Thread by @PaulCzege

How about some #RPGtheory? Great. Are you designing an RPG? They are fragile social constructs. They fail to deliver on your envisioned play experience for them all the time.

If you want the best for your RPG you need to inform your decisions by knowing how you expect it to deliver on your envisioned play experience.

There are three ways RPGs do it.

When John Harper runs 3:16 he brings a ton of compelling NPC play and genre detail to the table. There's malevolent drill sergeants and narcissistic generals and scarily faulty equipment.

There's references to Hamburger Hill, Aliens, Platoon, Full-metal Jacket, Starship Troopers. His GM style brings the players into an experience of fun character drama.

When I ran 3:16 it was a dumb race through the jungle fighting teleporting monkey-like aliens. I couldn't bring the experience the way John does. There wasn't anything fun about the combats and the players didn't manage to create any fun character drama.

Greg Stolze's In Spaaace! is like this too. When you play it with Greg he hits you with a firehose of Futurama, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Spaceballs, Ice Pirates, Coneheads, 3rd Rock from the Sun, etc, and it's hilarious.

When you play it yourself, if your GM can't do it like Greg, it's not the least bit fun.

This is the first way an RPG might deliver on its designer's envisioned play experience: the GM brings the fun.

The second way is to rely on play culture. Lots of OSR games are in this category.

They don't say a thing in the rules text about how or why characters might be fighting creatures in a catacombs, but a play culture of taking odd jobs from wizards you meet in seedy taverns compensates for that.

And the third way is the design of a game itself gets players into the headspace to participate successfully in the play experience.

This, to me, is the real art and undiscovered country of game design, because you only ever achieve it with a real understanding of human motivation and how it connects to the themes of your game.

The Clay That Woke gets you into the headspace of contemplative minotaurs by…

…giving you reflective time while other minotaurs are having their scenes, by not stressing you out about the possibility of character death, by asking you to reflect on the actions of other minotaurs in the Nameless Conversation, and among other things, by requiring certain…

…kinds of interactions between player characters, frex, having a conversation about a civic or cultural issue.

So yeah, if you want the best for your RPG you need your creative decisions to be aiming it at how you expect it to deliver on your envisioned play experience. Any of the three are valid choices as long as you're clear in your head about what you're doing.

Wait...is there a fourth way? What about just writing a lucid, instructional text that lays out the envisioned play experience???

Good luck with that.