group games.”

Is it as much work as being a game master? I don’t think so. For one thing it’s a lot less pressure, because you can move at your own pace and take breaks whenever you want. Additionally, a good solo game works with the player to make the storytelling process easier.

This very open-ended design isn’t the only way for a solo game to be structured. Some of them do take the reigns a little more. I’ve seen some great results from games that script out certain things that must happen (or are likely to happen) in your story. Do No Harm has several different kinds of random generation for its story elements, but it also has a list of Events, which always happen and always in the same order (assuming your story isn’t cut short by one of the more tragic endings). LOGAN contains lists of scenes for you to choose from, each of which is carefully framed to show a moment from the life of designer Logan Timmins. These include ‘milestone moments’, which happen during every playthrough and each contain hundreds of words of prose to be read during gameplay, like slices of a memoir.

I found these games to be less demanding on my storytelling muscles because of their semi-scripted nature, but I was left wondering if these games had any replay value. When I asked Comprehensible about this, he explained “I really am not focused on replayability”. We don’t expect a video game to vary wildly each time we play, why put that expectation on an RPG? Sometimes a game can just tell a single interactive story, and that’s enough.

Danger and Strategy

A good role playing game needs to tell a good story, and to surprise you along the way, but usually we also expect it to introduce some amount of risk. The possibility to fail, or at least to not get what we want all the time. This can feel tricky to do, since we’re being asked to both embody the protagonist and work against them at the same time. Nicholas Robinia commented:

“One of the common questions I get when people come up to me to talk about some of these games is: “how does the game stop me from just dictating that I win?”. … Maybe a lot of these players lean so heavily into the mechanisms of the game, and leave the storytelling up to the game master predominantly, that they don’t actually know how the story is being told or how it could be told in a different way.”

Sometimes solo games ask you to be your own game master, and decide on what would be most fair or interesting instead of just giving the protagonist what they want. Sometimes the game can do that for you by laying down rules that take control from you. Comprehensible described games that offer little strategy and mechanical challenge as “narrative randomizers” and solo games that offer a lot of challenge through their rules as “solitaire but with a very thin fictional veil”.

The latter is definitely how I felt playing Space Vampire. The game gives you prompts to journal in the voice of your vampire and spin a narrative around what you’re doing, but I didn’t find that side of things to be as robust as I’d hoped. It felt like set dressing for what was ultimately a board game. Which is not inherently a bad thing, I had some fun with it.

Cartograph designer Brandon Lee says:

“I always find my enjoyment in a role playing game, solo or otherwise, is one where there is still some tangible amount of game. For me the presence of a game infers that there must be some presence of strategizing. … Winning obviously is often not [the goal] in role playing games, but avoiding loss certainly is.”

I can empathize with that preference, but I definitely had a good time playing LOGAN despite the fact that it guarantees a happy ending and involves no real strategy (your character can mess things up and endure misfortune, but those moments are either the fault of the dice or they’re unavoidable). I think we include game mechanics that offer danger and strategy for a variety of reasons, none of which are particularly unique to solo RPGs. One is particularly relevant to solo RPGs though, which Lee brought up later in the interview:

“I think another element that these mechanics in these narrative games provides is that I think it alleviates some cognitive load. It allows a player, particularly in a solo game, to offload some of the minutiae of the narrative to an abstracted mechanic. … You’re already doing so much in a solo game.”

In my experience, the most valuable solo RPG mechanics have been the ones that offer this kind of streamlining to the player. Caught in the Rain offers some simple mechanics to help you handle any immediate threats that might be coming for your character during a scene. This was a huge help in terms of allowing me to think about my character’s actions without having to decide when these threats would come into play. The rules made that choice for me.

A lot of this is down to personal preference of course. I get the sense that a big part of what separates solo RPGs into its different subgenres (whatever those may be) is how much of the game is open to interpretation and how much of it feels adjacent to a board game.

Introspection

One thing all of my interviewees mentioned at one point or another was a solo game’s capacity to make you look inward and contemplate. This definitely matches up with my experience playing them. Talking to another character during gameplay would feel very awkward to most people, as it essentially amounts to talking to yourself. Even when journaling my experiences during Caught in the Rain, my session of which involved a lot of social drama, I naturally gravitated towards writing about important conversations as if I were explaining them to a third party, like the narration in Bladerunner or Fight Club.

Several designers mentioned how a solo experience has less ‘energy’ than a group RPG does. Comprehensible said: “This is obvious but I feel like they are well suited for stories where the protagonist is isolated in some way.” Which could be taken in a literal sense, but also in an emotional sense. My Caught in the Rain character, despite spending a lot of time in conversations with people, felt like she was always alone in a deeper sense.

Logan Timmins mentioned how the end goal is often not to isolate the player, but to encourage them to look inwards in a new way:

“You can get a lot more personal in solo RPGs and really invite people to explore quite sensitive topics. … You don’t have to worry about interpersonal dynamics. … I tend to see people are more willing to go to those deeper places when there’s no fear of being judged by anyone else. You can go to deeper emotional places, you can also go to weirder places.”

On the topic of protagonists, he also said: “I don’t create a strong protagonist. My design intention is to create space for the player themselves to be the protagonist.” Comprehensible made a similar point:

“I think solo game protagonists tend to be more like the people that are playing them, and I think that is a compelling character. Everyone is going to come in with different experiences and goals for what they want out of the game and I think that reflection of them as fictional characters helps to develop the game.”

Saying Something

As well as the player, the designer is also able to weave their experiences deeper into the fabric of the game in a solo format. In a group RPG, some (probably not all) participants read the rules before you play, after which you all put the book down and aim not to spend a lot of time reading during the session. With solo RPGs it makes a lot more sense to have the text open in front of you during play, and a lot of them almost require it.

I saw both LOGAN and Looking Presentable use this to their advantage a lot. I’ve already mentioned the slices of autobiographical writing that LOGAN presents to you for reading during gameplay. Looking Presentable asks you questions as you perform cosmetic procedures on the paper dolls in front of you. Questions like: “Surely it’s her job to make sure what’s being sold to her is safe?” We aren’t prompted to respond to these questions in any concrete way, they’re just presented for us to consider. Logan Timmins pointed out how when the GM is expected to relay information “things can get lost in communication”, so there’s sometimes a benefit to cutting out the middle man.

Both of these games felt a lot more vulnerable and raw than what I’m usually used to from RPGs. I’m aware that this isn’t something unique to solo games, but I think they (and their designers) trend towards sincerity and honesty in a way that I find really admirable. Robin Small, designer of Looking Presentable, told me in regards to her game’s message: “It’s one thing to read an essay about it, it’s another to directly do it in game form and I think that engenders a very different sort of reaction.” It’s not a game that incorporates fictional characters or any kind of protagonist. It almost doesn’t have a narrative in a traditional sense. Timmins was very vocal about how he made LOGAN first and foremost for himself, as a way to process and explore the experiences of his life, and to turn them into art. If you’re looking for the kind of art that only small, independent artists can provide, I think solo RPGs are a great place to look.

My takeaways

While playing solo RPGs, regardless of how much I’m caught up in the moment, there is always a lingering feeling that there’s a piece missing. Similar to when I’m playing an instrument, there’s a sense of “well if I’m not doing this with my friends, then what’s even the point?”. While I don’t think I’m deeply in love with solo RPGs in quite the same way I am the rest of the medium, I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed them. So for those of you who haven’t gotten around to them yet, I’m going to gently push solo games your way like an insistent parent feeding a toddler: “How do you know you don’t like them, you haven’t even tried one yet!”.

If you’re going to play one of the games I tried for this article, I’d really recommend Caught in the Rain. It was among my favourites and I think it’s a great showcase of what solo RPGs have to offer.

The Black Box

Mothership people, or people interested in trying Mothership, I have a multi-session adventure coming to Kickstarter sometime in the next few months. Here’s the pitch:

Pharmacology magnate Anna Brechardt-Emlin has lost contact with her father and is fearing the worst. She needs someone to investigate his workplace, a secretive storage compound stationed on the barren desert planet known as Red Sands. For whatever reason, none of her the usual mercenaries will take the job. Weird. She's enlisted a crew of miserable, cash-hungry contractors instead. This rescue mission will take them out of the material world as we know it and into a terrifying, psychological place humanity will likely never understand, created by a mirror that reflects only pain. The Black Box.

If you think you might want to support The Black Box as it comes to life, follow the pre-launch page on Kickstarter!

I’ve been watching a lot of GM advice videos lately. Some of them are good, some aren’t. One of the better ones was about a particular approach to dungeon design (called Jaquaysing the dungeon) and I was stuck thinking about why all this very valuable advice wasn’t making its way into my work. I think it’s because pretty much all of my dungeon design at the moment is for Mothership. Some horror dungeons I’ve seen closely resemble your typical D&D dungeon, but all the best ones are the ones that don’t. The ones that really make you feel like a horror movie protagonist rather than a tomb raider. Let’s talk about how to do that.

What is a horror dungeon, anyway?

When I talk about horror dungeons, I’m not just talking about theming. I don’t just mean a dungeon with ghouls and ghosts and skeletons, and I don’t just mean a dungeon that is scary. To me, a Real Horror Dungeon is one where the players have good strategic reasons to be scared of the monster (or monsters). This is a monster that might launch a brutal ambush if they don’t keep an eye out. This is a monster that is more powerful than they are. Running and hiding is probably a better idea than fighting.

If the players can’t just walk in and kill the big bad, they need something else to do instead. There are three main ways you can go about this:

• Escape only: The players ended up in this situation by accident or against their will. Their goal is to escape.

• In and out: The players have some non-combat objective they need to complete inside the dungeon, and after that they need to escape.

• Silver bullet: The players are here to kill a monster, but they need to complete some non-combat objective before they have a chance in the fight. Encountering the monster before then is bad news.

You can achieve this experience in any RPG system obviously, but some are better at it than others. Also the more your players are expecting to win fights, the more explicitly you will have to telegraph that fighting might not be the best option. If you’ve been running a normal Pathfinder campaign and your players find themselves in a Real Horror Dungeon, you might need pause the game and explain to them directly that things will be different. Otherwise, you’ll probably TPK. Fast.

Hide and seek

In your typical dungeon, each room is its own challenge. Players enter a room and they fight the bad guys, solve the puzzle, etcetera, after which they loot the room, search the room, and maybe rest. Then they’ll assess the room’s exits and decide which room to enter next, and encounter a new challenge to face.

The Real Horror Dungeon does not work this way. At least one monster is prowling around somewhere in the dungeon, and the moment the players make a loud sound or shine a light somewhere that the monster can see, it will take notice. It might be actively hunting the players down, or it might just be inconveniently positioned in between the players and their objective, ready to kill any passers by.
I am always asking my players whether they’re using their torches or not. Whenever they make a loud noise I’m thinking about how far that noise travels, and how anyone or anything nearby might respond. My players are always trying to figure out how to spot the monster before it spots them.

Moving between rooms is the challenge, more so than any individual room is a challenge. So you can’t just design the dungeon room by room. You need to take the whole dungeon, or at least the section where the players and the monster are likely to cross paths, and design it as one encounter.

In my opinion, random encounter tables should never be used in this style of play. Unless your monsters are incapable of opening doors, every monster should respond as soon as your players fire a gun or cast a lightning bolt, so you need to be approximately keeping track of where every monster is even before the players meet them. I can suspend my disbelief in this way when it comes to a regular D&D dungeon, but not a Real Horror Dungeon. Encounters should not be random, they should result from the game of hide and seek.

Individual rooms might have their own challenges, but these have lower stakes than the game of hide and seek (and should usually be optional). Each room still needs to be important, though. Here are some things players might do in a room other than confronting a challenge:

• Learn new information about the dungeon, the monster, or something else

• Find helpful items or facilities

• Meet someone who isn’t likely to become dangerous

• See something that terrifies them, or otherwise helps to set the tone

Quick Fights

Hide and seek can’t last forever. Eventually the players will be found, and the rising tension will explode into an action sequence. These should happen fast, and don’t have to end with one side defeating the other. Monsters (usually) feel pain, so even if they are “winning” a fight, they might step away to recover. A pack of monsters might step away to regroup, rebuild morale, and try a new tactic. Players will often end the fight by running away to places where the monster can’t or doesn’t want to follow. Once the fight ends, you’re likely going back to hide and seek.

If you have a monster larger than the players, always think about what doorways it can and can’t fit through and how that impacts its ability to chase the players. One of my favourite ways to design a floor is to have a large lobby or hallway that the monster can easily wander, surrounded by lots of smaller rooms that are easier to keep it out of. Now every time the players want to travel to a new room, they need to distract or confront the monster. Short bursts of action, followed by periods of rest. Do you understand how, again, we’re not thinking one room at a time? We’re thinking about the whole location as one space.

You can take this multi-room approach even further with the way you run your monsters during combat. Have them throw people around, drag someone away from the group, leap onto someone, or trip and crash through windows. This mirrors how a lot of action sequences happen in horror movies. It’s pretty rare to see it all play out in one room.

The Map

This article probably explains why all of my scenarios come with not just a map for the warden but also a map for the players, which they gain access to pretty much as soon as they enter the building. In a classic dungeon crawl players might like to draw out a map of the dungeon as they go, but it’s often not super necessary because the problem they are trying to solve is in the room with them. If they do need a map, it’s probably for some sort of plan they’re setting up and not a heat of the moment decision.

In the Real Horror Dungeon style of play, having a map of the building is an essential visual aid in the same way fighting on a grid is essential for a game of Draw Steel. A good horror game is not a game played one room at a time.

Put your money where my mouth is!

More Of Me is out now, and is free for its first two weeks. It will blow your socks off. My latest Mothership scenario built around all of the ideas I discussed in this article, and it is crammed so full of insane science fiction horror it’s almost too bizarre and informationally dense. Almost. I was lucky enough to be able to watch the final playtest, which was probably the best RPG session I have ever witnessed. Try it out.

How many playlists?

GMing is hard, and you only have so much mental RAM to work with, so we probably only want to switch between playlists a few times per session. Sometimes I have a player in charge of switching between playlists2, but that player shouldn’t be getting distracted from the game by opening their phone all the time.

Most of the time when I’m getting music ready for a new campaign or RPG, I have two or three playlists:

• a gentle and relaxed playlist

• a dark and foreboding playlist

• optional: a playlist for action sequences like fights, chases and disasters

One playlist could work, but I find that this creates emotional dissonance during certain scenes. I really want to avoid suspenseful tracks during scenes that feel safe and gentle songs during life threatening or reality warping moments.

The reason the action playlist is optional is because in a lot of my favourite systems, we don’t spend a lot of time in action sequences and it’s easier to just pick out a song or two to use. Maybe each session or location gets its own song. I actually prefer a single song to a playlist in this context, for reasons we will touch on later.

Sometimes I have more than three playlists. In that case I like to have a very concrete method to decide which playlist to use, so I don’t need to think about it while running (or so the player handling music can easily tell which one I want). I might have different combat playlists for different enemy types (ghost, robot, dragon, etc.) or playlists for different locations (a city playlist and a wilderness playlist for example). I once co-DMed a hexcrawl where we had seven playlists for the seven environments in the region, plus one for dungeons and one for bosses. That was fun. Lots of playlists, but still only using a few per session.

What makes a good playlist?

Avoid large changes in mood. All the songs should feel fairly similar when it comes to things like intensity, suspense, speed (the bpm doesn’t need to be similar, but they should feel roughly as fast as each other). You shouldn’t have to skip a song because it isn’t right for the current moment. You should be able to pick a playlist and be confident that every song in that playlist is a good fit for what’s happening. Each song should be internally consistent too, so one that really amps up halfway through is a no-go.

Keep it short. Around 60 minutes is the sweet spot for me. If your playlist is a couple of hours long I think it’s best to trim it down. For one thing this lets you keep things consistent. You’re smashing together different albums, artists and soundtracks and attempting to create a cohesive whole. You don’t want a random grab bag of things that all fit the title. You want it to feel 80% as cohesive and distinct as a regular soundtrack would.

Also, shorter playlists result in more familiarity. Whenever I hear Clear The Cobwebs by Mark McGuire I am pulled back to the fictional town of Southridge, California. If your playlist is five hours long, players only hear each song once every session, which is probably once every three weeks or more. They are unlikely to develop an emotional connection to those songs. Shorter playlists also make the other two points on this list easier to achieve.

Create a musical identity, not just an emotional one. I hate to hear a hard rock track and an orchestral track in the same playlist3. Think about the genres and instruments you want for the sound of your story. Is your game brass-heavy?
Synth-y? Punk rock?

Searching for songs

Generally we want to use instrumental tracks that have a fairly consistent mood throughout the song. Here are the first places I look when making a new playlist:

• Old playlists. Sometimes recycling can save you a lot of work.

• Other people’s playlists. Sometimes there’s reddit flair and discord channels for this, but you can also just search the name of your RPG (or a similar RPG if yours is too indie) on a music streaming service and steal from others’ public playlists.

• Soundtracks. Generally I have more luck with video games than with film and TV. Interactive entertainment has different needs. A lot of films also get too orchestral for my liking. Keep in mind some soundtracks might be available on music streaming services as playlists but not as albums.

• Albums and artists already in the playlist. Some of my best playlists are mostly made up of one or two artists. When you find one song that works, pilfer through the album and the artist’s discography for as long as you can be bothered. Using multiple tracks from the same artist will also make your playlist more cohesive.

• Synth artists. They get a special mention here because if you’re doing anything sci-fi or neo-noir or whatever, artists like Marconi Union, Carpenter Brut and Nina Richards are your best friends.

• Darren Korb. This guy has been in my players’ ears for almost a decade. Check him out. Don’t be scared to use him in your fantasy game, even the songs with electric guitar and contemporary drums. It just works somehow.

Obviously you don’t need to care about your music this much, but I hope you do! Your ears deserve it. Happy sound-searching!

Check This Out

Weird Place is a great TTRPG youtube channel, and I particularly recommend their videos looking at RPG culture in different countries. Try this one about Japan.

• Realism: When the players look at their map, it should look like a place designed for people to live in and/or work in. Where is the generator on this research base? Where do these pirates keep their food? Even if players don’t consciously notice whether a location feels real, I think they can feel it subconsciously.

• No Duds: Each room the players step into should add to the atmosphere or narrative, and it should have some gameplay significance too. Every time one of my players opens a door they should be holding their breath a little and leaning forward in their chair, because they should be 100% sure that whatever is on the other side is important somehow.

It can feel difficult to achieve both of these things at once. So this mansion needs a bathroom. What the fuck is engaging about the bathroom? This room is bound to be a dud.

This is one of the many things I love about writing a scenario where the players are wandering into the aftermath of some catastrophic event, or into a deadly situation that’s well on its way. Let’s check out some examples from my work.

A cleaner’s closet would ordinarily be a pretty boring location, but this one has the players asking a lot of questions (or answering them, depending on what they’ve figured out already). It also gives information-hungry players a little side quest: charge the laptop and find a safe place to read through it.

The stimpack is a more important part of this room than it might seem. It means that the problem-solving part of your brain gets a definitive reward. I try to give every room a gameplay function and a narrative function if I can. Mothership is really good for that kind of thing, players are always in need of more guns, explosives, medical supplies, ammo, etc. In a disaster scenario like this you can just put them on a corpse and they’ll make sense in any location.

This elevator from my next scenario, More Of Me (which should be out in February, it rocks, get hyped), is a great example of a gameplay feature that also has strong narrative implications. Something broke this elevator. What was it? Is it alive? Is it still around upstairs? These are both tactical questions and storytelling questions.

I love how in this kind of scenario the storytelling doesn’t put the strategic side of things on pause. If you only care about getting your loot and getting out, there’s no dialogue scene in between you and the next room. You end up with a place so rich with narrative in a way that doesn’t detract from the
dungeon-crawl of it all.

Also, because the narrative centers around events that happened in the past, you can carefully craft a story without any need to shepherd the players into taking a particular action. They can approach any part of the scenario however they want and it won’t affect most of that story because most of that story already happened. You can present your players with an open-ended problem to solve as well as a carefully crafted story you wrote beforehand and the two don’t get in each other’s way. That’s really hard to do when the story almost entirely revolves around things that are happening during play.

I think some amount of obfuscation is key to making this all work. If it’s too easy to figure out what happened, a lot of allure is gone. By making things hard to piece together, you’re providing the players with a chance to play detective which is what makes the whole thing feel like a part of the game and not just a short story presented as set dressing. Since understanding the scenario’s backstory is a side quest, not the main objective, it’s better to have one that’s too hard to solve than too easy. If the players only partially get what’s going on, everything ends on a mysterious note. If they figure out all the details 2 hours in the back half of the session will feel dry and empty.

It’s always worth giving your players chances to use their skills (or known languages or whatever else is on their sheet) to get additional information. It’s another thing that helps the players feel more involved in the detective work. I feel like it goes without saying, but don’t make the environment linear either. Let the players make informed choices about what rooms they want to investigate first, even what rooms they want to enter at all.

If your scenario backstories are as complex as mine (which is not a brag, it’s just a stylistic choice) it can be helpful to have a timeline of events. These are super useful when the players ask an NPC a clarifying question about something that happened 8 hours ago, or they search through a pile of documents for a particular piece of information that you’ll need to improvise. I’ll show you the timeline from Silent Star. Any more information than this is definitely unnecessary for a single session, and you could certainly do with less.

Also, handouts can be a really good method of storytelling for this sort of thing. More Of Me has heaps of them, here’s the first one the players are likely to pick up:

I can’t remember the last time I wrote an RPG adventure that wasn’t inspired by this methodology. Try it out, and let me know how it went!

Check This Out

I read an article recently that explains a super intuitive and versatile way to encourage more interesting combat actions than just ‘attack’. I think its such a great idea, and I might work it into one of the games I have underway at the moment.

Before we continue, let’s talk about the word genre, because it can mean a lot of different things. In this case, we aren’t talking about setting elements (fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian) or tone (all-ages, surreal, noir). We are talking more about what causes conflict in the story and how that conflict is handled (action, horror, mystery, romance) or if there isn’t much conflict, what serves to keep us interested (world-building, slice of life, comedy).

Let’s have a look at a couple of common traits that will make an RPG easy to run, easy to play, and a good fit for most groups:

1. We follow a consistent cast of multiple protagonists who work as a team, and pretty much the entire story is told through their perspective.
   Most players want to play as the same character the whole time, and most groups have 3 or more players.

2. These protagonists rarely come into conflict with each other and only occasionally conceal critical information from each other; most conflict comes from external factors.
   Most players want to play co-operatively.

3. It is easy to create joy and excitement even in the absence of witty, funny or nuanced dialogue.
   Most players still want to be having fun when they can’t find anything hilarious or clever to say.

It’s a short list, but it excludes a lot of stories that are common in other storytelling mediums, and are common in life. Not every group demands each of these three traits in an RPG. A group where everyone has silver tongues doesn’t need to worry about the third point, and a group that loves to pass notes across the table for half the session will actively ignore the second. The list I’ve given is about what will make a game gel well with most groups.

Now let’s look at a few genres as examples:

ROMANCE stories typically center around two or three main characters, with the conflict centering around their disagreements and misunderstandings. Our main characters don’t work as a team, and they need to come into conflict with each other to create the pivotal scenes.

ACTION is a model student here. We can put together a team, and tell a great story mostly through their interactions with external factors.

HORROR is a great fit in exactly the same way.

POLITICAL DRAMA is all about concealing information between characters, and almost always focuses on one character or several characters who are plotting against each other. So not a good candidate.

HEIST stories can fit really well into the medium, as anyone who has played Blades in the Dark can tell you.

COMEDY is an interesting one. Lots of individual RPG sessions feature comedy, but its rarely what a game or adventure is designed around. Even people who can be pretty funny in a session of D&D might really struggle when comedy becomes the central focus for a long stretch of the story, because you’ve essentially stumbled your way into a long form improv performance.

MYSTERY/INVESTIGATION is a genre I consider to be quite hard to design RPGs for, and to write adventures for. But I think all that is for reasons unrelated to the topic at hand. It does fit the criteria for today.

Now that I’ve made my main point let’s clarify some things.

First, this conversation is about the primary genre of a story. It’s pretty common for a Pathfinder game to have a romance subplot or for a Blades in the Dark game to feature some amount of comedy. My point is if you put those elements in the driver’s seat of your narrative, you’ll see how the game becomes more high-effort for the players and the GM.

Second, none of this applies to GMless RPGs. There’s just no way to make a GMless RPG that is easy to play in the way that I’ve described in this article. They typically rely on drama between player characters and compelling conversations in a way that makes them inherently trickier to play. So if you’re making or playing one of those, take it as an opportunity to explore the kinds of stories you don’t usually touch on in your other games!

Third, yes, the title was a little overzealous. To clarify, I think you can tell any kind of story you want through RPGs, some just take a little more elbow grease from the people at the table.

So there you have it. When people comment on how many combat focused RPGs there are, I think to myself “of course there are!”. It makes perfect sense to me that most games focus around fights, heists, mysteries, and horror. I don’t think it’ll ever change, and I think that’s fine!

I made something! It’s free, for now!

My next Mothership product is out, and you can grab it for free for the next week.

Prognosis comes with 12 absurd science fiction sicknesses ready to be printed onto both sides of a single piece of paper. It is designed with Mothership RPG in mind, but can easily be adapted into any science-fiction horror game.

I think everyone is aware of how setting creates gameplay to some degree, but I’m writing this to encourage designers and GMs to keep this stuff in mind while they work, and to encourage GMs and their tables to think about this issue when picking systems/settings/adventures.

Another great example of this is high-tech characters vs magical characters. The thing about technology is that you can buy it, you can steal it, and you can break it. Getting a lot of cash in a science-fiction RPG feels very different to getting a dragon’s hoard in a fantasy setting, because money is usually the main barrier in front of a lot of the coolest powers your character could have. Whereas if you want your character’s equipment and their special powers to be mostly separate systems, a more magical and less technological setting is the easiest way to get there.

Of course, in a D&D-style fantasy setting we run into the question of magical items. How common are they? Are they usually found in shops, or are they almost all hidden away in ancient ruins? I would argue these questions will affect the mechanics of your player characters much more than they affect the narrative and vibes of your game. ‘Are there shops that sell magical items?’ is a setting question, but it answers a huge gameplay question: ‘Does money function as a kind of experience points?’.

Here are some other examples of setting creating mechanics in ways that you might not have thought of:

• The more often players run into characters of greater or equal power to themselves, the more they are strategically incentivized to create positive relationships with NPCs. If the players and their enemies are easily the most powerful people in the setting, friendship and diplomacy will rarely grant tangible rewards.

• Settings without currency transform shopping into the much more interesting process of barter trade.

• Hacker and engineer type characters are able to use whatever technology is around them, meaning the actions they are capable of will be much more context dependent than a wizard with a predetermined list of spells.

• If the players are members of an established faction, this can hugely dictate the way that social encounters play out. A game about cops versus a game about private eyes will have very different processes for interviewing witnesses, even if the mechanics are exactly the same.

A lot of these seem to come down to what is the most straightforward and intuitive. For example, a game about wizards could play very similarly to a game about engineers and hackers, you would just have a lot of explaining to do about how magic works and how wizards usually interact with it. Whereas players already understand (on a very basic level) what a car is, where they might find one, and what it means to hot-wire one.

So if you really want to mix a certain setting element and a certain style of gameplay that don’t usually go together, you’ll just need to put a little more elbow grease in and make your setting a little more detailed.

That’s all, thanks for reading!

Check This Out

I’ve been listening to Bastionland Podcast (spotify, apple), by Chris McDowall (Into the Odd, Mythic Bastionland). He’s been doing interviews where he asks people in the RPG space to talk about games that inspired the way they think about the medium. There’s an episode with Quinns from Quinns Quest if you’re a fan of him.

For those unfamiliar, skill checks in Blades can be a normal success or failure but very often end in what we call a ‘mixed success’. That just means you succeed with an unintended consequence or not to the degree you’d hoped.

Many years later I ran The Wildsea, which uses essentially the exact same dice system, and yet it started to annoy me instead of excite me. I was frustrated that half the time my players made a skill check I had to invent some clever twist on it. The mixed success, at least in these examples, pretty much operates as a blank space where the designer says “come up with something totally unique for this” and the GM is left to do that work on the spot, often in the middle of a pretty fast-paced scene.

This felt a little easier to do in Blades, due to the kinds of tasks your players are doing and the levers the GM is given to pull on, but I definitely wouldn’t say Wildsea made the wrong choice. What I would say is that it invited me to think about RPG design in a new way.

There are complex rules, which are difficult to understand and remember, and there are also laborious rules, which require the GM or the players to do a lot of creative work on the spot to make things work. This realisation lead me to favor the more straightforward success/failure binary in my own designs. It’s not strictly a better way of doing things but it does lessen the cognitive load you’re placing on the GM, so if you’re going to do something different you need a good reason.

Some other examples of laborious rules:

• GM-less games that ask the players to narrate an antagonist as well as the protagonists and side characters e.g Sleepaway

• Custom dice that present a second axis for the results along with the success/failure axis e.g The Fantasy Flight Star Wars games, where results can be any combination of Success/Fail and Lucky/Unlucky.

• Sci-fi technology that isn’t explained in any real detail e.g Mothership.

• RPGs that ask you to come up with a list of custom traits for your character during their creation, with very little guidance. Whenever you roll for something, you will then be asked to come up with a reason why one of your unique traits will help you with the situation. e.g Fate

During the design process, I sort of think of laborious rules the same way I think of complex rules. Designers shouldn’t make a rule laborious unless we’re getting something out of it that really enhances the experience, and we should keep an eye on how much work our games are making the GM do on the fly.

These same ideas apply to published scenarios and adventures too. This is why I don’t write 1-page scenarios. I want to do the work for you, so you have less to do at the table or while prepping. From my perspective, this is what pre-written adventures are for in the first place. They make things easy for the GM, and let them do less of the work to make a good game happen.

This part of RPG design might also contribute to the appeal of high complexity games, as they tend to (but don’t always) create less laborious experiences. Sure, there’s a lot of rules to remember, but at least you can rely on them to tell you what happens in most situations. If you’re playing a very rules-light game and you want to put someone in a headlock, it’s up to the GM to figure out what that means with little or no guidance.

I hope this post can help you understand why you like the games you like, and why some games might feel bad to run even if the story turns out fine.

Check This Out

Check out what Michael Pisano is doing over at Haunted Meat. The artwork feels retro to me in a way that is difficult to describe, but that I’m always on the look out for.

Some people who play RPGs want to play as disabled characters, and so some GMs want to accommodate those characters by making the fictional environments accessible. For example, adding ramps to your dungeons and hand rails to your space stations. We can also accommodate for fictional disabilities such as being haunted or being made of wood.

This is obviously coming from a very compassionate place; if we’re making a fictional world, why wouldn’t we make one where everyone feels included? However, there are some questions we need to ask. If you’re making the environment and the culture perfectly hospitable to disabled people, are you removing opportunities for your story to actually address accessibility concerns and ableism? Disability is unique among marginalised identities in that it is fundamentally defined by the things we struggle with and the things that we cannot do. Could removing those struggles be erasing us in a way?

It’s a difficult question, and it has a lot of different answers. Personally, I am worried that able bodied game masters and designers (especially those who consider themselves socially progressive) might try to write things in such a way that disability never steals the focus from the rest of the game. How convenient it would be, if we could represent disabled people in our stories without having to actually make the story about disability in any real way?

Balancing the Scales

Disabled characters pose a problem for character creation, because game designers and GMs often want to make sure every player character is at roughly the same power level. Reizor articulated how she feels this sometimes prevents accurate depiction of the disabled experience:

“Something I really don’t like as a game designer with a disability is when you can take a flaw [during character creation] that is a disability, that gives you a mechanical penalty, and then you get an experience point refund. … I don’t recall ever getting any points back, I gotta say! … I don’t think there should be compensation for this!”

“Even for games like D&D that are highly mechanical, I don’t think the best way to represent disabilities is like, oh you get a minus whatever to this. I think it is better to say ‘you have this disability, and suffer from the effects of this disability’.”

They also talked about how some of their own games touch on disability in a way that doesn’t always feel disempowering:

“In Make Our Own Heaven you have these things called glitches. Glitches are random undesirable outcomes of being a transgenic organism - you are angel and human DNA spliced together. … Maybe your body just can’t produce it’s own serotonin, or maybe you are paralyzed from the waist down. None of those things would prevent you from being a super-human demigod, but they might create interesting narrative levers for you and the game facilitator to push and pull at — narrative complications. … They’re negative in the sense that they’re meant to be disabilities, they’re not negative in the sense of being penalties on your character.”

Symbolism

JD Clément and I discussed how making games with disabled people in them and making games about disability are not the same thing. Some of his games do feature disabled stories, but there are other ways to discuss the topic:

“I wanna do a White Wolf game about centaurs. I know that sounds silly but that’s the point. … ‘Centaur: The Free’ is what I’d call it. They appear normal, whatever normal means, but they’re actually centaurs or chimeras or whatever and the world is not made to accommodate their bodies. That becomes a disability metaphor really quickly, but it’s also really funny because can you imagine going to a goth bar and dancing with goth babes and you’re also half horse? It’s hard for me to tackle these kinds of things in a serious way, if that makes sense.”

“To be clear if you want to play a character in a wheelchair in D&D go ahead, that’s fine. If there are wheelchair users that think that it’s really good representation I’ll take your word for it! I believe you! I’m not trying to discount that! Just to me it seems literal as opposed to thinking a little bit more about how to represent disability and make a commentary on it. I guess it feels apolitical, almost.”

That second quote is one I find really important to include because I don’t want to present this article as if my perspective and the perspectives from my interviews are the only legitimate ones. If you’re disabled and you like ramps in your dungeons, good for you! Great, even! The point of this article is that making a character disabled is not the pinnacle of, or the only approach to, disability representation.

Becoming Disabled

Some people are disabled from birth, but many of us become this way. For some like myself this is a gradual process, but for others this happens through accidents. Many games have this baked into the rules, usually during some dramatic moment where your arm gets exploded or something. JD is a big fan of that process:

“I enjoy when my character—and I enjoy inflicting this experience on other players when I run games—when my character changes physically.”

“The next game I’m gonna publish, Coffin Keep, there are a lot of traps where you’ll lose limbs.”

This inevitably leads to able-bodied players in control of disabled characters. Some might think of this as a problem, but I don’t see it that way at all. The reality is that anyone can become disabled at any time, and I love when games serve as a reminder of that. Having the disabled experience suddenly imposed on able-bodied players makes me let out a maniacal cackle.

In more strategy focused games, isn’t it upsetting to see disability imposed on players as punishment for poor decisions? Not necessarily. Yet again that just strikes me as realism. I sometimes wonder if I would still be disabled if I smoked less in high school or I was more careful during the height of COVID.

Some able-bodied progressives will find this stuff uncomfortable, and to me that is the point of this sort of gameplay.

The Struggle

During our interview, JD said “I don’t know if I understand the desire to make disabilities empowering” and I really resonated with that. Disability is horrifically disempowering. Although my interview with Reizor reminded me that while we are presented with challenges, we learn to overcome those challenges and we should take pride in that. I think disability in gaming is at its best when that becomes the focus. When your condition makes something ten times harder than it needs to be and you win out anyway.

I’ll end this article with something from Reizor that I found really inspiring:

“There are difficulties, to be clear, but those hard limits that others tell you that you have because you have a disability are not real for the most part. Your creativity is going to get you over those barriers. … Too often people let others’ belief of what they can achieve stop them. Especially if the people telling you those things are not disabled, they don’t know what the fuck they are talking about.

Find Reizor on itch and instagram.

Find JD on itch, twitter and bluesky.

Find me on itch and bluesky.

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Melbourne International Games Week is a huge time for both the video and tabletop gaming scenes. As a proud Naarm resident, everything was less than an hour’s drive from my home, and I’ve tried my best to take full advantage of any opportunities to meet other creators in the tabletop scene, many of whom were flying in from across the continent for PAX Aus.

If you don’t live somewhere with similar opportunities, I’ll still have some advice for you throughout. It is worth noting that not every industry event has a huge advertising budget and you might have to do some rigorous searching to find out if anything is nearby. At the same time, I am very lucky to live in such a cultural hot spot.

It’s time to run through my experience day-by-day, but don’t mistake this article for a diary. I’m here to tell you what I learnt about networking in person, and what I learnt from the people I met.

Interactive Narrative Social

This event was run by the Australian Writer’s Guild, and was for anyone who works in ‘interactive narrative’, and those interested in networking with them. In my experience it was mostly people from video games, tabletop games and visual arts. There was a panel at the start, which I missed most of. I caught the audience questions, which were mostly not good questions (as is to be expected from an audience, asking good questions is hard) and hence the answers were not incredibly valuable.

I got the chance to talk to John from ARC, who I had met once before, as well as some other lovely people from the RPG scene. Next I talked to three video game writers in a row, all of whom were lovely people and none of whom I could imagine myself, a TTRPG designer, working with (but who knows, these things surprise you sometimes). I spent some time getting to know a few great visual artists, and then ducked out to an arcade with some new friends.

Overall, it could have been worse but I didn’t enjoy going to an industry event where a huge amount of people there weren’t actually in my industry in a strict sense. I later learned that RPG folks often use this event to catch up with industry friends they already know, and not as much for meeting fresh faces.

Australian Role-Playing Industry Awards

This was the only event I went to that was exclusive to TTRPG industry folks, making it the best experience in terms of getting to know the local scene. So thanks John and the rest of the ARC people for setting it up. The small amount of tickets were in high demand, meaning I was in a modestly sized room with some pretty experienced people from all over the continent. Some people at the event seemed more interested in talking to me than others, but this had no connection to how experienced or accomplished they were. The people I admired the most were, if anything, the most welcoming.

If you find yourself struggling to talk to other creatives in a space like this, just ask them about what they’re making. Show them that you’re genuinely interested (and if you’re not, get interested; if you’re a designer other people’s games should excite you).

One thing I’m super glad I did: asking questions. Not just small talk, but questions that I genuinely needed the answer to. I got great advice on a few industry-related issues that had really been bugging me over the past month or two, and people were happy to pass on some wisdom. You should obviously get to know the people you’re talking to, but don’t be afraid to pick their brains either, when you think they’ll have good advice. The people at Storybrewers and The Ravensridge Emporium were markedly generous with their expertise.

Congrats to Nicole Renner for winning game of the year with Dark Vigil. You can see the rest of the winners here and the nominees here.

DevCon

TGDA’s DevCon is the annual industry meetup for the Australian tabletop game design community, so mostly board game designers. Lots of folks use it for play testing, but I was mostly there for the talks and to meet people. The venue was gorgeous, and the event was impressively well put together. I caught up with some people from other states who I’d only seen online so far. Nora from Double Summon was as insightful as always. She convinced me to keep going to board gaming events when I have the time; while it’s a separate industry to TTRPGs in some ways, the overlap is still worth taking advantage of.

The best talks I saw:

• Christy Dena taught us how to run a play test. One of many great recommendations: assessing what players are expecting and hoping for at the start, or even in the middle, of the test. She has a 2019 article on play testing here.

• Thomas Biedermann discussed ‘serious games’ which is to say games that, rather than being primarily entertainment products, act as “models, communication and cultural objects”. This is a topic that has interested me before and I am curious to look more into.

• Jett Archer shared their genius and out-of-the-box approach to marketing a game. The best insight being that you don’t just need to advertise your game to gamers. Your game is about something, and you can advertise to those people too. E.g advertise your game about gardening to gardeners, or your horror game to people in the indie horror film scene.

I’ll edit to link to the slides/recordings of these talks when they’re released.

PAX Aus

I’m not going to PAX this year. A lot of people at these other events were surprised to hear that, given that it’s the main focus of the week. I’ve never found PAX Aus to be worth the money as a consumer: the panels are of varying quality and the rest of the venue feels like a giant shopping center I had to pay money to enter.

A lot of the other designers go there to sell products, to advertise and to add people to their mailing list. I didn’t have any products released yet when it was time to apply for a booth, and I still don’t have any official physical releases. The folks at ARPIA agreed with me that getting a booth at any event wasn’t really that useful unless I had a product to put on the table. Something that people could hold in their hands. People come to conventions to buy shit, not to learn about your crowdfunding campaign.

To Conclude

It was a big week. Too many migraines to count, 2 vicious joint pain flare-ups, 1 bout of nausea from an ill-advised chinese cigarette, and it was all worth it. I’d consider the whole thing a huge success, and I’d invite any freelancers or independent artists to take as many chances on in-person events as they can afford to. Go check out Silent Star. Goodnight.

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The horror genre gets in the way here a bit I think. Due to how these stories are paced, I can’t put the sick alien monster on the cover and I can’t reveal how that alien got there. Giving away too much of the good stuff up front will spoil the fun. The initial premise of the scenario, the stuff that happens in the first hour, needs to be novel enough to draw people in. I don’t think I quite did that.

I think about this sort of thing a lot, because a lot of my games and scenarios aren’t built on some wacky premise. I’m not making games where you kill neo-nazi space giants with barbie dolls. These days I try to focus on the ideas that I think will garner some degree of attention, but those ideas are still never quite as dazzling as a lot of my peers.

I suspect that less radical ideas do have their advantages business wise, but those come once people are already invested in the game. People who play very weird games tend to play a lot of games, and don’t stick with the same one quite as often. This means you only really get them to consume the one product, and they probably won’t become attached to the IP. Of course, none of that helps me as someone with no real audience.

There’s something to be said for RPG reviewers helping out in this regard. Solid game mechanics and shocking plot twists do seem a lot easier to talk about in a review than they are in self-promo. I’d enjoy being an RPG reviewer, but I think it’s somewhat incompatible with being a designer. I’ve been told by people much smarter than me that being critical of your peer’s work does not get you far in this space. So even if I have a lot to say in that regard, maybe it’s best kept to myself.

I refuse to contort to fit the market too much, because I think that will result in worse design and ultimately bite me in the arse. It’s just something I mull over when I’m writing sometimes.

Seen or made anything that was a little boring on the surface but you thought was really well made? Leave a comment.

Check This Out

The Australian Roleplay Community (ARC) will be hosting a streaming event for Melbourne International Games Week on October 5th on their Twitch. The 12PM definitely piques my interest.

A basic summary of the grid system

The first step is determining your type area. Decide on what paper size you’re using, then figure out your margins (the border of largely untouched space around the edges of the page), and the rest of the page is your type area! There are lots of choices involved in determining your margins, which Müller-Brockmann gives plenty of advice on. I made my margins pretty small, to give that
dense-with-text Mothership look, and made my outer, top and bottom margins all three fifths of my inner margins.

Next, you decide how many columns you want. This is the main factor determining how long each line of text will be. The last factor in that will be the intervening space (the empty bit) between the columns. I went with two columns, because in this case it’s easier to read than one, and three columns on an A5 page is pretty cramped. Here we are assuming most of our text will be one grid field wide but this might not be the case for some layouts.

Around this point you’ll need to determine your font and text size, which will give you an idea of how many words are on each line of text, and you can then adjust other elements accordingly if the lines are too short or long. My columns had about 7-10 words per line, which Müller-Brockmann says is ideal.

Next, you’ll decide how many rows of grid sections you want. Below is an example presented in Grid Systems, so you can get an idea of what we’re going to end up with. This example isn’t perfectly orthodox, as the top row of grid fields is bigger than the others. Conventionally they’re all the same size.

The space that divides the rows of grids from each other should be the same height as a row of text (i.e each row on the grid should be separated by an empty line of text). Make sure to take into account not just the height of the text itself, but the leading as well (the empty space between the bottom of letters on one line and the start of the next line). We already divided our grid vertically when we made our columns, and they are already separated by an intervening space which was arbitrarily determined irrespective of text size.

It is probable that you’ll have to adjust your margins at this point so that the type area is exactly the right size to fit in the whole grid. I am describing the grid system as a set of steps here, but really you will often need to come back to earlier steps and readjust so that everything lines up. Margins, column width, intervening space, text size, font, and amount of grid fields all depend on each other and need to be adjusted to make a perfect grid.

So now that our grid is done, we can fit in our images and text! Blocks of text should start at the top of a grid field, and should take up with entire width of one or several fields. The edges of images, tables and diagrams should all line up with edges of grid fields (or edges of the page, like the photograph in the example above). Usually lining up headers and paragraph breaks with the grid isn’t optimal, but it’s a nice touch if you can make it work.

It is important to note when using text of differing heights, leading should be added so larger or smaller text is equal to the height of one or several rows of your regular body text. This maintains the grid. For example: each line of my body text is 12 points tall (9 point text with 3 points of extra leading at the bottom), so my headers are 24 points tall (20 point text with 4 points of extra leading) making them equal to two lines of body text.

You can get into more advanced grid work, like overlaying multiple grids and using them both at once, but those are the basics of the typographic grid.

The good and the bad of the grid

I think the above quote summarises a lot of the benefits of the grid system. These benefits could be considered particularly important for an industry like tabletop gaming. It’s a world where players and GMs are routinely asked to internalise complex rulesets and fictional worlds, and where players are often slowing down games to crack open a book in the middle of play and check something they’ve forgotten.

It is important to note that just because a designers opts not to use the grid system in its entirety, doesn’t mean they can’t borrow elements of it to achieve some of its effect.

Why reject the typographical grid, or reject elements of it? The obvious answer is for stylistic choice. Layout can be so important to RPGs in particular because the source book is often the only visual element of your game you can guarantee your players (or at least your GMs) will look at. So maybe you want to go out of your way to make your book look disorderly, or you’re willing to throw some clarity out the window to go after specific aesthetic choices. I do think understanding the core theoretical ideas behind editorial design is still helpful in this case, so you can pick and choose between clarity and style on a case-by-case basis. Check out this very circular and grid-less 2 page spread from Dead Planet by Tuesday Knight Games:

If you want a compact book, you might find yourself pushing against certain rules of design to cram all the information you can onto a given page. I know on my current project its been a real effort to squeeze every line of text I can onto certain pages so that a two sections can share a page, or a particular section only takes up two pages and not three, even though the actual word count is the same either way. This compactness can be of particular importance to products with smaller page counts, where a certain section taking up two pages rather than one can change how the whole book flows.

However if you’re less concerned with the actual information density of a book and more interested in it feeling dense, you don’t necessarily need to break out of the grid system at all. Just expand images, tables and diagrams to fill any empty space you have. Grab some Creative Commons images if all else fails.

My main takeaways

I think you ought to treat editorial design theory like you treat an RPG: follow the rules that work for you, throw the others out, but keep them all mind and learn why they were made. Here’s some of the best things I learned from studying and implementing the grid system:

• However tall a line of your body text is, that is the sacred vertical measurement that all elements should line up with. Get your layout program to place guidelines cutting your type area into rows of that height.

• Copy-paste your body text into your layout program and decide on font and text size, so you can see how much space your text is going to fill up, then create a page or section layout with that in mind. Digital applications make it super easy to visualise, don’t try to invent things in your head.

• Pay attention to your column width, and how many words fit onto a line. 7-10 words is considered ideal for easy reading.

• Determine the size of images and diagrams to suit the desired layout of the page, considering the grid system and how much space is left to fill. Sometimes you can use this thought process to decide whether a particular image or diagram will be needed in the first place.

• Think of your margins in ratios. Your upper and outer margins could be half the size of the inner and lower margins. The Golden Section is when your margins have a 3:5:5:8 ratio, 3 being the inner margin and 8 being the lower margin.

Check this out

Hypermall: Unlimited Violence is fucking insane. It is oozing with style and the dystopian setting manages to be equal parts genuinely terrifying and uniquely hilarious. It’s particularly powerful in the hands of a GM who knows how to improvise. You can buy it digitally now or preorder a physical copy.

Here’s JD’s twitter and bluesky.

Perhaps the best introduction is talking about how these examples handle death. In The Wildsea, player character death happens whenever the player feels like it is appropriate. The GM never gets to tell the player that their character is dead. This game insists that something as impactful as character death should always happen at the right time. The Wildsea does feature dice, and various other negative consequences will happen to the player whether they like it or not, but something as severe as character death is left entirely up to the player and not the game mechanics.

In Mothership, character death can be frequent and sudden. Any substantial amount of damage has a pretty significant chance of instantly killing your character. Every risk you take has a considerable chance of ending in your death. This injects every strategic decision with a delicious amount of risk and significance. The bottom line of Mothership is that you live if you’re clever enough, and you die if you’re not. Primarily the game isn’t asking you to create a story, it’s demanding that you come up with solutions.

Its worth noting that in most cases, these solutions have to be creative. Your character isn’t powerful enough to blindly shoot through problems, nor do they have a list of magical powers they can bring with them. Each scenario results in its own environment, equipment and horror to deal with, and requires clever on-the-spot thinking, not pre-packaged tactics.

Our Best Options

The Wildsea’s narrative focused attitude to role-playing is what I think designers mean when they describe their game as ‘fiction first’ [Edit: It isn’t], whereas Mothership’s strategy focused attitude comes from McCoy’s experience as an OSR (old school renaissance) gamer. Both of these philosophies represent what I see as the best pathways towards embracing RPGs as a medium.

Tabletop RPGs take a lot of effort to play. Scheduling is a nightmare, the rules can be tricky sometimes, and they take a lot more energy and focus to get through while playing than a video game or a board game. Why do we do it?
Infinite choices. However extensively they are made, video and board games ultimately limit the player to a pre-existing set of options programmed into the game. Even in video games that encourage the players to invent their own solutions (Minecraft, Deus Ex), you ultimately need to consider a list of valid options that have been programmed in and go from there. By considering the fictional world and making rulings in response to it during gameplay, tabletop RPGs avoid this limitation and allow any action that is available in the fiction to become available in the gameplay.

A strategy focused “escape room” design philosophy embraces infinite choice by concretely rewarding creative problem solving. When you are allowed to interact with the fictional world as if it were real, and given a problem that mandates a creative solution, you are forced to make use of the infinite space of possibilities available in the fictional world, which then requires you to immerse yourself in it.

A narrative focused design philosophy instead acts as a tool to make collaborative storytelling easier and more immersive. Creating stories is fun! In a lot of ways, these experiences have a lot in common with a writer’s room or long-form improv. I see two main factors that separate narrative focused RPGs from other forms of collaborative storytelling:

• The process is streamlined in such a way that the designer has done a portion of the heavy lifting, making the exhausting process of inventing a story much easier.

• Players are each responsible for a different character or set of characters, allowing them to see the story through a particular perspective and immerse themselves in the fictional world more than is usually possible while the creative process is still ongoing.

I imagine solo RPG players might have something to say about that second point.

Opposed Forces

I see these two attitudes towards RPGs as being in opposition to each other. Most games are a blend of both philosophies to some degree, but I do think pushing towards one moves you further from the other.

This is because strategy emerges from limited choices, or random factors. If a player finds themselves at the end of the dungeon and says “I walk up to the dragon and stab it and it dies” and everyone else says “ok cool”, our game is devoid of strategy. Instead we need to say “roll a longsword attack” or “you need to figure out how to get closer first” or “its not your turn yet”. Obviously limiting choice too much also removes strategy, to achieve a strategic game a happy medium needs to be found.

To the lament of narrative focused design, adding randomness or restrictions to a game closes off certain narrative results, sometimes pushing the most effective story beats out of reach. To use my initial example; if a character’s death is left partly up to random factors, or the player’s skill, we lose the ability to guarantee that they will die at the most narratively appropriate time.

In Tandem

None of this is to say that narrative and strategy don’t assist each other. Often they need to work together to accomplish certain goals.

Narrative gives strategic decisions weight. Successfully saving a civilian from a fire means so much more when we care about who that civilian is, when we understand what building is on fire and we are wondering why.

Strategy immerses a player in the narrative. When a player is asked to make meaningful choices about what a character wants and how they aim to get it, we learn things about that character and the character is encouraged to learn about the setting and interact with the other characters in ways they might not otherwise.

What doesn’t work?

Obviously that depends on the style of play you prefer. My main goal here is to get players, GMs and designers to think about how they’re trying to use the medium and to stay true to that.

There is a style of gaming, or perhaps a cultural idea within the hobby, which flies in the face of what I’ve been discussing in this post. I’ll write about that sooner or later.

Check This Out

I’ve been really enjoying OSR blog Pointless Monument by Martin Orchard. One of their posts gave me an idea for a really fun player-facing Mothership supplement. You’ll see that here at some point.

What did this do to my learning process? It allowed me to draft a lot of games very quickly, which is nice. It circumvents the problem most game designers have where they dream really big with their first project/s and don’t have the skills to execute yet. It does mean i’m much better at the skills that are necessary for starting a project as opposed to ending one. Is that a bad thing? I’m not sure, maybe it just means i really have the fundamentals down. We’ll see once i start wrapping up projects over the next year.

What changed? Well, i realised my chronic illness is preventing me from getting a real job, potentially forever, and i realised i’m a pretty good designer at this point. Also my high school band had ghosted me, and my creative brain was itching to find a new project to latch onto.

As it turns out, if you want to get anywhere with game design you have to actually finish games. Finishing games is much harder than starting them, especially if its the part that you’ve never done before. So i instated a rule: only one game at a time. This was good, it forced me to get through the parts of the process that i wasn’t super excited about. Now i know how to reign in my thinking to get things into a playable state, and get past the ‘blue skies’ phase of development into actually paring things down.

Once i learnt how to get past the rough part of design, i decided to go back to spinning multiple plates. Why? I can only really get design work done for 1-3 hours before my creative engine grinds to halt and needs to cool off. My chronic pain and migraines don’t help with that. Some days, every design problem on the chopping block seems impossible and nothing gets done. The trick is, if i switch to working on a different project, it puts me up against a new set of problems and reinvigorates me.

When working on a larger game this trick can be done by switching between different parts of the same game, but in my experience it doesn’t work quite as well. Another benefit to multitasking is that it means you still have things to do while a project has to go on hold: waiting for a play test, illustration, etc.

Working on several RPGs at once can feel like a lot. Right now, the perfect dosage for me is 2 Mothership scenarios and 1 pretty big game, plus blogging and going to other designers’ play tests and whatnot. Obviously a lot of this depends on whatever else you have going on in your life, but it might also depend on what you’re making. A rules-dense fantasy heart breaker has so many different elements that i imagine its possible to hop between them and work on the same game hour after hour and day after day.

If this sparked any thoughts about your workflow, leave a comment or hit me up on bluesky.

Check This Out

This plug is for another designer i met through some playtests. Ben Galea of Pink Wizard Games is making an awesome 1v1 board game called Castles (working title). Keep your eye on it, or buy a copy of Dwarves in the meantime.

So i’m not actually lying, but it does feel a little disingenuous to be interacting with people online in the way i have been in the past few days. I am, in some sense, doing things i wouldn’t have done otherwise in order to eventually garner support for my business endeavors. Networking has always felt gross to me, its part of what drove me out of the audio industry.

This time around i’m already getting used to it though. I’m discovering i do genuinely like making friends who are also designers, supporting them, and giving people advice. In practice, a lot of the process is just supporting other people and being social.

Maybe some of the discomfort comes more from the fact that i don’t like reddit, i don’t like large discord servers and i’m not sure if i like bluesky. Also, due to my chronic pain i don’t really like doing anything that doesn’t effectively distract me from my legs (if you’ve never met me, i am in the habit of using my disability as an excuse/rationale for all of my actions).

What i’m hoping is that the parts that i find jarring and upsetting are the parts i’ll get used to over time, and that i’ll make new friends that get me excited to do my networking homework. It’s probably healthy for your brain to be interacting with your peers as if they’re your peers and not your competition. RPG design can be lonely sometimes, if you’re not going out of your way to make connections.

In his article on this topic, McCoy said something that really stood out to me:

People who read the title of this post, but not its contents, might get the wrong idea about me. I’ll post it anyway, maybe a flagrant open-book attitude will be my angle vis a vis blogging.

Check This Out

I think i’ll make a habit of talking about something cool that someone else is making at the end of each of these. So today I’ll shout out Double Summon Games. I recently tested Mugen Taikai on their discord server, and it kicks ass.

Here's Nora's bluesky.