1pg essays: My Pillars of RPG Design
I initially wrote for Gnome Stew back in 2019, my mind brimming with ideas for the development for tabletop rpgs. Well before I was enraptured with the ENnies. While that in itself was an enlightening experience that refined my ideas and theories on tabletop rpgs, it ultimately triggered a level of jaded burnout that I've only recently started from 4-years later. RPGs are simple. Roll your dice, add stats or choose the dice you want, then improv from there. But improv is not the same as improving the medium, despite their otherwise similar phonetic structure. To improv is to go as is. To improve is to see the path before and behind you. I attempted to codify my findings as 'the 7 seven swords of tabletop rpg design.
The 1st. Resolution Mechanics Must be Fast. The 2nd. Endless Depth in Customization. The 3rd. True Strength Lies in Simplicity. The 4th. Dissociated Mechanics are Fine; Fiction is Cheap. The 5th. Agency is an Illusion; Slay It or Play to It. The 6th. Chase the Consequences to their Limit. The 7th. The GM is a God to be Slain.
Only now, years later, do I see them for the pretentiousness edge they held, similar to one I would have wielded back in middle school. 'Chuunibyou'. I scarcely remember the fuck I was smoking at the time but I shall assume.
1st. Make things simple, or they eat up everyone's time because you will be doing 1 thing a million times over and over for the entirety of the game. If your combat wipe takes an hour, your sessions 3 hours, and you plan for 2 games a week for a year, that's 104 hours of your life entirely on combat. The fuck.
2nd. The Japanese RPG scene has an immense amount of customization and the ability to make a million variations of the same character. I will see a million magical girls and raise you 1 more. But. Their abilities are what distinguish them. The more limits you have on the character creation you make: the less variety and the quicker the burnout will take you.
3rd. Simple mechanics allow characters to express themselves entirely through roleplay, through cool moments. It's hard to enable the rule of cool of jumping walls to attack an enemy, when I have to roll a million checks just to run up and jump and attack, and have just as many points of failure to keep me from this action. For every check, you enable failure. Through complexity, you've doomed you and your game to plateaued mediocrity and long stage plays. When your only opportunity to cool things is through 'critical successes' then you keep your players from planning out cool actions, and instead hinge on the gambling inherent to success/failure.
4th. I don't care if the ability makes sense in world—you can literally flavor it however you want. Express it how you want. You have to think mechanically so the game actually has a modicum of flow. Express HP as HP, express it as wounds, express it as stress. It doesn't matter. Fiction is easy to make, distribute, sell, launder. You can figure it out. But mechanics require a small amount of engineering and a decent understanding of discrete mathematics (or the ample time to experiment/playtest to simulate rolling the die a million times for its failure states). There's a lot of writers willing to sell their ideas for pennies or, even less: the praise that their ideas are worth more than pennies. D&D 4e was fine, fight me.
5th. Players don't actually have agency: they have allowances. Your goals are either to trick the players they have an iota of agency through rails/decision points (modern GM techniques), or to truly give them agency through an absurd amount of random tables (the basis of OSR theories and the fuel of countless table blogs). Modern GMs give the players an insane amount of plot armor. Ham this up. Or don't. If you do ham this up, this allows you to create heroic stories. If you don't... Well you 'grit' and 'realism' and 'souls-like' adventures.
6th. The truth behind Player Agency? Consequences. Take whatever decisions the players make, then chase them to both their natural conclusions... then the supernatural ones. Make the entire thing due to the secret machinations of a cult or an ancient artifact. And to do that you'll need to design for such. Big effects will be abound in high-magic, but if you have a very low power game, then the consequences will ultimately be something political or personal. Can your game handle big effects? Does it thrive better when its small? Do you want a wide strike range of stories? Or are you making something small and personal like an intimate conversation between lovers (Starcrossed, or any number of PBTAs).
7th. The GM is ultimately a God to be slain. I reiterate this as a GM. Your players need a manner in which to affect the story, or affect the mechanics, in a way the GM cannot touch. Fate has aspects. Savage Worlds has bennies. Fabula Ultima has fabula points. In almost every aspect of the worlds they make, the GM will as a god, controlling the peoples, pointing the narrative compass where they want, and deciding the fates of all. Given the chance, they will sit alone in their room, painting with a single color. You must enable the players to both fight and to work with God. Let them slay God. Make God humble. A humble God is a storyteller that shares the bread the bake, while an arrogant one must be brought to heel or else appear on r/RPGHorrorStories.