Adventure Design
Before we get started, here’s a link to Part 1 in case you missed it. There is an idea that rules-lite games don’t require adventures and scenarios the way crunchier games do. I think this is an idea shared mostly by younger gamers, because modern games that use Powered by the Apocalypse designs generally encourage the GM to build things improvisationally with players.
Continue reading Spooktacular Adventure Writing: Part 2I’m not stating anything particularly controversial when I say it’s tough to be a game designer. The tabletop RPG market is an economics nightmare; demand is low and supply is incredibly high. Demand is low because this is a niche hobby whose marketing to the public at large is, essentially, Hasbro screaming so loud that nobody else is heard. Supply is driven by the fact that, at a functional level, thanks to crowdfunding Kickstarter, itch.io, and DriveThruRPG, basically anyone can make a TTRPG and get it on sale. TTRPGs and self-published fiction are very much the same, and everyone’s looking for the solution to the fact that 90% of everything in the market is utter crap.
Imagine, if you will, that you’re a good game designer. You’ve made something that’s captured the attention of part of the audience and, after you run some numbers, you realize that you could make a living on this. If you’ve done those numbers correctly, you’re still looking at a difficult life, one filled with a lot of hustle, a lot of compromises on your creative vision, and, most discouragingly, precarity. Precarity is, in essence, the amount of time you spend one decision away from ruin. It’s the constant enemy of anyone who doesn’t earn a constant and consistent income, and when your precarious income is game design instead of, say, insurance sales, there’s no relief from it, either. The only avenues to some meager financial security are to release a game that honestly gets famous, book dozens of hours of freelance work over and above your own design work, or simply have a day job.
Continue reading The Precarity of RPG DesignStardew Valley returned to the video game consciousness in a big way recently with the release of its 1.6 update. This update includes new content, rebalancing, and generally significant improvements and changes to the game that most thought unlikely after the 1.5 update due to designer Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone shifting his focus to his next game, Haunted Chocolatier. Needless to say the scope of the update was a very pleasant surprise, and many players, myself included, dove back in.
I’ve put a number of hours into a new playthrough of Stardew Valley, having previously put the game down after the 1.5 update. Compared to my last two playthroughs I’ve taken more time to consider the design of the game and what it can teach us about tabletop games. Much like the last time I analyzed a video game like this, No Man’s Sky, the intent is not to imply that the gameplay loops would make much sense at the tabletop; Stardew Valley’s most tactile elements, like its combat and fishing, belong firmly in the digital realm. Instead I’d say there’s a lot to learn about how Stardew Valley presents a world and the avenues by which a player can interact with that world. This world design is, in some ways at least, the opposite of No Man’s Sky. Stardew Valley presents a ‘closed world’ where the avenues of interaction are finite and presented from the beginning, and that mode of world design can teach some lessons to tabletop RPGs, either to designers or GMs.
Continue reading Stardew Valley’s Closed World“Think about screenplays and films, or the final episode of a television show that you know will not be renewed. Think about saying goodbye to friends who are moving away. Think about the last day of summer vacation. Think about funerals. Think about the restaurant that closed all those years ago, and the noodles they used to serve. Think about the best birthday party you ever had. Think about putting off the last chapter of a book until tomorrow. Think about grief, and relief. Think about the end of a world. Think about the feeling of emerging from a movie theater into a dark parking lot, under the stars.” Longtime readers might recall I’ve written about saying goodbye to characters before, but that was largely in a ‘how to remember and treasure them’ way. The reasoning behind that article is, however, the same one that drew me to check out the subject of this one: the attachment to characters that we’ve created and a desire for closure as we leave them, and the snapshot of their lives that we played out, behind. This is a look at World Ending Game by Everest Pipkin.
Continue reading World Ending Game – Saying Goodbye With Style
Welcome to another System Hack! Way back when I gave an intro to how to use dice and dice statistics in your game designs. This is in some ways a sequel to that article, but given the design assumptions of RPGs it also plays a very different tune. We use dice in RPGs because large swathes of our game mechanics are predicated on the probability of something happening. Success, failure, or something in between is determined by odds that reflect the internal consistency of the setting. This, like so many norms in gaming, comes from wargames and isn’t particularly necessary in many game designs. We have gotten through the checkpoint of ‘you don’t have to use dice’ but the result has been, merely, diceless games. What if we play differently, and steal a deck of cards from the poker set instead of stealing dice from Monopoly?
Continue reading System Hack: Using Playing CardsTwo of the roads with the most traffic to Cyberpunk RED are, naturally, players of Cyberpunk 2077 and players of older tabletop editions like Cyberpunk 2020. However, once arriving at their new carmine destination there are naturally going to be a few disconnects, and one of the biggest is in the nature of combat. The smart Cyberpunk 2020 party wanted to blast their opponents to chunky salsa as fast as possible and often could, and V eventually becomes a cybergod capable of mowing through entire gangs on their own. Cyberpunk RED characters are themselves tougher in turn than their 2020 counterparts, but they simply can’t go through their enemies that fast. Aaron pondered changes to the combat rules but found that, as with anything else, fiddling with the wiring that already exists can pose a lot of challenges. I’m not fiddling with the wires, so much as I’m adding an attachment (much like the Cyberpunk RED Luck Deck from that same article) – and I’m stealing from a galaxy far, far away to do it.
As longtime readers of this site may be aware, I have a long history with GURPS. GURPS was the first game I GMed for what is still my primary gaming group, and I GMed GURPS for the majority of all games that I ran from 2006 until 2014. In the intervening decade I moved away from the system because my own interests changed; I began seeking out specific experiences and different approaches to game design. Some of my favorite games and game systems from the last decade, systems as diverse as Twilight:2000, Electric Bastionland, and Apocalypse World, all share the common property of being designed for a specific circumstance. In other words, all of these games could be considered the antithesis of GURPS at least as far as design goals are concerned.
That said, my affection for GURPS and generic game systems in general has never completely waned. Beyond that, when it comes to a more simulative approach to gaming, to times when you want to know how to make a very wide range of situations relevant, GURPS is still king. I cannot think of a better game for bringing verisimilitude and consistency to a very wide set of characters and circumstances. However, as much as I hold a lot of affection for GURPS, there are still some things I’d want to change if I were to return to the system. For this System Hack or two (or three?) I’m going to look at GURPS and look at things which haven’t gotten as much revision and research as the tech level system, or the frightening number of weapons, or the comprehensive and extremely math-heavy solar creation templates of GURPS Space. No, I’m going to be talking about things that have received a lot of attention since GURPS Fourth Edition was released in 2005. Spotlight management. Player-driven goals. And today, advancement.
Continue reading System Hack: Advancement for GURPSWelcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers and industry news stories about demon slaying and blacklists from elsewhere online.
After graduating into one of the worst recessions the global economy had yet seen, I cut short a fruitless job search to go to grad school. I ended up with a Master’s Degree in Innovation Management, a field which sounds like it was made up by the Business School industry but yet taught me a lot. While invention is the act of creating something new, innovation is the act of deriving value from new things, from inventions. According to the World Economic Forum 1.7 million patents were granted in 2021, which is a huge number. But even setting aside things like filing the same patent in multiple countries, a small fraction of those patents represent anything like tangible value to society at large. While invention can happen with a bit of creativity and some work, innovation is significantly more dependent on exogenous factors, on what happens to the invention after it comes into being. RPG designers are like inventors in that way; many many people are designing, are inventing, but the vast majority of games will never make an impact on the market at large.
While there are certainly forces contributing to a greater stagnation of the RPG hobby (D&D comes to mind), the low ‘hit rate’ for new RPGs when it comes to moving the needle in the greater marketplace is largely structural, and unlikely to change in the long run. On the creator side, making an RPG is relatively easy, requiring significantly less money and specific skill than making video, digital games, or visual art, and often less time than writing long-form fiction. This means that the number of entrants into the market will be relatively high. On the consumer side, RPGs have higher switching costs than virtually any other form of media; a consumer needs to find a minimum of 2-4 friends to play with them, with a play time of two hours on the low side. Beyond that, when the presumed norm of the medium involves campaigns of literally dozens of four-plus hour sessions and understanding at least one densely-written rulebook, the perceived switching costs are significantly worse than the already high actual switching costs. These things combined to make the number of consumers in the market relatively low, and the number of games they will consume lower still.
Continue reading Most Games Don’t MatterPlay in any game system long enough, and you’re going to want to tweak things a little – there’s something missing, or a rule doesn’t quite work the way you want it to. Or maybe you’re coming at things fresh with an idea of what you want to do. No game system matches your idea 1:1, but there are a few that come close enough that you don’t want to have to design a game from the ground up. Whether it’s just for a home game or you’re designing one yourself to publish, that means it’s time to change or ‘hack’ the system in question. But what thoughts might you want to have along the way? I’ve got three.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 