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My design philosophy

I’ve been dithering on writing this one for a while as I feel that it would be useful but I don’t really have the vocabulary to explain this the way that some professional designers do. However, as I’ve been doing this professionally for 5+ years now — it’s actually been 11 years since I launched my first Kickstarter and released my first TTRPG, wild — I figured it might be good to talk about my design philosophy.

If you’ve played any of my games, especially Apothecaria or For Small Creatures Such As We you’ll notice that’s a lot of wiggle-room in the mechanics. Things aren’t pinned down as tightly as they would be in Dungeons & Dragons or even in a number of other indie RPGS and that’s a conscious choice.

I primarily make solo RPGs and part of the beauty in that particular medium is that you have so much control over your own fun. You don’t need to worry if bending the rules is going to upset someone else at the table because there is no-one else.

For me, that freedom to bend the rules to make a better story is a huge part of the appeal. It’s like how some videogames will let you change the difficulty during gameplay or allow you to reload a save and try again. Sure, sometimes you want to be forced to commit but sometimes you just want to relax and play a cool story.

And this is where TTRPGS can really shine. Without the limitations of a computer, your imagination can run wild. I see my job as a game designer as being a guide to a fun and immersive experience. One where you can decide “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I could use my magic to have a suit of armour carry my reagents for me” and not have the mechanics get in the way.

I design my games as a conversation where I provide context, mechanics, and goals to give your story enough structure and content to be engaging while still providing you space to bring your own ideas to the table.

I like to think of the relationship between a player and one of my games as being similar to that of a player and a GM. The game is there to provide a world and a challenge. The game will put interesting obstacles in your path that will hopefully make your story richer but at any point, you can decide that you want to change things up. You’re the director, actor, and audience all in one and I think that’s awesome because you can make an experience that is perfectly fitted to you in a way that no-one else ever could.

I’m always blown away by the creativity of players in our Discord community and I believe that making my games without that wiggle-room would discourage such creativity.

To give some real examples, when creating For Small Creatures Such As We I had to deal with the fact that players could end up with crewmates that - apart from their generated Traits - could be anything they could imagine. Trying to then bend Events around such a nebulous concept made for some tricky writing. If I wanted to ensure that every Event was 100% ironclad and could not be abused then I would have to cut down on the possibilites for Crewmates. And for another game, that would have been fine. I could have made species for each of the game’s Planets and given players some lore to help colour flesh them out but that wasn’t the point. I wanted to give players a sense of discovery and there’s little discovery to be had if it’s already written. So the solution was to trust the players. To give them the freedom to create anything and to react to Events in a way that is fun and interesting for them. To some players, that means having an unstoppable killer ghost that breezes through every event like a cool ninja. To others, that means having a soft-hearted chef with a difficult love triangle involving the pilot and the ship’s computer.

Is it perfect?

No, of course not. There’s no such thing. But it does make for experiences that excite me and like an ancient alchemist, I hope to spend many more years learning and refining!

TL;DR

My games will always have space in the rules for players to insert their own creativity. Places where I’ve decided a solid rule might not fit or where forcing players to do it one way would cut off a whole other player’s story.

I like that and I trust my players to be able to make a ruling in those spaces to make the game fit them.

Thanks for reading :)

Blog post design essays are not my strength but I’m hoping to get better at it.

If there’s anything about my games / design process you’d like me to dissect, let me know in the comments!