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. Dont 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 designers 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 Designers 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 Publishers 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 designers style.

Dont 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 games identity. Its 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. Its 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, its 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 games 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.

TROY COSTISICKS POWER 19

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 cant, dont, or wont?
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 PCs actions and decisions?
Who controls the PCs 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 isnt 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.

Heres 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 its spent?

Creativity
Creativity is the fuel that powers roleplaying games. Its 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 Bakers 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.
Its 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 (RPGs, reference books etc) that may be useful to your
design. Dont 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 dont 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 thats 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, its 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 doesnt 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, its time to test it. Find at least one other person who
hasnt 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 publishers 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