Inspired by these blog posts, I submit my list of things to read/check out to get up to speed with RPG design. Standard caveats apply: there’s no one right way, this is just my preferences and what makes for good tabletop game design.

3 Things to Read

7 Maxims of the OSR transformed how I thought about RPGs. I had always balked at OSR recommendations for how to play when I had seen them articulated in reddit or twitter posts. Gus’s articulation of these maxims, why they make sense, how they get overstated, helped click into place for me what is good about these practices, and how they should be thought of as guidelines rather than hard rules about what counts as a good way to run RPGs.

Jewelbox Design and Broken Bastion is another blog post from Gus L. and really captures what I am looking for in adventure design and play experiences.

The Elusive Shift is a book that looks at the early history of the RPG scene, piecing it together through the discussions and arguments that took place in fanzines. One thing you’ll quickly discover is that the majority of discussions you come across online were already being hashed out right when everything started. You can save yourself a lot of time by just diving into the history.

1 Game to Play

I’ll do the heretical thing and recommend a video game to play: Dishonored - Death of the Outsider. Really, any of the pillars of the immersive sim games could work here. Lots of iconic PC games owe a huge debt to tabletop roleplaying games, but I think immersive sims capture the magic of tabletop gaming better than most, even the classic computer RPGs or roguelikes. However I pick from the Dishonored series because a lot of immersive sims take place in dead worlds, and this is a workaround for the fact that computer games never really managed to do any better than conversation trees for handling dialog with NPCs, and the Looking Glass devs felt this was the weakest part of Ultima Underworld. But Dishonored has fixed dialog with characters. Not too much, but just enough to allow for additional interactivity in the world and some faction based play, and this is a welcome inclusion in the genre, and this kind of minimal characterization is something a GM can look to for inspiration for how to run and characterize NPCs in their own adventures.

I also pick DotO specifically because it is a small, contained experience with some of my favorite level design work in the series. And also it does away with the morality system you find in the rest of the series which is extremely game-y and unsatisfying.

But mostly, the sort of player freedom to explore and interact with a space is what I like about running tabletop RPGs, and immersive sims are a master class in how to design and layout these spaces. There are some things that won’t translate back to the tabletop experience, but an awful lot of it will.

Also, as a sort of bonus recommendation is this series of podcasts interviewing people that worked at Looking Glass studios to get a sense of their philosophy towards game design and how they approached their craft.

My Own Advice

Avoid the theory and mechanics rabbithole. A lot of amateur tabletop game designers fall victim to what in the software development world we call the not-invented-here syndrome where people become obsessed with creating a novel set of mechanics or just reinventing the wheel for how to play roleplaying games. But ultimately you should use whatever set of tools is readily available to you, and strive for having a ruleset and procedures that will empower you to play as frequently as you are able to. Ultimately being able to run games regularly will let you most quickly discover what works for your table and what doesn’t.