Tabletop RPG Design Primer

OVERVIEW

Introduction I have always loved playing roleplaying games, putting myself in the role of a character exploring

fantastic worlds. I gradually had gotten more and more involved with the hobby, beginning to run my

own games. Invariably I began to alter the game rules to suit my particular games, which led me to

explore roleplaying game design.

If that sounds familiar to you, this book is here to help. This is meant to be a primer of sorts for the new

roleplaying game designer; enough of a foundation for a new designer and/or publisher to get started.

With this guide in hand, you should have enough knowledge to be able to continue learning the craft on

your own.

This book is only a starting point. You can only succeed by reading, observing and playing a wide variety

of games. I encourage you to reach out to other communities of game designers. You can design games;

we can help.

This guide consists of five major sections, each of which has number of subsections underneath

1) Overview

2) The Designer

3) The Publisher

4) Selected Articles

5) Ludography

Realistic Expectations This guide assumes that you want to get in to RPG Design and/or RPG Publishing. Before you make your

final decision, you should learn a bit about what that entails.

A hobby industry: Out of the entire RPG industry, I would estimate there are approximately 75 people

who are employed full time. About double that number of professionals work freelance, contracted out

by other publishers. The rest of us work full time jobs and do our RPG projects on the side. Don’t aim to

quit your day job to pursue full time RPG design.

A lousy way to make money: For me, a successful year as a designer-publisher consists of recouping

money spent attending conventions and enough cash to buy food for my playtesters. There is some

money to be had, and it is rewarding, but not to the extent that I once thought.

A tight-knit community: We are all colleagues, collaborators and friends to some degree. That famous

designer whose game inspired you in your youth might playtest your first game. That professional who

broke a dozen contracts a decade ago is still scorned. Join the community with passion and an eye

toward collaboration, and you can easily join the community. We are all in it for the love of the game.

The Lifecycle Part 1: While everyone has their own independent path, there seems to be a common progression within the

hobby. Depending on the level of engagement with the hobby, they contribute something different to

the community on a whole. All of these roles are essential for our continued success, and its important

context to understand where everyone fits in.

Players are the most numerous and the most important. These are the people from every walk of life

who add diversity, creativity and enthusiasm into the mix. While they have the lowest level of

engagement out of the various roles, they vastly outnumber all of the others put together.

Game Masters are the next most numerous. These are the women and men who find, purchase and

learn the games, leading groups of players into engaging games with nothing but a book to guide them.

They contribute their skills are teachers, and their hard-earned money to the hobby.

Hackers are a subset of Game Masters who are unsatisfied by playing a game by the book. They often

start by making minor mechanical tweaks; a new feat here or a new initiative system there. This is the

domain of the experimenters, brave souls who alter existing games to suit new purposes. They

contribute their refinements and feedback to existing games and help improve existing games.

The Lifecycle Part 2: Designers are those Hackers who are unsatisfied by minor changes to existing games, and are driven to

create something new. We learn from past designs, hone our craft and try to create engaging

experiences for our audiences. We often seek innovation, which is fundamentally a desire to contribute

some lasting value to the field of game design. We contribute new game designs for everyone to play.

Publishers are the business counterparts to the designers. We transform the game text presented by a

Designer into fully realized products. We manage freelancers, get books printed, manage distribution

and shipping, marketing and convention presence. We make the designer’s games accessible to the

community, and occasionally even earn a the designers a little cash for their hard work.

Organizers are the few rare gems who bind the RPG community together. These are the hardworking

women and men who organize regional and national conventions. They run trade shows, provide

publisher resources and run high-quality retail stores. They make it possible for Publishers to display

their wares, Designers to test them and everyone else to play.

The Designer’s Role You can choose to be a pure Designer, a dedicated Publisher, or multiclass as a Designer/Publisher for

both roles. Here are the responsibilities of the Designer role in general:

Determine what a game should be about and why you are designing it.

Determine what kinds of fiction would be best suited for your concept.

Identify the mechanical structure of play, and where you need specific mechanics.

Prepare a rough text and initial mechanics.

Playtest and revise the text locally until the game experience matches your concept.

Carefully write the final game text to communicate exactly how to reproduce that experience.

Get unaffiliated playtesters to try to play the game solely based on your text and provide

feedback.

Refine the text until the draft is complete.

Work with an editor to continue to refine the text before delivering it to the publisher.

The Publisher’s Role The Publisher has a whole other set of responsibilities which you may or may not want to take on. Here

are their tasks:

Determining the commercial viability and target audience of a game.

Creating a budget for the game.

Selecting, hiring and paying freelancer Editor(s), Illustrator(s) and a Layout Professional suitable

for the project.

Selecting and paying printers.

Determining distribution and shipping solutions

Determining deadlines and ensuring communication between all team members.

Administer any fund-raising or crowd-funding campaigns

Marketing and community relations.

Managing inventory and accounting.

This primer explains the fundamentals of each of those two roles, beginning with the Designer on the

next page, and focussing on the Publisher beginning on page XX.

THE DESIGNER

Basic Research The single most important responsibility of a game designer is to explore a wide diversity of games.

Treat each new RPG book like a textbook on game design. By reading, analyzing, playing and teaching

those games, you can see the effects of the various game components.

Examine the mechanics and resolution systems.

Examine the procedures of play.

Consider the advice being offered, and what problems each piece is trying to solve.

Consider how well the rules reflect the setting and vice-versa.

Consider what portions of the game are emphasized and which are minimized.

Read other games by the same author to discover that designer’s style.

Don’t limit yourselves to tabletop roleplaying games either. Modern board games are both fun and

teach you a great deal about game mechanics. Video games are excellent at showing you how to teach

game rules, how to emphasize setting or create an emotional resonance. Any game has lessons.

In your spare time, read more broadly. Learn about improvisational theater, fiction writing, statistics and

language. Delve into history, sociology and psychology so you can better explore the human condition.

The more that you learn, the more ingredients you will have available for your future designs.

The Mission Statements Every game is about creating some specific kind of experience. A mission statement is meant to reflect

the core of your game’s identity. It’s some single sentence that all of your design should focus around. It

can be big and philosophical, or small and personal in scale. Whatever it is, it needs to be something that

you are passionate about exploring in design.

Some mission statements include…

Ghost stories on space stations

Build worlds and challenge your beliefs within them.

Fight for what you believe

Powerful ambition and poor impulse control

There are no status quos, so play to see what happens

Try to create a Mission statement for your own game. It’s an invaluable tool are you design mechanics

that support that statement, and remove ones that interfere. In one of my own games, I was able to

dramatically streamline my resolution system by focussing my own mission statement.

The 3 Questions Once you have your mission statement down, it’s time to dig deeper. Jared Sorensen, designer of

InSpectres, proposed three questions that would help examine a given game.

Question 1: What is your game about?

This should be derived from your mission statement. For example, Fiasco is a game about powerful ambition and poor impulse control.

Question 2: How does your game do this?

This question addresses the focus of your game. If you devote half the book to combat, you are indicating that you are focusing on violence to solve problems. If you devote that space to courtly intrigue instead, you communicate a very different theme. Fiasco offers comprehensive lists of dysfunctional relationships, dangerous locations, unseemly objects and selfish desires for instance.

Question 3: How does your game encourage / reward this?

How do your mechanics encourage player behaviours that align with your game theme? How are the

rules and procedures reinforcing the game’s themes? Characters in Fiasco have a better outcome if all

their scenes are positive or negative, which encourages some players to fail spectacularly in game.

John Wick asks a bonus question: How do you make this fun?

Twenty Point Core Design Document Now that you have considered the fundamentals of your game, you are ready to write a Core Design

Document. This will be a few pages of text that you will be able to refer to during the game design

process to inform all of your decisions as well as your playtesting efforts. Write your working title for

the game, followed by your mission statement.

Troy Costisick created a longer list of questions which were derived from the 3 Questions on the

previous page. Each of these helps you examine a different facet of your game and will help you in

different ways. Try to answer each of these in turn and write your answers onto your core design

document. This is a great document t to share with other designers when you are soliciting feedback.

T R O Y C O S T I S I C K ’ S P O W ER 1 9

1.) What is your game about? 2.) What do the characters do? 3.) What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do? 4.) How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about? 5.) How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about? 6.) What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)? 7.) How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game? 8.) How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game? 9.) What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?) 10.) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like? 11.) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about? 12.) Do characters in your game advance? If so, how? 13.) How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about? 14.) What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players? 15.) What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why? 16.) Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?

17.) Where does your game take the players that other games can’t, don’t, or won’t? 18.) What are your publishing goals for your game? 19.) Who is your target audience?

Dividing Responsibilities There are a lot of different responsibilities for the people playing your game. Many games have a

central GM, DM or referee figure that hold the majority of the responsibilities. Other “GMless” or

“GMfull” games have more distributed authorities, with each person having equal control over the

game. Some particularly unusual games even mix the two styles, featuring things like player-controlled

factions or multiple GMs.

So what are these responsibilities? Try to find the answer for your game.

Who is responsible for controlling the spotlight and attention of the group?

Who is responsible for explaining, arbitrating and/or altering the rules?

Who is responsible for creating NPCs?

Who controls and portrays friendly NPCs?

Who controls and portrays hostile NPCs and monsters?

Who determines how the scenes are established?

Who determines when the scene is finished?

Who controls natural phenomena?

Who can establish facts about the past, during play?

Who can establish facts about the future, during play?

Who controls the PC’s actions and decisions?

Who controls the PC’s thoughts and emotions?

Who narrates the outcome of a conflict?

Who keeps track of time in the fiction?

Who manages the logistics of actually getting together to play the game?

Who needs to prepare for game sessions?

Setting Context Every game takes place in some kind of fictional setting. Some games are focussed on expressing the

character of one world, while others offer compatibility with multiple distinct settings. Settings give a

context for play, and create interesting situations for player characters.

Refer to question 4 of your Core Design Document. How does your setting encourage players to behave

appropriately and leave room for conflicts. What are the major internal threats, external threats and

scarcities that fuel the most conflicts in your setting?

What are the major organizations and political factions in your setting? Do you have multiple governing

bodies, one nation or fractious anarchy? What types of government do they have; monarchy, tyranny,

plutocracy, theocracy or direct democracy are but a few examples.

What kind of economics drive the setting? Is the economy based on salt, gold, silks or shells? What is a

scarce import and what is a plentiful export? Who trades with whom, and with which means of

transportation?

How are matters of faith, religion and spirituality addressed? Is it a monotheism, polytheism or more

diverse set of spiritual practices? What does each religion think of as the greatest spiritual problem; A

faith concerned about the spiritual implications of violence will be different from one concerned about

hubris or emotional attachment.

What is the climate like, and how does that affect the local flora and fauna? Are there any plants with

special medicinal, industrial, agricultural, spiritual and/or addictive properties? Are there any animals of

particular value for labour, companionship, military, food, hides, or spiritual reasons?

Meaningful Choices Roleplaying games are all about meaningful choices. Choices allow the participants to feel like their

ideas, creativity and agency are appreciated. When these choices are personally relevant to the player

and are crafted to suit the individual character, you encourage immersion and a deeper level of

roleplaying. This is why you always need to consider where meaningful choices are presented.

Consider the Czege Principle, attributed to the designer Paul Czege. It can be explained that if the

person who creates adversity is the same one to resolve said adversity, the result will be boring. Setting

up sandcastles then knocking them down isn’t compelling play. With full control over both the problem

and the solution, the choice to solve that problem is arbitrary rather than meaningful. By dividing those

responsibilities between multiple people, the resolution of the adversity is significantly more rewarding.

Vincent Baker proposes the Fruitful Void as another piece of RPG design theory about choices. Games

are designed with specific problems or decisions that the rules cannot be applied to solve. Those

“Fruitful Voids” are where player choices, situations and creativity will shape play. Dungeons and

Dragons has no rules that explain why heroes seek adventure or why they seek to risk their lives for

advancement and treasure. The deepest experience in play is how the player chooses to answer those

questions for themselves. The Fruitful Void is a space in the game that is set aside for players to fill

during play.

One last note on choices in games. Psychology research has found that the human mind can only easily

keep track of about 5-7 discrete entities at any one time. If you have a choice with multiple answers

your design, try to limit yourself to under seven different options. Lists of 3-4 strong items tend to be

the best to choose from, in my practical experience. For some good examples of this in action, consider

Fiasco or Apocalypse World.

Resolution Systems Roleplaying games are, at a fundamental level, simply collaborative storytelling with rules adjudicating

what happens when people disagree about what should happen. Those rules consist of the resolution

system and are often the core game mechanic for play. There are three common approaches to

determining who gets their way, originally proposed by Johnathan Tweet in his seminal game Everway. I

have reworded them for clarity. All of these have their benefits and drawbacks, and often several of

them are featured in any given game.

Chance: Some random factor determines who is successful. Dice are the most common randomizer,

used in games such as Dungeons and Dragons to determine if your fighter can harm a Demon. Playing

cards and tarot cards have both been used to great effect as well. This is often referred to as “Fortune”

in game design theory.

Choice: The resolution system allows one or more people to choose the outcome based on some

procedure or limitation. This can involve spending certain resources in order to succeed (Dream Askew),

saying certain ritual phrases with counter responses (Polaris) or just what is dramatically appropriate.

This is often referred to as “Drama” in game design theory.

Certainty: This resolution system provides some fixed and absolute values for the participants. If your

value is superior for a given situation, you get your way. The iconic game for this kind of resolution

System is Amber Diceless, whose system has been reproduced in Lords of Gossamer and Shadow. This is

often referred to as “Karma” in game design theory.

Currencies Most games have some kind of Currency, which is received for specific behaviours and can be spent to

affect the narrative in some way. While spending Currency usually produces a positive result, negative

Currencies can also be found in select games. Some of the more interesting games with prominent use

of currency include Fate Core, Torchbearer and Trail of Cthulhu, each of which uses currency in radically

different ways.

For reference, traditional Dungeons and Dragons had three currencies;

Hit Points can be gained by rest or magical healing, and allow you to survive an injury.

Gold can be gained by performing quests or eliminating threats, allowing you to acquire

equipment and services.

Experience can be acquired by violence, theft or performing quests allowing you to gain

competence and ‘level-up’.

Here’s a few things you should consider:

How do people gain and lose Currency?

What behaviours are incentivized by each Currency?

Is the Currency positive, negative or mixed in effect?

How much will be people willing to spend their limited Currency, and what will be the effect of

people hoarding it?

Who can exchange currency and what happens after it’s spent?

Creativity Creativity is the fuel that powers roleplaying games. It’s those clever ideas by the players, fascinating

character histories and engaging narrative twists that bring a campaign to life. As a designer, your job is

to provide the necessary tools for participants to be creative.

Pillars are nuggets of information without context, which can be interpreted during play to build some

kind of cohesive context. A creative pillar is an evocative statement, often with rich descriptions that

express the themes, moods and motifs of the setting. For example, some good pillars include these

oracles from D. Vincent Baker’s In a Wicked Age.

A hermit priestess, practicing obscure deprivations.

A fallen-in mansion, where by night ghosts and devils meet.

You can find more use of pillars in Houses of the Blooded (wagers) and Fiasco (set-up).

Walls are creative constraints, limiting the scope of play. These walls restrict what kinds of ideas are

appropriate in a given game, focussing creativity to be within a certain fictional space. Characters in that

setting may be happy staying within these walls, may zealously defend them, or may seek to break them

down. In any case, walls give participants something to build off.

For example, How We Came to Live Here includes very strong gender norms in the indigenous society.

This encourages creative ideas that address gender, taboo and deviance within the context of this

society, as well as forcing players out of their respective comfort zones. Grey Ranks and Steal Away

Jordan are other excellent examples of Walls informing play.

Webs are when participants combine several elements of fiction and exploring how they interact. You

may take the religious practice of Shintoism, mix it with androids in a science fiction setting and see

what emerges. Our monkey-brains are remarkably good at pattern recognition and quickly build webs

of associations, if we provide something to build off.

This combination of multiple things is exactly how Spark works, with multiple philosophical beliefs

clashing during play. You can also see this in games such as Microscope or The Quiet Year.

Beware of creative exhaustion, produced by the mentally taxing effort of making creative contributions.

You need to balance the creativity among the entire group. If the GM is the only one being creative in a

game, their contributions may very well suffer from it. If everyone has a chance to pitch in new ideas,

the game is easier for everyone.

Playtesting Principles Playtesting is the essential activity of game design. The designer presents a mechanic, procedure or

entire system and tests it with other. The designer then gets the opportunity to observe it in action, hear

constructive criticism from players and discover emergent properties. The designer incorporates that

feedback to design the next iteration, then playtest again to gather more information. Through this

iterative process, a roughly assembled concept can be refined into an elegant and well-explained game.

Before each playtest, the designer needs to ascertain exactly what they want to test and how they

intend on doing so. Determining what to focus on for each playtest is a skill you will acquire over time.

It’s vital to clearly communicate the focus of each test so that the participants are testing the right

pieces of your design.

The primary benefit of playtesters is that they can identify problems and provide feedback on the

subjective experience that the game provides. As a rule, always record and give serious consideration to

any issue raised by your playtesters. It is vital to keep an open mind and to avoid taking criticism

personally. You are not your game, and keeping distance from your design will allow you to make wise

decisions going forward.

Many of the playtesters you are likely to get are also game designers in their own right, and we are a

mixed blessing. Game designers tend to be very observant of mechanical problems, and the good ones

will identify disconnects between the rules and the setting. Designers are also excellent walking game

librarians and can direct you to other products (RPG’s, reference books etc) that may be useful to your

design. Don’t let other designers steamroller your ideas though, and beware of other designers “fixing”

your game for you with new mechanics. Feel free to ask them questions to determine the underlying

reasons for those solutions.

Write down any suggestions for improvements and consider them with the help of your core design

document. Any mechanics which do not reinforce your mission statement should be examined critically.

When a problem is detected, try to find a solution that involves _removing_ something from your design

rather than adding something onto it.

One of the challenges with playtesting is that testers are ‘used up’ in the process. Playtesting often

requires an audience with no previous knowledge of the game. The closer someone is to the game, the

more assumptions they will make during the testing process and the less productive they will be. You

are always the worst person to test your own game, because you have internalized the game and will

subconsciously patch-over any problems you encounter.

A good technique for playtesting is called Roses and Thorns. After a playtest session, ask each person to

identify one thing about the game that they found most engaging, and one thing that that needs work.

After asking these questions from everyone, you can gather additional feedback and ask clarifying

questions.

Playtest Types There are four general kinds of playtests, each serving a different purpose and benefiting from a

different kind of tester.

Type 1: Concept Testing is the earliest stage of playtesting, usually with the designer and a couple

friends. The purpose of this test is to try out specific mechanical ideas and to see if the core framework

of play is functional. The purpose of concept-testing is to identify core mechanics that are unworkable,

and to get a general sense of the structure of the game. The game is almost never fun during concept

testing, but collaboration with playtesters is often rewarding. You stop concept-testing when you are

comfortable with the core resolution mechanics and structure of play.

Type 2: Internal Testing is the mainstay of playtesting. During an Internal Test, the designer works with a

group of local friends or players in an attempt to make the game playable. The focus of this test is to

make the game mechanics function, to identify problematic mechanics, and to identify any specific

elements which are particularly engaging for the players. You stop internal testing when you are able to

run an entire session successfully for your local group, and when it reproduces the desired experience.

Type 3: External Testing is a much more advanced type of playtest. This is when you run your game for

strangers, usually at game conventions or online. The focus of this test is to get objective feedback from

third-parties, unbiased by experience with your gaming style. When you are running External Tests,

write down any questions you receive. Try to minimize the information that you share about the game

system until after you are done playing the session, so as to avoid corrupting the feedback. Try to refer

players to written instructions if possible. If the rules as written don’t function, feel free to change a

rule, but note this change down so you can examine it later on.

Type 4: Blind Testing is the final and most difficult type of playtest. For blind testing, collate a copy of

your testing materials (Rules, character sheets etc), and hand them off to a group with no additional

instructions beyond what is written in the text. Audio recordings of blind test sessions are incredible

resources which allow you to discover where the text is unclear, or what assumptions are being made.

It is also possible to observe the session personally, but if the participants know that the designer is in

the room, it will alter their behaviours in problematic ways. Theoretically you should stop blind testing

when another group is able to reproduce the desired experience by following the rules you intended on

communicating.

Structuring Text Playtesting is essential in order to create a cohesive game, but that’s only half of the work. A more

important consideration is on how to explain the rules to a third party with the text. Unless you come

included with the book, you need to make sure that the text clearly communicates the entirety of your

game.

Consider the structure of your text. Developing outlines can be a fantastic tool for ensuring that

everything is communicated in logical chunks.

Bullet Points are acceptable for lists without any order, such as this one.

Numbered lists are ideal for set procedures that must be followed in a precise order.

Examples of play can either be included close to the text, or as their own chapter.

Page references are useful when one rule or idea is discussed in depth elsewhere in the text.

Short summaries of rules or procedures, particularly at the end of chapters or major sections,

are extremely helpful.

When structuring a text, it’s useful to consider the technique of concentric game design, introduced by

D. Vincent Baker in an article at lumpley.com. Imagine your game as a series of four concentric circles.

Imagine your game to be a planet.

1. The core of the game is the foundation of play. This would be a sentence describing the setting,

the goals for participants, and how you resolve basic conflicts. If you forget any other rules from

the outer layers, you can play a simple game with these rules which could fit on a single index

card.

2. The mantle of the game contains the general rules of play. This contains the structure of play,

the resolution rules, the basics on how players can interact with the story, and how the GM can

influence play. This is the basic version of the game, one that could fit on a single reference

sheet.

3. The crust of the game contains the specific details rules. Character classes or playbooks,

situational rules, gear, character growth and the rest all fall under this category. You usually use

these rules, and this allows you to fully experience the game as intended.

4. The atmosphere of the game contains the vast set of optional rules, home-brewed options,

hacks and experimental forms of play which allow you to customize a game to suit a specific

table.

The benefit of this structure is that it degrades gracefully. Without the atmosphere, you can rely on the

crust. Without the crust, the mantle is available, and you can always depend on the core of the game.

Refining Text With the basic structure of the text in place, you can dig into the writing process. There are a large

number of books that teach the art and the craft of creative writing. Learn from the experts on how to

write without judgement and to edit without mercy.

Revising your own text is difficult, because your mind tends to patch over any mistakes. Some useful

cognitive tricks for editing include…

Changing the formatting so it doesn’t look familiar to you.

Printing out the text and editing by pen, rather than on the screen.

Reading the text out loud.

When the text has passed through those filters, it’s time to test it. Find at least one other person who

hasn’t seen the game text before, and ask them to read through it. Ask them to mark up the copy with

pen and highlight anything that seems confusing. Their fresh eyes will catch anything that escaped your

earlier scrutiny.

When all of this is done, you should have a text that is ready for a publisher’s touch. Congratulations on

all your good work, designer!

LUDOGRAPHY

Books about Game Design

Things we Think about Games

Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

A Theory of Fun

Essential RPG Reading Apocalypse World

Blades in the Dark

D&D 5E

Fate Core

Burning Wheel