RPG Design
A Lifetime of Storytelling
As humans, we all have a part of us that yearns to play make-believe. As children, we learn speech and behaviors by mimicking adults. Most people grow out of this once they reach adulthood. Some of us continue to play make-believe well into adulthood except instead of make-believe, we call it role playing. In this page, I'll be talking about tabletop RPGs (TTRPGs). I'll just call them "RPGs" for brevity but know that I'm talking about the traditional tabletop genre.
I have been a lifelong RPG player ever since I first discovered the hobby in middle school. Not long after, my love for the hobby married with my desire to tell stories. I took on the role of the forever Game Master (GM) and never looked back. I first cut my teeth on game design without ever knowing it when I adapted and ran adventures for my friends in high school. Now, I manage an online community of gamers, many of whom are just discovering Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, and Lancer thanks to our system for organized play.
This page explores some lessons I have learned from my attempt at creating my own RPG system and the design methodologies and workflows I use when creating content for tabletop RPGs.
I have been a lifelong RPG player ever since I first discovered the hobby in middle school. Not long after, my love for the hobby married with my desire to tell stories. I took on the role of the forever Game Master (GM) and never looked back. I first cut my teeth on game design without ever knowing it when I adapted and ran adventures for my friends in high school. Now, I manage an online community of gamers, many of whom are just discovering Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, and Lancer thanks to our system for organized play.
This page explores some lessons I have learned from my attempt at creating my own RPG system and the design methodologies and workflows I use when creating content for tabletop RPGs.
Designing My Own RPG
There are loads of different RPG systems out there these days. The genre has expanded from the classic d20-based action adventure romp to a breadth of different options and styles of game. In college, I tried my hand at designing an RPG system of my own called Ad Malgam and learned a lot in the process. Let's unpack some of those lessons via a rapid-fire postmortem of my naive attempt at creating an original RPG design. For the morbidly curious, the full rule book for Ad Malgma is available above.
Setting, Inspirations, and Tone
Ad Malgam (a portmanteau of the words “ad nauseam” and “amalgam”) really wears its inspirations on its sleeve. It's a d20 fantasy system set in a world where heaven and hell collapsed in on the earth. During this collapse, the previously magic-free world became permanently imprinted with the Tide, my fancy name for magic. The Tide comes in two popular flavors: Celestial and Fiendish and no living creature on the planet is free of its effects. As the world recovered, the Tide's Influence (its flavor) within the population became thoroughly mixed. Now, everyone's racial ancestry is paired with a Tidal ancestry which describes what kind and how much of each flavor of magic they possess naturally.
The resulting setting is a marriage of a magical post-disaster world, an extra planar forever war fought amid mortal society, and an exploration of multicultural themes as nearly everyone in Ad Malgam contains a mix of angelic and demonic ancestry. Mechanically, Ad Malgam is a combat heavy dungeon crawler RPG that borrows ideas from other d20 RPGs for a foundation of dice mechanics.
Ad Malgam is also an expression of narrative themes that are very personal to my background as a bi-racial immigrant. The setting and rules stress that neither manifestation of Tide affects an individual's free will or behavior unless they are bursting at the gills with magic and possess a nearly pure concentration of one of the two extra planar Influences. In other words, only the pure archangels and pure demons lords of the world still see the divide between the Influences of Tide as sacred. Common folk, and most of the extra planar creatures who were dumped into the world, have come to coexist and even benefit from their opposite expression of Tide. It just so happens that those powerful archangels and demon lords are immortal, supernaturally powerful, and committed to a never-ending war against their sword enemies.
The resulting setting is a marriage of a magical post-disaster world, an extra planar forever war fought amid mortal society, and an exploration of multicultural themes as nearly everyone in Ad Malgam contains a mix of angelic and demonic ancestry. Mechanically, Ad Malgam is a combat heavy dungeon crawler RPG that borrows ideas from other d20 RPGs for a foundation of dice mechanics.
Ad Malgam is also an expression of narrative themes that are very personal to my background as a bi-racial immigrant. The setting and rules stress that neither manifestation of Tide affects an individual's free will or behavior unless they are bursting at the gills with magic and possess a nearly pure concentration of one of the two extra planar Influences. In other words, only the pure archangels and pure demons lords of the world still see the divide between the Influences of Tide as sacred. Common folk, and most of the extra planar creatures who were dumped into the world, have come to coexist and even benefit from their opposite expression of Tide. It just so happens that those powerful archangels and demon lords are immortal, supernaturally powerful, and committed to a never-ending war against their sword enemies.
Stats and Abilities From the Top Down
Characters in Ad Malgam have three main Attributes:
For example, let’s say a character just gained some Attribute Points. They decide to put their new points into the Celestial side of Endurance. In this example, let’s say the character has gone from a Celestial Endurance of 3 to 6 crossing the 5-point Threshold along the way. This means that the player may choose a new class feature from that Threshold. In this example, the player would choose between gaining the Evasion or Fast Healer feature. |
Advancement along any Attribute track rewards players with features or abilities that use that Attribute. Power-related features focus on dealing damage, Endurance features relate to mitigating damage or healing, and Wits features are all about unique spell effects. Each expression of the Attributes also promote a unique play style in keeping with their theming. For example, Celestial Power Features have a theme of relentlessly attacking, buffing your chance to land attacks, and pumping damage on successful hits. Fiendish Power Features are themed around singling out opponents, damage-over-time effects, and passive damage buffs. To complement these options, the Neutral features tied to each Threshold are designed to work with either play style to promote build diversity. Below is the list of Threshold rewards and the features awarded at each. These have been edited slightly from the original for better readability.
Dice Mechanics and Conflict Resolution
Characters in Ad Malgam have the standard assortment of Skills, Knowledge, and Weapons. During play, players make Ability Checks, Saving Throws, and roll against Armor Class as you might expect. These are how Ad Malgam typically deals with direct or indirect conflicts and contests.
What Ad Malgam adds to this formula is a system of Influenced Ability Checks. The split of Attribute Points a character has between the different advancement tracks for each Attribute also determines what bonuses they add to an Influenced Skill or Ability Check. These checks can be Celestial or Fiendish in nature, and most Skills belong to one of these Influences. |
A character's bonus for any Influenced roll is always the difference between points on either side of an Attribute's two tracks. In other words, a character with 10 points in Power split 3-7 between Celestial and Fiendish respectively would have a -7 modifier for Celestial Power Checks and a +7 modifier for Fiendish Power Checks. If the GM (or the rules) call for a non-Influenced roll, then the character's bonus to that roll is the total number of Thresholds they have crossed on either track for an Attribute + 1 per track with at least 1 Attribute Point in it. Given the example above, a character with 3 points in Celestial Power and 7 in Fiendish Power would have crossed 4 total Thresholds and has at least 1 point in both tracks for Power resulting in a +6 modifier.
Phew. Most of that was a mechanically dense mouthful, and that's just a summary of the core rules. Some play testers found it difficult to understand at all without a visual aid. Let's talk about that.
Phew. Most of that was a mechanically dense mouthful, and that's just a summary of the core rules. Some play testers found it difficult to understand at all without a visual aid. Let's talk about that.
Design Goals
The design goals for Ad Malgam were relatively simple:
Though the finished project had a limited number of unique features and traits due to its scope, I felt like the system for character advancement successfully fulfilled its goal. When paired with the rules for influenced skill and ability checks, the game offered interesting combinations of mechanical and narrative incentives to spread across multiple influences, even within a single attribute. Player testers frequently enjoyed reading through their potential feature unlocks and planning a path through their future level ups.
As for the rest of the design goals, well it's a mixed bag. In an effort to minimize the mathematical complexity of the system, I reduced the main attribute list down to 3 stats. At the same time, I expanded out what each of those Attributes meant to a character to restore some depth while also narratively rooting every character within the game's setting. All-in-all I think that was a success. Then I plowed ahead and made some derivative stats based on each of those attributes, ballooning the number of potential bonuses derived from those core attributes from 3 to 9. While this did continue to flavor a character's actions as a Celestial show of Wits or a Fiendish expression of Endurance, it also birthed wordy legal nonsense like the following:
- Create a simplified system for character stats with less emphasis on derivative stats, bonuses, and formulas.
- Make character advancement flexible and simple; no complex multi-classing.
- Reward players with abilities that are relevant to the attributes players choose to invest in.
- The theme must be reflected in the core game mechanics.
- Keep the scope within "solo college project" territory.
Though the finished project had a limited number of unique features and traits due to its scope, I felt like the system for character advancement successfully fulfilled its goal. When paired with the rules for influenced skill and ability checks, the game offered interesting combinations of mechanical and narrative incentives to spread across multiple influences, even within a single attribute. Player testers frequently enjoyed reading through their potential feature unlocks and planning a path through their future level ups.
As for the rest of the design goals, well it's a mixed bag. In an effort to minimize the mathematical complexity of the system, I reduced the main attribute list down to 3 stats. At the same time, I expanded out what each of those Attributes meant to a character to restore some depth while also narratively rooting every character within the game's setting. All-in-all I think that was a success. Then I plowed ahead and made some derivative stats based on each of those attributes, ballooning the number of potential bonuses derived from those core attributes from 3 to 9. While this did continue to flavor a character's actions as a Celestial show of Wits or a Fiendish expression of Endurance, it also birthed wordy legal nonsense like the following:
In this case, that character’s Power Ability Modifiers for Influenced rolls would be +7 for Fiendish Power (10 Fiendish Points – 3 Celestial Points), and –7 for Celestial Power (3 Celestial Points – 10 Fiendish Points). Neutral Ability Modifiers are derived from the number of Thresholds a character’s points have entered along either side of their Ability’s spectrum (See Chapter 1 for more details and a visual example on Thresholds). Using our previous example, we would find that a character with 13 points in Power split 3-10 across Celestial and Fiendish Influences would have a +6 Neutral Ability Modifier since it enters 4 Thresholds on the Fiendish side and 2 Thresholds on the Celestial side.
Lessons Learned
If I were to work on Ad Malgam again, the first issue I'd tackle is the boilerplate dice mechanics for conflict resolution. They were mostly functional placeholders anyway. They also caused a great deal of bloat when writing the system despite originally intended to reduce the amount of innovative content I was creating. Even given my edited explanation of these rules up above, I think the reliance on off-the-shelf design patterns for so many mechanics weighed the system down. Using so many interlocking systems pressured me into writing much wordier, 'airtight' rules than I intended to. I'd like to take the rules for influenced rolls and condense them down into maybe a single derived attribute or discrete bonus rather than six. Perhaps the total number of attribute points towards Celestial or Fiendish influence across all three attributes could be combined to represent a character's overall affinity for either expression of Tide? But this too embodies a problem I faced throughout the project: narrative grounding.
While working on Ad Malgam, I frequently became stuck trying to frame what are fundamentally gamist mechanics within a narrativist framework. On one hand, I was trying to flesh out a world with themes of moral ambiguity, racial and cultural diversity, and philosophical absolutism. On the other hand I was creating a numbers-go-up, dice chucking, tactics game. I found it difficult to, at once, explain that pure celestial energy would turn a character into a dictatorial, holier-than-thou, militant archangel without implying that putting all of one's points into Celestial-aligned attributes made your character a bad person. I didn't want the message told by the mechanics to be, "If you're not mixed race or multicultural, you become evil".
One of the most common questions I got when teaching the game to new people was, "Why would you not just dump all your points into one side of an Attribute?" To address this, I jumped through a lot of hoops to create mechanical and narrative incentive for characters to be a neutral balance of Tidal Influences (see the above jumble of rules soup). My intention in creating Ad Malgam was to comment on how modern society is already a mix of hundreds of cultural ideas. That every individual is a collage of traditions and values, some of which they never chose to adopt. What I did not want to say was that isolated or dedicated cultural institutions were somehow in opposition to inclusivity.
As a fantasy narrative exploration, it was a fun concept to play with. As an expression of my world view, it's imperfect. Ludonarritively, it stretches the intended message of multiculturalism to an extreme, black-and-white, generalized outlook. How ironic. I think there is a satisfying way to make an RPG dedicated to these themes without also committing such a polarizing mechanical design, but it's tough. As a personal exploration of my own experiences, though, it was a blast.
One of the most common questions I got when teaching the game to new people was, "Why would you not just dump all your points into one side of an Attribute?" To address this, I jumped through a lot of hoops to create mechanical and narrative incentive for characters to be a neutral balance of Tidal Influences (see the above jumble of rules soup). My intention in creating Ad Malgam was to comment on how modern society is already a mix of hundreds of cultural ideas. That every individual is a collage of traditions and values, some of which they never chose to adopt. What I did not want to say was that isolated or dedicated cultural institutions were somehow in opposition to inclusivity.
As a fantasy narrative exploration, it was a fun concept to play with. As an expression of my world view, it's imperfect. Ludonarritively, it stretches the intended message of multiculturalism to an extreme, black-and-white, generalized outlook. How ironic. I think there is a satisfying way to make an RPG dedicated to these themes without also committing such a polarizing mechanical design, but it's tough. As a personal exploration of my own experiences, though, it was a blast.
RPG Content Design
As a long time Game Master, I have developed my own pipeline and strategies to tackle content design for tabletop RPGs. My process is always evolving as the landscape of the hobby changes and new tools are developed. In the last several years, RPGs have seen a monumental resurgence thanks in large part to the popularity of actual-play web series introducing and teaching people about old fashioned RPGs. New platforms, virtual tabletops, and tool sets have made creating content for an online RPG session more accessible. All of which is to say that, over the years, I have picked up a number of skills and techniques to adapt to the wave of newcomers picking up their first RPG.
In the following sections, I'll share how I design content these days and how I teach new people how to play a tabletop RPG. I will use concrete examples when I can, but so much of my RPG design depends on my players, so very few things will apply to every group. If you get the chance, ask me about some of the stories I've written and how I've applied these ideas in the past. |
Campaign Design
One of the earliest and most influential practices I picked up from long time Dungeons and Dragons designer, Chris Perkins, was the use of a player-facing campaign bible. This 'campaign bible,' as Chris called it, is a document created and distributed to the players before the game begins. The document functions as a primer to the setting, an expectation manager, a common-knowledge lore document, and a living rules reference for non-standard or optional game mechanics. It sounds like a daunting brief to prepare and a boring document to read before creating a new character, but--thanks to an excellent walk through by Chris--it can be both simple and immensely effective.
So what form does this campaign bible take exactly? Well, it reads a lot like a concept pitch for an RPG adventure.
So what form does this campaign bible take exactly? Well, it reads a lot like a concept pitch for an RPG adventure.
- A brief setting description that conveys the tone and style of the adventure.
- A brief summary of important recent or historical events that make up the core to the story.
- A rundown of major players in the world relevant to the players or story (factions, nations, guilds, monarchs, families, etc.).
- A description of the population and/or environment.
- Rules reference for any optional or unique game mechanics not easily found in core rule books.
- A map of the region the adventure takes place in.
Sound interesting?
Check out my most recent campaign bible for Niam: a nautical, pirate-themed, heroic fantasy setting. |
One of my greatest pet-peeves in RPGs these days is the eternal campaign. A story with no defined end that continues as long as people are willing to show up and roll some dice. For many, this is their preferred way to play but I can't do it anymore. Having run multi-year long campaigns that came near to D&D's level cap, I have found it just as satisfying and easier to manage to condense a story down into 5-10 levels instead of 18-20. If the players want to carry on with the same characters and setting beyond that, I'm happy to oblige. But I always start a new campaign with an idea for how it should end and how the players might get there.
Story Structure
Before I write anything, I start by establishing boundaries. What is the theme of this adventure going to be? What major events and characters will define the shape of this world or this story? What style of game do I want to run? At first, most of these questions aren't very important. Their purpose is to give me limitations to work within to keep myself from getting overwhelmed by possibilities. Their exact details will change over time anyways but their presence helps embed the roots that better, more refined ideas will sprout from down the line.
Once the boundaries are down I move on to the major pillars of the story:
The sole exception to this is the first major quest that the players complete. I like to end what would typically be an Act 1 in my campaigns by putting the players in direct opposition to the main antagonist of the story. Oftentimes, they don't even know who or what is responsible for whatever trouble they just went through. Maybe they don't know that they just interrupted the Big Bad's evil plan and are now on a watch list. Whatever the circumstances, I want to sow the seeds of a "That was you!? " moment later down the line to motivate the players to actively pursue the antagonist and disrupt their plans. This not only gives the players a cool story moment but it fleshes out the antagonist's motivations when they go out of their way to put an end to the player characters' meddling.
Once I have a collection of cool moments, thematic grounding, and the all important start and end of my story, I begin putting the pieces together and filling in the details. Every idea that I explore is now in service of the greater through line connecting these disparate moments together. This process will result in me rewriting or completely abandoning my original ideas for what this world would be several times. Once I realize I have a story going, my goal drastically shifts from thinking up new ideas to stitching everything together into a complete, finished adventure. I rarely have a full narrative planned out before my players start rolling dice, but by the time they are introduced to the antagonist of the story, no new ideas are being written in. More often than not, I already have too much content to manage for the story I planned anyways.
Before I write anything, I start by establishing boundaries. What is the theme of this adventure going to be? What major events and characters will define the shape of this world or this story? What style of game do I want to run? At first, most of these questions aren't very important. Their purpose is to give me limitations to work within to keep myself from getting overwhelmed by possibilities. Their exact details will change over time anyways but their presence helps embed the roots that better, more refined ideas will sprout from down the line.
Once the boundaries are down I move on to the major pillars of the story:
- What important event(s) that define the setting happened before the story begins?
- What narrative tipping point do the player characters (PCs) fit into? What hooks them into the overarching narrative?
- What and when are the big reveals, calls to action, betrayals, and climaxes of the story?
- How does the story end?
The sole exception to this is the first major quest that the players complete. I like to end what would typically be an Act 1 in my campaigns by putting the players in direct opposition to the main antagonist of the story. Oftentimes, they don't even know who or what is responsible for whatever trouble they just went through. Maybe they don't know that they just interrupted the Big Bad's evil plan and are now on a watch list. Whatever the circumstances, I want to sow the seeds of a "That was you!? " moment later down the line to motivate the players to actively pursue the antagonist and disrupt their plans. This not only gives the players a cool story moment but it fleshes out the antagonist's motivations when they go out of their way to put an end to the player characters' meddling.
Once I have a collection of cool moments, thematic grounding, and the all important start and end of my story, I begin putting the pieces together and filling in the details. Every idea that I explore is now in service of the greater through line connecting these disparate moments together. This process will result in me rewriting or completely abandoning my original ideas for what this world would be several times. Once I realize I have a story going, my goal drastically shifts from thinking up new ideas to stitching everything together into a complete, finished adventure. I rarely have a full narrative planned out before my players start rolling dice, but by the time they are introduced to the antagonist of the story, no new ideas are being written in. More often than not, I already have too much content to manage for the story I planned anyways.
Encounters and Map Making
Encounter design often goes hand in hand with map design. If a map is intended to host combat at some point, careful consideration goes into the placement of cover, sight blockers, high ground, and terrain. If a map won't be seeing any combat, my focus shifts to world building details like urban sprawl, how climate and terrain affect the region, and an area's atmosphere. Each style of map making emphasizes different level design fundamentals, so I'll be talking about them separately here. That said, the best RPG adventures blend these styles together at a multitude of zoom levels.
Battle Maps Any location where PCs and NPCs could have a direct conflict probably needs a battle map. This conflict isn't always mortal combat per se (a heist on a secure vault might also warrant a battle map), but for this section, assume a situation where PCs and their opposition share a space where positioning and timing is important. Some GMs prefer to run their games without maps or miniatures at all, but I like to sprinkle tactical combat into my RPGs. My goal when designing a battle map is to incorporate tension and dynamics into the map itself somehow. PCs and NPCs should be wrestling for a tactical advantage of some kind such as high ground, a shared objective, or a favorable engagement range. Maybe the circumstances of the encounter mean that the PCs want to be on the defensive such as in a VIP escort scenario. Whatever the case is, I desperately want to avoid a situation where players and NPCs are standing side by side simply attacking one another until someone falls over. |
My first step in designing a battle map is always to establish a simple layout where PCs do and do not want to be. How do the players typically engage their foes? At what ranges are they effective? How can the terrain hinder or benefit them? And how can enemies and monsters exploit or assert pressure on the party's weaknesses? All these questions translate in some form or another to key positions, either stationary or relative to an enemy. As soon as I have a basic layout, I map out these key positions and adjust the map until I have what I call a tension map.
The tension map above is of a grand lobby in which two hostile groups (labeled in blue and red for readability) meet and engage in a fight. The stars in circles represent neutral golems who move slowly and attack any trouble makers in the lobby. The key dynamic of this fight is that the left side (blue) party have no melee weapons but have powerful ranged spells. The right side (red) party have short-range weapons and a charging attack that helps close the distance. Once the fighting starts, the "bouncer golems" pressure characters out from behind cover and force the two sides to cross open sight lines where both charging attacks and long range spell attacks are effective.
A tension map doesn't need to be comprehensive. It is an exercise I use to infuse basic encounters with dynamics and shifting priorities. A tension map can take many different forms and can feature multiple layers of tension mapping if I feel like it's necessary. This example is of a relatively straightforward combat encounter, but it has no verticality and does not account for the different capabilities of individual characters at subtly different ranges. I reserve heavy analytical deep dives for bigger, climactic encounters like boss fights or battle maps that get used in more than one session. Once the first draft of a battle map is done, I move on to digitally rendering the scene in the case of an online game or writing notes about the visual and other sensory details of the map in the case of an in person session. For most encounters, a quick tension map sketch is quick and effective. I also reuse templates for common encounter tropes like ambushes or stealth encounters whenever I can to save on prep time.
A tension map doesn't need to be comprehensive. It is an exercise I use to infuse basic encounters with dynamics and shifting priorities. A tension map can take many different forms and can feature multiple layers of tension mapping if I feel like it's necessary. This example is of a relatively straightforward combat encounter, but it has no verticality and does not account for the different capabilities of individual characters at subtly different ranges. I reserve heavy analytical deep dives for bigger, climactic encounters like boss fights or battle maps that get used in more than one session. Once the first draft of a battle map is done, I move on to digitally rendering the scene in the case of an online game or writing notes about the visual and other sensory details of the map in the case of an in person session. For most encounters, a quick tension map sketch is quick and effective. I also reuse templates for common encounter tropes like ambushes or stealth encounters whenever I can to save on prep time.
Region Maps
When designing a non-battle map, I zoom my focus out from human-sized details to city-sized features. While fantasy worlds sometimes get away with hand waving the feasibility of civilization prospering in the interior of mountains or the at the edge of an infertile tundra, some level of knowledge about human civilization can go a long way to making a relatable, believable world. Settlements in the real world only survive under a handful of sustainable conditions. Here are some details I pay attention to when designing a town, city, region, or even a country for an RPG:
When designing a non-battle map, I zoom my focus out from human-sized details to city-sized features. While fantasy worlds sometimes get away with hand waving the feasibility of civilization prospering in the interior of mountains or the at the edge of an infertile tundra, some level of knowledge about human civilization can go a long way to making a relatable, believable world. Settlements in the real world only survive under a handful of sustainable conditions. Here are some details I pay attention to when designing a town, city, region, or even a country for an RPG:
- Elevation, temperature, and humidity shape the land and form the boundaries of climates and geography.
- Civilization started near rivers, lakes, and wells. 90% of human life exists within 10km of a body of freshwater.
- People need to eat to survive. If calories cannot be grown or caught locally, they need to come from somewhere.
- Climate determines what crops and livestock a settlement can sustain. Plants and animals are specialized and so are farms.
- Cities and towns grow outward from communal centers: economic, military, religious, transportation.
- Humans expand asymmetrically following geographic features and resources.