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Abra | I gain access to a world only I can see.

HHEININGE

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To my mind, the main advantage of Big Stupid Tables over generative content is that generative models must, by the nature of how the technology operates, produce outputs that are statistically likely to appear in their training data, while the outputs of a well-constructed set of dice lookup tables may principally consist of combinations of elements never before attempted on account of being dumb as hell.

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To my mind, the main advantage of Big Stupid Tables over generative content is that generative content must, by the nature of how the technology operates, produce outputs that are statistically likely to appear in its training data, while the outputs of a well-constructed set of dice lookup tables may principally consist of combinations of elements never before attempted on account of being dumb as hell.

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Cecil Beaton (British | 1904 - 1980)

Gwili Andre, c.1932

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The Tombs of the Old Heroes (1812) Caspar David Friedrich

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If any of y'all had tips for aspiring TTRPG creators, what would they be? I'm hosting a "How to Make your own TTRPG" panel at a con this weekend, and anything to show folks from a fellow indie studio would be great!

Yeah a bunch. Each one of these could basically be its own post, but here are the condensed versions.

Social Media

You need social media. No one will ever hear of your game without a strong social media presence. And as much as it sucks, your best bet is probably tumblr. It’s the only populated social media site that allows your posts to be widely circulated without you having to pay, and also long form enough to actually include information. I dedicate one day a week entirely to social media and that’s just about the only reason we make any money at all.

Also, when using tumblr, the first five tags you put on a post are the most important, those are the tags that make it show up on people’s dashboards. The first twenty tags are the ones that make it show up in search results. Don’t put the name of your game in the first five tags generally, because if no one has heard of it yet, no one is following those tags.

Don’t Paywall Your Game

You deserve to be paid for your work if you indeed did any work at all (we’ll get to that), but that just isn’t the world we live in. Unless you have an advertising budget to essentially trick people into buying a game that might end up being crap, you need something to prove that your game is worth spending money on. Without an advertising budget, that proof has to be your game. Setting your game to pay-what-you-want, or providing “community copies,” lets people try your game before they buy. Plenty of people will buy up-front when given the option, and others who can’t afford it at that moment will download it for free then come back and pay later. Some people will never pay, but what that means for you is that they either never experience your game, or they pirate it. People experiencing your game, showing it to their friends, and talking about it is one of the most valuable pieces of advertisement you can ever have. It will ultimately lead to more people who are willing and able to pay learning about your game.

Start Small but Not Too Small

Do not make a one-page game for your first game. Do not be like us and make a 700-page game for your first game. Try to aim for something between 20 and 200 pages, especially if you’re one person or a small team.

Play and Read a lot of RPGs or Your Game Will Suck

Would you watch a movie by a director who had only ever watched one movie? Would you read a book by an author who had only ever read one book? Hell no, those would suck.

Read many rpg rulebooks, from many different genres and decades, play as many of them as you can (by the rules) to understand how the rules work and why they’re there. This will give you the creative tools you need to make something that isn’t just a weaker version of the last RPG you played. No, listening to "actual plays" does not count.

Most actual plays stray significantly from presenting a regular gameplay experience in favor of an experience that is entertaining for an audience. If you want to learn martial arts, you should be watching martial arts tournaments, not WWE.

If you want an actual play podcast that has my “actually mostly presents a real gameplay experience” approval, try Tiny Table.

If you say you don’t have time to read rulebooks, then you don’t have time to design a good game. Studying is part of the process of creating. If you don't, you won't even know about gleeblor.

This will let you know whether your "innovation" is more like "Cars don't need to run on gasoline!" or "Cars don't need crumple zones and airbags!"

The Rules Matter, So Design with Intent

The rules matter the rules fucking matter holy shit what you actually write down on the page matters I can’t believe this is actually the seemingly most needed piece of advice on this list. The. rules. matter.

Design your game to be played in the way you designed it. The rules affect the tone and genre of your game, they affect the type of people PCs can be and the kind of stories that will result from gameplay. Bonuses encourage PC behaviors, penalties discourage PC behaviors.

Do not fall for the trap of “oh well people will just play it their own way based on vibes anyway so it doesn’t matter what I write the rules to be.” Write that you wrote this game to be played by the rules and that significant changes to the rules mean that players are no-longer playing the game you made. Write like you deserve for your art to be acknowledged by its audience. If you don’t, then there is no point in anyone playing the game you made, because if the person who wrote it doesn’t even care what the rules say, why should anyone? The people whose “playing” of TTRPGs consists of never opening the rulebook and improving based on “vibes” will still do that no matter what, but the people who would have actually tried to engage with your game will find that it sucks if you don’t even care what the rules are yourself.

Playtest

You need to playtest your game if you want it to work as intended. You need multiple sets of eyes on it. If you don’t have the opportunity personally to do so, just release your game anyway with the acknowledgement that it’s unfinished. Call it an alpha or a beta version, and ask for people that do play it to give feedback, then update and fix the game based on that feedback.

Ignore Feedback

Most people do not have any game design credibility, perhaps least of all TTRPG players. You do not, in fact, have to listen to everything people say about your game. Once you ask for feedback, people will come to you with the most deranged, asinine, bad-faith “feedback” you can imagine, and then get really mad at you when you don’t fall to your knees and kiss their feet about it. You do not need to take this feedback at face value, instead you need to learn to read between the lines and find out which parts of the rules text are being misinterpreted by players, and which incorrect assumptions players are making about your game. Then, you update and improve the game by clearing those up. Only like 30% of “feedback” you receive will actually be a directly helpful suggestion in its own right at face value.

You can’t please everyone, and shouldn’t, so appeal to the people who actually like your game for being what it is, not the people who don’t.

Read Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy

Yeah this one sounds self-serving but hear me out. Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is as much a treatise on TTRPG game design as it is a game itself. When it presents mechanics and rules, it tells you what they are, why they are, how they are, and what you’re intended to do with them. This makes it an excellent example to read for anyone wanting to get serious about game design and learn how TTRPGs tick under the hood, and an excellent example of a TTRPG that expects players to play it the way it was written to be played, and why that is a good thing. Also you can download it for free.

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Vanitas, 1680 by Carel Fonteyn (Flemish, c.1640--?)

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Carmen Dell’Orefice by Norman Parkinson 1949

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Horst P. Horst — model wearing Cartier diamonds, 1934

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Mary Astor photographed by Scotty Welbourne for the film Upperworld (1934)

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Dovima by Horst P. Horst 1953

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Vogue Italia Oct 1992 - Meghan Douglas by Walter Chin

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Sam Haskins - Dress from Thea Porter (The Telegraph Magazine 1974)

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The Grand Cascade, Terni with fishermen in the foreground by Claude-Louis Châtelet

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Boreas (1903) by John William Waterhouse

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Albert Watson - Vogue UK (May 1985)

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Currently tinkering with "modular encounter tables" for this lil hexcrawl thing* I've been working on in the background.

I've always found that it's easier to write a bunch of small tables than one giant table, so I'm extending that idea to encounter tables. Rather than relying on a single encounter table for a region/hex/whatever your unit of area is, I'm working on a set of mix-and-match tables you put together based on different factors.

So, to get into specifics, let's say players are traveling through the Trudge (the name of this stretch of the Riverlands), and have triggered an encounter. the GM picks the Nighttime (it's night when the pcs are out), the Minor Waterway (the type of waterway in the hex), and the Trudge (the specific stretch) tables and combines them into one.

Each individual table is currently just a d6 table, but once you start putting them together it expands the options pretty nicely.

There's still some tinkering to be done on how to best combine tables. In the above example, three tables would map nicely to a 2d6 roll (where first d6 decides which table you roll on, 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, and the second then gives you the result from the specified table), but I have other types of tables, like, "biome" (marshland, forest, etc) and whatnot. Four tables based on a d6 is a little more annoying to work with unless you start weighting results, which could work, I dunno. And I don't want to just kind of shrug and tell the GM "pick which ones you want", I'd rather have a procedure to fall back on.

Still, the idea is there and it slakes my thirst for creating as many tables as possible lmao.

*it's a Riverlands micro-region, to be released in some form maybe this summer.