Players, either from experience playing, or because they read the book, can easily discover the details of published monsters and thereby get an advantage that can ruin the fun. Dealing with unfamiliar opponents with unknown tactical abilities is a valuable tension driver in TTRPGs.
The ideal TTRPG has no rules at all.
Any rule immediately obstructs the game.
Game design should seek to keep
the total number of rules as close to zero as possible.
We’ve been trying to get a game started and keep it going for a couple of years. We’re on attempt 3 and it seems to be working this time. Attempts 1 and 2 were undermined by unequal levels of player investment, and one obnoxiously self-absorbed player. From what I read online, these sorts of derailments are fairly common.
But struggling with these situations, and struggling to get a handle on D&D, has given me a chance to think about the nature of players, the Game Master, the game itself.
This is my own bias – I’m far more interested in the story than any rules. The sheer volume of rules, player options, expansions, etc, for D&D looks to me like a game design failure, not a success. You don’t improve your chess game by giving one of the pieces extra powers, or saying it can take two hits before removal. You improve by being a better player. Extra (as in excessive) stuff like levels, feats, bonus actions, magic items, don’t improve the game, they just give (players mainly) a way to keep going without getting better – instead of being better players they just overwhelm any challenges.
D&D is based on an acquisition model – players are actively encouraged to acquire more everything, become more powerful, and ultimately invincible. “Winning” D&D is about acquiring.
Acquiring stuff implicitly requires tons of rules to describe and govern the stuff. D&D also becomes about memorization, acquisition of information.
Acquisition of stuff is not inherently antithetical to good play, but it provides a way for players and GMs to focus on stuff instead of story. And D&D is designed from the ground up to encourage that.
The “game of imagination” provides so much stuff (rules, classes, feats, races, sub-classes, accessories, academies, multi-classes, items, etc, etc) that your imagination doesn’t need to do any heavy lifting at all. How true that is depends on the individual, the table dynamic and the GM’s campaign style. But the game itself is a tilted surface, wanting everything to slide towards a place where all you have to do is take what they give you.
It makes sense – they want to sell more expansion books, on-line game options, VTTs, licenced products, and all the other hundreds of consumer items you can buy. Hasbro would likely prefer that you mute your imagination and just buy more stuff, digital and/or real.
I’m interested in a game that asks you to work with what you already have – that imagination thing. Sure, you need a framework for a game to have consistency beyond a single instance of spontaneous playful engagement, like those unknown kids 200,000 years ago. But it should IMHO be designed to keep the game itself small. To put the burden of imagination on the GM and players – not on a game designer. Game designer makes the framework – the GM/players bring it to life. Game design 10%, GM/players 90%. More or less.
Where is this train of thought stopping? I’m not really sure, I’m just watching the countryside go by for now.
RPG games were invented by kids sitting around a fire some 200,000 years ago.
They took turns describing how each would have handled the day’s hunt.
They shouted, gesticulated, interrupted, building the dramatic story to a heroic pitch. They were wide-eyed & intense describing dangers, then laughing at slapstick fumbles. They had no dice, published no game mechanics, invoked only one rule; the Rule of Cool.
They invented the most perfect RPG system in history, and none have ever done better.
Table tops were invented about 150,000 years later.
This was written as I was drafting an intro for One Game. There seems to be an idea that somebody out there “invented” the idea of a game that kids and probably some adults have been playing since humans could harness enough language to toss ideas and images back and forth. Likely 100,000 to 250,000 years past. We’ll never know the people or kids who were the first to discover the wonder of describing something that existed only in imagination, and the wonder of realizing that others could receive that imagined creation. That must have been one amazing day.
Tabletops and dice have been around for thousands of years. Museums have some nice d20 from ancient Egypt. Its not likely that anyone enjoying games of story and imagination were going to demure over tables. I mean, what was the better option? Tables were everywhere.
Paper minis for TTRPGs. These guys and gals are classic skeletons, doodled up using Concepts app. I don’t have a particular need for skeletons, but I had long ago made some skeleton doodles and liked them, they were just fun. The drawing was long lost and I wanted to recreate them more or less.
Paper minis for games are easy and cheap to make. If you can draw that’s great but its fun to make these with any skill level. The little plastic stands can be found in batches of 50-100 on Temu for about $5-10 Cdn. Get the 1″/25mm ones with the gripping bumps inside the groove, they hold better.
There’s no PDF, I just lined them up in a layout app and printed them, fronts and backs.
They were previously posted on Reddit r/papermini
These guys, all guys, can be encountered over a wide range of my campaign. They are horribly malformed, inbred and of small cognitive ability, they serve Mother. Mother is always hungry. I made these paper minis in a bit of a hurry, there will probably be a v2 someday this year.
My son listened to a great podcast called Stories Podcast when he was younger. It’s a podcast for the about 6 to 12 audience, offering classic stories, fairy tales, and original material with a full cast most of the time. Mixed in there were some original stories about Max Goodname, Knight of the Realm, by Daniel Hinds. My son loved those stories and a new Max Goodname story was an event. I even bought the Kindle books, the only two Kindle books I’ve ever bought (I hate walled garden services).
In 2021, Stories Podcast and Michael Low, an English teacher, announced Starsworn, a TTRPG based in the world of the Max Goodname stories. This was huge for my son and we were (I think) the very first to enlist for their Patreon. You can still obtain Starsworn in PDF and printed versions at https://www.storiesrpg.com/
The game allowed kids and parents to play the game at home alongside the podcast episodes which continued to be released from time to time. These are full cast performances, a lot of work. Game scenarios were released from time to time, but in the end, not as frequently as originally planned. These are also a lot of work.
My job was to be the Narrator, which is similar to the “Dungeon Master” in a Dungeons & Dragons game – the Narrator sets the scene, enacts the various characters who are not players, and acts as a sort of referee. The players (my son and buddies) invent characters for themselves to be their avatars in the story, and essentially pretend and imagine what those characters do. The rules were a reasonable size, Starsworn could be read and played within the hour, maybe half hour. Because the players were already familiar with the world their characters inhabited from the podcast, it was easy to jump in.
This was a genius set up – having an ongoing story or stories happening in the podcast made the whole imaginary world seem more alive and engaging for the kids. They heard the stories, and knew that somewhere out there in their own game world, Max Goodname and his friends were actively on adventures. It made Max real. They would meet Max’s allies, friends and enemies as they played and moved through the world. They wanted to follow up story threads that emerged from the podcasts, chase the bad guys along with Max. And in the end, that is what brought the game to an awkward endless cliff hanging fade away.
The Stories TTRPG crew moved on to other stories with new characters in different worlds. My players weren’t interested – they were invested in Max Goodname and wanted to know what happened to him.
Scenarios were to be monthly, reasonably priced. But they quickly fell behind schedule. Several podcast episodes were released but then no more. Our game slowed, paused, never resumed. This was largely just bad luck – we were there at the start, eagerly waiting for more material that never arrived. For anyone starting now, it wouldn’t matter – the available material is all there is, so you know what you have to work with.
So what I learned about game design from this experience with what I think was a brilliant concept for a kids TTRPG was this…
The game played at home had to be aligned with the “official” story as presented in the podcast. So the Narrator had to be careful not to contradict the podcast, and more important, not to let the players follow story threads from the podcast which were still unresolved in the podcast, in case the players’ actions turned out to be out of sync with later podcast story direction.
The Narrator could use published adventures and/or invent adventures, which was fine and works. But I found the kids kept wanting to follow threads from the podcast. But it was extremely difficult to do that because of the large time gaps between either podcast stories or published official scenarios. As the game Narrator, I just didn’t have enough information, and I couldn’t invent narrative that might conflict with the next official instalment and so burst the bubble of imagination.
Critical lessons I learned;
– Starsworn was an actively ongoing story players/narrators could coordinate with, as distinct from, just providing a backstory or setting which players/narrators can expand on.
– A notification from the publisher (which never happened) that game materials and podcasts had ended (no more future releases) would have made a critical difference and allowed us to continue without worrying about conflicts between at-home story and podcast story.
The frequency of published material (stories or game scenarios) has to keep pace with the general rate at which participants/kids/gamers are advancing the story at home in their own game.
Narrators (in the sense they function for Starsworn) need to have enough information about narrative threads in the published and forthcoming podcasts, stories and game scenarios to be able to work their own narrative invention around those official threads so they generally remain synchronized. That would possibly mean giving Narrators some sort of plot/story outline ahead of podcast or publications.
Alternatively, narrative threads in the podcast need to be resolved within timeframes compatible with general at-home rates of play.
In the end our game stalled out. He wanted to pursue a villain from the podcast, which was impossible to do without causing story conflicts between the game at home and the podcast stories in future. We waited for new material to appear so we could move forward. By the time it was clear that there would be no more Max Goodname ( meaning we could have taken the story in any direction we wanted), the kids had moved on to other games.
As I said, it doesn’t matter for anyone starting with Starsworn now – you know what is available, so you know when you can diverge from the “official” story without any issues. And I recommend it – Starsworn is a great starting point for kids who want to try playing a TTRPG. The Max Goodname stories are great and my son and his friends loved them.
The One Game is a TTRPG, a tabletop role playing game. It is similar in nature to many other TTRPGs.
This website is the home of The One Game, and also thoughts and rants about TTRPGs or more or less related things.
So why does this exist? I wanted a rules-light game system that could be learned quickly, and played with just enough detail to make it exciting and fast moving. I previously had run Starsworn and Magical Kitties Save the Day games for my son, and they were fine, and manageable in scale. But my son wanted to play D&D because it’s impossible to avoid arriving at D&D’s doorstep if you are interested in TTRPGs.
Two things became obvious quickly. One, D&D (5th edition) required a decent amount of time to learn – it was much more elaborate than our previous games. Two, I didn’t have a decent amount of time to read the absurdly huge rule books. I also don’t have time to try a dozen other systems, even if I could find anyone to play them with. I listened to podcasts, read what I could, and it seemed clear to me that D&D suffered from disorganized bloat. As Ash Barker put it – D&D fails the Christmas morning test, meaning it is not possible to read the rules, set up and play in a reasonable amount of time.
It was quicker to write a rule set from scratch (with some theft) than to learn D&D. The critical mechanics are, as far as I know (because I’m not going to spend time researching this), original. Some mechanics are based on or inspired by various TTRPG pundits and designers. While Shadowdark is still too fat for my needs, it was inspiration.
The One Game has more than zero rules, so in that sense it’s a failure like all other modern TTRPGs. But it is quicker to play than most.
I don’t believe The One Game will rule them all, it’s just that it’s the one game I have time for. I’ll be adding a PDF to this site at some point – it will not be definitive, more of an early prototype I will be modifying, trimming as we use it. Hopefully it will make TTRPGs a realistic option for others.
Break a leg.