Instead, I'm going to start with conceptual tools—Paradigms & Practices that have served me well.
We'll start with some Basic P&P…
• A Gravid Situation
• Functional Collaboration
• Interesting Content Generation
In V&S you're prisoners who have just escaped an orbital prison aboard a ship of unknown origin. Go!
When designing, ask yourself about the very first moments of play. Do the characters have something to do right away? Is there a clear place to go?
At its core, a game is collaboration among the players. It does have to be all anarcho-syndicalist & shit. You can have an iron-fisted GM if you want, but there'll still be collaboration. Take the time to examine how—or even if—that works in your game.
But the way you roleplay in one game won't always fit the way you need to roleplay in another. Roleplaying is not one size fits all.
It's so easy to think of an RPG as a series of rules that resolve a series of conflicts. How do we know you scaled the castle wall? How do we figure out who won the legal argument? Who hit who for how much?
Instead, ask how can you help the players make interesting things happen. What's interesting about scaling a castle wall? Why is a legal argument compelling?
But there's always more, right? There's always that next level. So let's dip our toes into the P&P Expert Set.
(Or at least, that's what I'm going to pretend he likes to talk about so I can both avoid the mistaken impression that this is my idea & lend authority to my assertions here.)
You want to ABC.
Be (thinking about the game you are currently designing as a)
Conversation.
Even if your game is wall-to-wall stat blocks, charts & sweet, sweet calculations, folks are going to need to talk to each other to play it. Decide how you want that to work.
Or rather, we should talk about how you should have a clear idea of what the objective of your game is and how your game helps and challenges the players on their way to it.
But now I'm back with 4 tools from the P&P Companion Set and then some bits about hardware & software.
Let's start with Playstorming.
I've had quite a lot of success with it. MonkeyDome, the precursor to #SwordsWithoutMaster⚔️, was playstormed:
Plus, it gets you all jazzed up.
Or microgames or picogames or femtogames? Something tiny & manageable—just big enough to hold an idea or 2 plus the tools from the P&P Basic Set.
I'm going to say this in all caps and with 3 exclamation points, because it needs to be shouted:
ABANDON YOUR GAMES OFTEN & WITHOUT REMORSE!!!
Keep churning through them until something sticks. Or doesn't. It doesn't matter. Just don't cling to unfinished games that aren't moving.
Make a pun with your rules & then drive that pun into the ground. Make folks draw you a picture in order to buy your game. Try to write a game without mentioning numbers of any kind. Whatever your kink is, give it a shot.
I have some baggage here. Partly because throughout my college years, while pursuing a degree in English with an emphasis on creative writing, everywhere I looked I saw someone trying to sell my dreams back to me in the form of tools.
It was incessant & predatory.
I've got a lot of anger about this, so I should probably leave it at that.
I mean, just ask me about my calculators sometime.
I do all my layout & whatnot on Adobe CS4 because I'm too cheap to get anything newer.
society6.com/product/the-sa…
So many spreadsheets.
It deserves to be on the growing list of design tools at my disposal for helping me disappear into another world without distracting lyrics.