Designing for Yourself

Making the kinds of games I want to play

A few weeks ago I wrote about some advice I’ve carried with me from fiction workshops that basically amounts to: make the kind of art you’re interested in experiencing yourself. I think it’s fairly common advice, but it’s a foundational principle for my creative practice: I’m trying to make games that facilitate the kind of play I’m most interested in taking part in.

Making games I would like to play is a huge part of the “why” behind Studio Zosimos. It’s something that energizes me to create with the same spirit of play I bring to my tables. It’s something that drives me to learn how to make new things, because I have a habit of getting bored with anything I do over and over again. It’s something that allows me to put all the different kinds of work I like to make together, because tabletop role-playing games combine visual, verbal, and physical elements into an interactive narrative experience. I don’t just want to create those narrative experiences – I want to be a part of them.

I can’t speak to the kind of commercial success that this design philosophy can result in, but I do know that it helps me focus my work around filling a niche instead of trying to make everyone happy with a single design, and it’s something that is personally satisfying and fulfilling. So, in this spirit, I’d like to share some articulations of the qualities I enjoy in tabletop role-playing games and how I’ve gone about trying to incorporate them in my games. If these qualities resonate with you, I hope to keep making the kinds of games we’ll both enjoy playing.

Narrative First

Ultimately, TTRPGs are a storytelling form, and what’s more, they’re a form where the audience gets to directly take part in the storytelling. This, along with the fact that books, dice, and other accoutrements provide opportunities for visual and physical storytelling, gives me a structured and spontaneous experience that makes use of all different kinds of creativity.

I want the games I play and the games I design to prioritize storytelling. I accomplish some of this through my game’s presentation – how the books, illustrations, and writing serve as jumping-off points for storytelling and provide players with advice on keeping play safe, flexible, and fun. But a major part of this is the game’s mechanics.

I appreciate games that use their mechanics to serve the narrative. While any mechanic could hypothetically facilitate storytelling if it creates an interesting conflict for the player, I personally tend to gravitate towards lighter, more streamlined rulesets – I often feel like time spent looking back at the rulebook is time out of the story of the game (but, again, you can memorize anything with enough repetition – there’s some higher complexity games that I love too!)

I hope Retrograde’s core Skill Check mechanic is easily grokable while using the mechanics to create compelling conflict within the game’s story. Retrograde’s skills are the thresholds needed to succeed checks as well as a resource pool you can spend to turn failures into successes – the depletion of skill points simulates a character’s mental, physical, and spiritual exhaustion as they brave a multitude of dangers. It’s perhaps not as rules-light as it could’ve been, but I hope its level of complexity threads a needle of prompting strategic play that organically incorporates into the game’s narrative. I’d love to hear how this feels for y’all, and if you’d like to try it out, Retrograde’s rules and an introductory adventure are available for free here.

Emergent Storytelling

I seek out games because they are a medium of storytelling that allows the audience to be a storyteller. I sometimes think of this as interpretability, but games go far beyond the interpretability of a novel or a play because in games, the story actually forms around you, the player. Games are so good at facilitating this kind of emergent storytelling because games are conflict generation machines. Any task is a conflict. Any question is a conflict. Any objective is a conflict. If you have a conflict, you have the beginning of a narrative. Games let you tell the story by choosing what conflicts your characters attempt to solve.

I love emergent storytelling, and most TTRPGs are great at telling emergent narratives. Even if an adventure has a fairly linear structure, there’s usually many (potentially infinitely many) ways to go about solving the problem at hand. I don’t mind structure in games; in fact, having some structure gives valuable direction and purpose to your play and prevents foundering indecision when faced with the immense possibilities available to you. In Retrograde, creative bottlenecks and “scripted events” don’t have set solutions – it is up to the players to find solutions to the problem at hand, and therein lies much of the fun of RPGs for me!

Fairness and Challenge

I always want the games I play to feel fair and challenging. Fairness and challenge are an easy objective for a designer to have, but they’re a little too general to be very useful. Here’s how I try to distill them down: I think of fairness and challenge together as the degree to which the reality of play matches my expectations and the degree to which my actions have consequences. This can mean many different things in context: I don’t mind games where an enemy can one-shot me if I as a player have been alerted to the danger and have some feasible means to circumvent or survive it. If the first time I ever see or hear of a monster, it one-shots me, that’s pretty clearly unfair and unenjoyable play.

Making play both fair and challenging has been a difficult design question for me, especially for combat, and quite honestly, I’m not satisfied with the solutions I’ve found so far. Combat is probably the weakest part of Retrograde’s ruleset – it’s pretty swing-y, and while I tried to elevate non-combat play by giving characters mental, physical, and spiritual hit points, the reality is that most enemies and most player characters will primarily be dealing physical damage. Of course, that doesn’t need to be the case in any given adventure, but it is true of the adventures I’ve written so far.

In truth, this is a reflection of my own personal inclinations in play: I’ve been slowly pulling away from combat-focused RPGs and towards investigative-focused RPGs in large part because I’m usually unsatisfied with the challenge of combat in RPGs – I often feel like fighting minions is a chore, and running through an entire adventure only to have a TPK in the boss fight feels unsatisfying for me.

In Overprint, the player characters will almost certainly encounter combat, but they may not “solve” the conflict at the adventure’s heart through combat – the main challenge of Overprint is finding the best possible solution, and that solution may well involve great personal sacrifice. That conflict – what a character is willing to put on the line for what they believe in – is for me a much more compelling conflict than trying to get an enemy down to 0 hit points before you drop to 0 hit points. It’s way more complicated than that, of course, but I find myself more interested in narrative conflicts than mechanical conflicts – in my designs, that leads me to focus more on challenges that occur outside of combat, exploring how the decisions player characters make can impact the narrative and how their specific skills help them solve problems in unexpected ways.

Broadening My Horizons

I’m close to finishing the books for Retrograde’s Kickstarter, and I’m thinking ahead for what my next projects will be. I want to write more adventures for Retrograde, but I’m also thinking about what other kinds of games I could design, and I’m eager to encounter games that have different kinds of play than the traditional TTRPG gameplay loops I’m used to.

Dialect is a game I love, and really blew my mind about what an RPG could be – I’ve never played anything quite like it, and now of course I want to make something like it! The Anarchitect was my first attempt at making a story game in the same vein as Dialect, and it was a blast to make and to play.

I hope to continue finding design inspiration by discovering new kinds of narrative play I enjoy, and I’ll be eager to share any such discoveries with y’all here. Thanks for reading!

– Nathaniel