Thread by @Epidiah

#AprilTTRPGMaker

"20. Favorite design tools?"

Alright, let's open this toolbox!

I'm going to ignore hardware & software for a moment here & discuss them at the end of this thread for reasons I'll get into later.

Instead, I'm going to start with conceptual tools—Paradigms & Practices that have served me well.

We'll start with some Basic P&P…

Designing Vast & Starlit, I delved into the very least a game had to do and still satisfy my own personal needs. Therein I found the 3 things that make game design easy:

• A Gravid Situation
• Functional Collaboration
• Interesting Content Generation

• A Gravid Situation
In V&S you're prisoners who have just escaped an orbital prison aboard a ship of unknown origin. Go!

When designing, ask yourself about the very first moments of play. Do the characters have something to do right away? Is there a clear place to go?

That first nudge is so important and can easily be overlooked, especially if you've got a catchy, but rarified concept for your game.

• Functional Collaboration
At its core, a game is collaboration among the players. It does have to be all anarcho-syndicalist & shit. You can have an iron-fisted GM if you want, but there'll still be collaboration. Take the time to examine how—or even if—that works in your game.

Unintended & disruptive barriers to collaboration can slip in unnoticed, because the assumption is folks will just roleplay through it.

But the way you roleplay in one game won't always fit the way you need to roleplay in another. Roleplaying is not one size fits all.

• Interesting Content Generation
It's so easy to think of an RPG as a series of rules that resolve a series of conflicts. How do we know you scaled the castle wall? How do we figure out who won the legal argument? Who hit who for how much?

That's the default for so much of the design out there. You're going to slide into it all the time. Don't fret about it.

Instead, ask how can you help the players make interesting things happen. What's interesting about scaling a castle wall? Why is a legal argument compelling?

So that's Basic Paradigms & Practices. I would contend that those alone will carry you through a thousand functional, playable & enjoyable game designs.

But there's always more, right? There's always that next level. So let's dip our toes into the P&P Expert Set.

So, @lumpleygames likes to talk about RPGs as structured conversations.

(Or at least, that's what I'm going to pretend he likes to talk about so I can both avoid the mistaken impression that this is my idea & lend authority to my assertions here.)

I'm going to start by saying I happen to believe this is true, but also that it simply doesn't matter if it is, because it's useful. You want to mull this over, consider its ramifications, and internalize it.

You want to ABC.

Always
Be (thinking about the game you are currently designing as a)
Conversation.

Think about how that conversation is going to go, how you want it to go, and how you can encourage that.

Even if your game is wall-to-wall stat blocks, charts & sweet, sweet calculations, folks are going to need to talk to each other to play it. Decide how you want that to work.

As long as we're tagging @lumpleygames, we should also talk about the objective of your game.

Or rather, we should talk about how you should have a clear idea of what the objective of your game is and how your game helps and challenges the players on their way to it.

The benefits of this clarity are legion & often hidden. RPGs are fractals with layers upon layers all of which are covered in their own layers. A ton of #rpgtheory has been written on players' relationship to their characters, as actors, authors, fans, what-have-you…

…which makes it all sound terribly complex. Folks can get lost in the forest here, noodling about with definitions and prescriptions. But the truth is, a player is a player, and player craves an objective. Even if that objective is just "Explore this world," or…

…"Together you will toil to craft an enthralling short story of sword & sorcery"—a player will seize that objective and carve their own path through that forest.

All right, I've got put some food in me and then talk about the Rockford Files for a while. But this afternoon I'll try to tackle the P&P Companion Set with juicy topics like The Compost Heap and Playing. And then the promised hardware/software talk.

Whew! Apparently I had a lot of Rockford Files to talk about! (You can listen in on @ndpaoletta and I talk Rockford on @TwoHundredPod: twohundredaday.fireside.fm)

But now I'm back with 4 tools from the P&P Companion Set and then some bits about hardware & software.

Up to now, I've talked about tools that I try to apply to all my games. But not every game needs every tool. This Companion Set is all about tools that I use when I feel the need, but don't bring out for every job.

Let's start with Playstorming.

Playstorming is the act of collaboratively designing the game you're playing while you're playing it. It is a beautiful, fruitful mess.

I've had quite a lot of success with it. MonkeyDome, the precursor to #SwordsWithoutMaster⚔️, was playstormed:

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It's useful when you need to break out of a rut. You can make a game completely out of nothing. It can take you in unexpected directions. And it teaches you to watch your fellow players, learn from their techniques & instincts, and codify them.

Plus, it gets you all jazzed up.

Playstorming is good for generating ideas, but if you've got loads of ideas & nowhere to dump them, then might I recommend nanogames?

Or microgames or picogames or femtogames? Something tiny & manageable—just big enough to hold an idea or 2 plus the tools from the P&P Basic Set.

You can go from idea to finished product in an afternoon to an entire line of products in a single week: epidiah.itch.io/vast-starlit

In the grand conversation that is TTRPG design, the clearest, most effective way to get your point across is to design & deliver a game that proves it. Every new idea has its naysayers until it's an old idea. Nanogames pump new ideas out right away so they can start aging faster.

But not all ideas are ready for prime time. That's what the Compost Heap is for.

I'm going to say this in all caps and with 3 exclamation points, because it needs to be shouted:

ABANDON YOUR GAMES OFTEN & WITHOUT REMORSE!!!

Toss them on the compost heap. Let them fester there to be cannibalized later for other games you'll only turn around and abandon as well.

Keep churning through them until something sticks. Or doesn't. It doesn't matter. Just don't cling to unfinished games that aren't moving.

Here's one last one: Play with your design.

Make a pun with your rules & then drive that pun into the ground. Make folks draw you a picture in order to buy your game. Try to write a game without mentioning numbers of any kind. Whatever your kink is, give it a shot.

I know playing seems like an obvious tool for a game designer, but you'd be surprised.

Hardware/software time!

I have some baggage here. Partly because throughout my college years, while pursuing a degree in English with an emphasis on creative writing, everywhere I looked I saw someone trying to sell my dreams back to me in the form of tools.

The right pen. The right notebook. The right keyboard. The right word processor. The right prompt-a-day calendar. The right market listings.

It was incessant & predatory.

I've got a lot of anger about this, so I should probably leave it at that.

But the other part is that I'm really susceptible to this sort of thing. I love a gadget & it's easy for me to mistake something new & interesting for something necessary & game-changing.

I mean, just ask me about my calculators sometime.

So when I talk about my hardware/software tools, I want to emphasize that even though I enjoy them & they do alright by me, none of them is essential and all the previously mentioned Paradigms & Practices are far more useful.

That said, I do most of my writing & promoting from my phone. I use a foldable keyboard & the #JotterPad app to write. Sometimes I keep notes in OneNote, but usually those go in JotterPad as well.

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I've taken a few stabs at Scrivener over the years, but it never stuck. Instead, I organize all my texts for individual games in file folders on either Dropbox or OneDrive.

I do all my layout & whatnot on Adobe CS4 because I'm too cheap to get anything newer.

I like to have a small dry erase board & a notebook around to work things out. If I need to store stuff from it, I use Microsoft Office Lens to capture images.

I make my coffee in an Aeropress and drink it from the mightiest of mugs.

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Oh and like a ton of spreadsheets.

So many spreadsheets.

Today, as I write spooky space stuff for @herzwesten, I'm listening to spooky space ambience by @TabletopAudio: tabletopaudio.com

It deserves to be on the growing list of design tools at my disposal for helping me disappear into another world without distracting lyrics.