Designing TTRPGs… and Visiting the Mall Food Court

Designing a TTRPG isn’t easy. But there are natural boundaries you can use: genre, player and GM expectations. Game mechanics should emerge from genre (hence player and GM) expectations. Games in the horror genre shouldn’t have mechanics for slapstick. An RPG focused on present-day mercenaries doesn’t need rules for magic. Systems should reinforce, not fight against, genre conventions. Both GM rules/tools and player systems must support genre “feel”.

Play experience expectations flow from genre expectations. If I’m playing a horror game, I want to feel horror. Fear. Terror. Or at least know that my character is feeling horror, fear, dread, terror. If I’m playing a heroic fantasy TTRPG, I want to play a badass wizard, throw spells, fight owlbears, swing magic swords.

Some genres naturally align with resource management mechanics (post-apocalyptic, survival). Others focus on abundance/social capital (space opera, social drama). Mechanical weight should match genre expectations, player and GM expectations.

The “Game” Problem… Calling something a “game” creates pressure for optimization systems. Traditional RPG mechanics often default to resource management, but not all genres call for managing resources. Certainly not all call for managing scarce resources. If there’s no genre or player expectation for “In this kind of play-world, I would expect to manage resources,” this can create disconnect between mechanics and fiction. Resource-management should not be the go-to mechanic for TTRPGs. Unless the genre says it should. (Certainly, post apocalyptic games call for it.)

But if you call it a “game” it should have “gamey” things. Mechanics. Systems. “If this, then that” constructs that exist outside the game fiction. Mechanics make it a game.

Or do they? If the only mechanic was, “You tell part of the story. That’s your turn. When you’re done, then the next person continues the story.” IS THAT A GAME?

I’d say, “Yes, but not much of one.” Fictional coherence. Immersion isn’t possible with fictional coherence. (Or is it?)

Design Balance: Games need mechanics that create meaningful choices without breaking immersion (fictional coherence). Pure storygames can lack engaging structure. “You tell the story, then I tell the story,” isn’t much of a “game”.

Is there a sweet spot? Mechanics that enhance rather than obstruct storytelling? Or is storytelling only one of the outcomes that TTRPGs should support? If I’m playing a Mad Max post-apocalyptic TTRPG, I would say that I’m likely to want to tell stories that fit the genre. Right? Or… at least “inhabit” characters who live in that fictional milieu. “I want to play a character who rides a crazy tricked-out post-apocalyptic mayhem vehicle.” That’s a genre and play experience expectation. But it implies storytelling, it doesn’t put it front and center.

If I choose the rollercoaster, I want to feel thrilled, breathless and exhilarated. If I choose the twirl-a-whirl, I want to feel nauseous. The sign in front of the ride IS the player/GM play experience expectation. The job of the designer is to build a ride that matches the sign out front. If it’s Cthulu, I want my investigator to go mad.

So there’s no universal sweet spot, is there? The mechanics should match the sign out front. Maybe the sign out front is, “Cozy stories by the fire.” If so, “You make stuff up, and then I make stuff up,” might be… just fine?

I mean. Not for me. I want something to push against.

My sweet spot is probably summed up in a single word, “Adventure!”

But a substantial number of players who have sat at my table have been interested in either: a) vicarious badassery (exact definitions vary, but yeah, hero-porn, basically); or, b) optimization.

Many players at my table have just wanted something social to do. Drink a couple beers, joke around, get out of the house without spending a lot of money.

Many player have wanted to experience discovery, a sense of other-place-ness, a clockwork miniature world that they can uncover, discover, marvel out, make sense of. (Aside: because often we gamers are not super great at the “real” world?)

A couple players over the years have wanted to be amateur actors.

A very very few players have wanted to tell cool stories.

This… hah. This is why 5E D&D succeeds, right? Because it isn’t anything. Literally it’s nothing. Which means it’s all of these. There are builds for the optimizers. HP inflation and short rests for the “I want to kill shit” badassery crowd. There are… Fuck, there are Tabaxi for the funny (furry?) voices crowd. And now, in the last decade plus, the “I want to hang with pals” crowd are like, “D&D is cool, sorta.”

I wonder if the 5E designers did this on purpose? It’s the rorshack test of games, everything and nothing. Every player can project onto it the kind of play experience they showed up for. The beer and pretzels gamers never cared in the first place. The voice actor player can do a scottish dwarf all night. The optimizer can spend days in the right subreddits looking up build options. The immersion player can… well they can hope their DM is decent. But I digress. The 5E non-design is brilliant. And awful. It’s the vanilla ice cream of games. No, the tofu of games. It tastes like anything you want it to.

Surely this contributes to why super “coherent” indie games, lovingly designed, never amount to much adoption. I mean lots of other reasons, too. But this. 5E accomodates every playstyle, every time. Honey Heist… not so much.

So the cruel irony is that the more laser focused your design is, delivering just exactly some particular genre or play experience, the smaller your footprint will be. It will be the perfect game… for like 19 people. One time. Maybe twice.

Meanwhile 5E is the mall food court. You get pizza, I’m getting mediocre ramen, and Alice is getting a salad. We’re technically sitting down for a meal together. Sorta.

So, this: “Just play a different system” advice falls flat. Sure, Dread is better for horror, but now you need everyone to want horror, learn new rules, and give up their character builds they’ve been theory-crafting. The switching cost isn’t the rules. It’s the social cost. 5E’s beautiful mediocrity is a feature! It means never having to negotiate what experience, or decide on it, or even talk about it explicitly.

Yah. The indie scene creates these beautiful, coherent, focused experiences for audiences that mostly don’t exist in sustainable numbers. “For 3-5 people who want exactly this experience” isn’t a market. It’s a very specific dinner party. Meanwhile… mall food court.