3 RPG Design Tips For Professionals and Homebrewers Alike

For those who aren't regular readers, I've been a freelance RPG designer for more than six years or so now. I've written modules like The Ghosts of Sorrow Marsh, designed feats and encounter tables in products like Feats of Legend: 20 Orc Feats as well as 100 Encounters in a Fey Forest (both for the Pathfinder RPG), and I've contributed class archetypes in supplements like Letters From The Flaming Crab: Puppet Show along with The Demonologist from TPK Games.

I'm leading with this because I don't want anyone who goes further to think I'm armchair quarterbacking the realities of designing tabletop RPGs. On the contrary, making games is very much my day job, and not a day goes by where I'm not elbow-deep in something's engine trying to figure out what's making that rattling sound, or how to get just a little more horsepower out of it.

There's your problem; no universal dice rules.

So whether you're a fellow professional, or just someone who likes to retool games and make changes for your personal friend group, I would ask that you please keep the following tips in mind. I say this from experience; they are going to help far more than they're going to hurt.

Tip #1: Do Not Play Favorites

As someone who's up to my shoulder in a core rule book right now (I'll tell you more when I can, trust me), I truly sympathize with everyone out there who has a favorite in their games. Whether it's a particular class you're all gung-ho about, or a character race or background package, or just one particular faith in your game, do not give them all the toys. It will not endear them to your players, and it will draw into question your objectivity when balancing a rule set for fairness.

Look no further if you need an example.

If you've never played the first edition of Scion, it's a game with a really cool premise. In short, one of your parents was a god, the titans have escaped their prison, and now you need to stand with your parents to become a hero like those in the old myths and legends. Eventually you will ascend to stand at your parent's right hand as a god yourself... if you survive.

Which powers you get access to, and which attributes you can make godly, vary largely based on your parent, and which pantheon they belong to. If you read this book it's pretty clear someone on the design team loved the Norse gods, and Odin in particular. The one-eyed wanderer is hands-down one of the most powerful parents in the game, and if you're going for raw numbers and options there's very little reason to play a scion of any other god at least 80 percent of the time.

That sort of favoritism creates problems in game balance and design, and it can make players who'd rather opt for something else feel like they're being punished for wanting to explore other options. Make every option unique and viable, and you'll have a better overall game.

Speaking of significance in game design...

Tip #2: Make Your Options Mechanically Significant

 

One game I played a lot of when it first came out was D20 Modern. While it had all the usual flaws of 3.5 Dungeons and Dragons, it presented a lot of fun options and unusual potential for playing modern fantasy games using an at least vaguely familiar class system with prestige classes, feats, and other recognizable elements.

It's really not that bad, if you can overlook the flaws.

One of the big issues I felt this game had from a design perspective (a flaw shared by Shadowrun, and some books in the World of Darkness as well) was there were entire tables dedicated to modern firearms of every make, size, and style over the decades. But when all the semi-automatic handguns did the same damage, had the same rate of fire, and the same size clip, there was really no point in including three dozen variations that amounted to the same thing. Ditto the shotguns, machine guns, submachine guns, etc. If it's all the same, why waste the page space?

I've seen this with classes, with monsters, with weapons, armor, and background traits. If there is no mechanical difference between two aspects of the game, or if you're just going to assign the same value to a dozen different options, don't bother reprinting them. Flavor reskins are a part of any game, but don't waste your players' time and energy reading through a bunch of palate swaps.

Tip #3: Don't Let Random Chance Reign Supreme

Randomization is the function of the dice. However, that randomization should be something that affects the challenge of the game, not something that decides every aspect of it. Put another way, if it's possible for a character no matter how ill-prepared to overcome a challenge entirely on a single roll of the die, then your system is little more than a slot machine; unbalanced, and probably grossly tilted in favor of the house.

It's an RPG, not a craps table.

To give an example, a character who rolls a natural 20 on an attack is going to hit in basically every edition of Dungeons and Dragons. However, even if that farmer with the hoe smashes an impossibly lucky blow into the face of the conquering tyrant Eldrakkar, it isn't going to kill him. Eldrakkar is the game's big bad, after all, and a CR 17 fighter/necromancer. Such a lucky blow is unlikely even to phase him, likely giving him little more than a thin cut along his cheek. This firmly establishes that it is always possible to hit, but that it is not possible to randomly destroy a powerful character because of a lucky roll of the die... whether that's the campaign's big bad villain, or the party's front line fighter once they really hit their stride.

All it takes to throw that out the window is to add a chart of random critical hit effects. The chart might have some less potent options like, "stunned for a turn," or, "character loses weapon," but often more brutal entries like, "character loses a hand," or, "character is decapitated" wind up on these lists.

Imagine that you're playing a campaign, and the big boss that you've had all this built-up for dies in a single hit because the wizard's player got lucky, and stabbed the bad guy in the heart for an instant death. Or, flip the script, and imagine that your heavily armored professional soldier who's survived dozens of encounters is killed in the first round of the first combat of the game because the DM rolled a natural 20, and then chopped your head off because a goblin sergeant got in a lucky hit with a hatchet.

That kind of extreme randomness is not good game design. Especially when you consider that in any game the DM is going to roll far more dice than the players, meaning that the players are going to be on the receiving end of any unfair odds. There's always going to be elements of chance and randomness, and good or bad luck can sway how a game goes... but if every roll of the die literally carries the potential to end a challenge (or the party) I'd suggest trying to re-balance the game so you're not swerving all over the road when you fire it up.

Also, while we're on the subject of randomness in game design, I would like to ask all my fellow designers to please stop padding out games with huge tables of random things. Don't waste page space with twenty different criminal backgrounds, or random starting ages and weights for characters. Even random encounter tables are a little passe at this point, since a majority of groups would rather focus on the story they're all there to tell without wasting an hour fighting off two enraged grizzly bears who were just there for the lulz. We've got limited time, and focusing on meaningful challenges and story beats is often far more preferable.

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That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday!

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