Some stuff about game design

One of the things I’m working on, have been thinking about for probably decades now, is how to make a good role-playing game. The thing about TTRPGs is that they’ve got two kinds of things that are pretty often at odds with each other.

There’s fluff and there’s crunch. Or at least that’s how the grognards and rules-lawyers tend to talk about it. From that perspective, it kind of deprioritizes the story, right? The story is in there in the fluff. The really interesting stuff is in the crunchy bits, the potato chip deliciousness of rules and their interactions. I used to believe that: I’d treat being a player as a kind of intellectual exercise - what could I do with these rules to craft a character that was Broken in some way. I had a lot of fun with older D&D, especially 3, 3.5, and 4e, kicking around on the rules optimization forums. I had wizards who could never be grappled, or even hit in combat (conjurer specialization of short teleports as a free action are pretty broken), fighter-tanks who generated temporary hitpoints every turn, and bards who could make all their friends into damage machines. Sure, the wizard can toss an 8d6 fireball, but my rogue has four attacks per round and each hits for 4d6, and she can do that all day.

I’ve since given up on that. I still like the intellectual exercise, but these days I think of role-playing games as collaborative storytelling. I get lost in the fluff. The backstories players cook up are so interesting, it’s such a fun improvisational challenge to smoothly incorporate little things like backstory into the current arc, to have recurring characters be memorable, and to provide real plot and engagement to players.

Still, you can’t just have a story with no rules for bones. Maybe instead of fluff and crunch it’s better to think of it that way: meat and bones. To do a good RPG, you need to have a story to tell. The rules give you a framework, but without a story they really are not interesting. This is probably the same as art. Not saying that my derivative and gonzo RPG storylines are art, but the same thing is here - to make art or write an RPG, you have to have something to say.

Anyway.

I have a lot to say, as it happens. So I’ll be collecting those thoughts in a series here. My goal is to produce the bones of a RPG system that is new, a mixup of a couple of really interesting ideas that other people have had, plus a few ideas of my own. I’m going to apply that to two different campaign settings that I’m developing in parallel (the meat for the bones). Tentatively entitled “We Live on the Water” and “The City of Morning”, they are: 

• A high-concept, generational story about refugees from multiple points in human history all trying to survive on an alien sea. Science-fantasy in a kind of Lord Valentine’s Castle, Darkover kind of style.

• Something of a “what if shadowrun-style story structure, but high fantasy instead of modern urban fantasy”, city-based with large factions that use the player characters as catspaws, as those characters try to carve out for themselves a space in society.

More on both, plus more rules crunch than you can shake a d20 at.