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Don't be afraid to do the obvious thing. Sometimes it feels obvious because it's natural, and sometimes—in an attempt to be obvious—you end up being clever, or even better, original.
After a decade of design writing, I can honestly say this is the hardest lesson to actually learn and live by. Doing the obvious thing feels lazy, hackneyed, and wasteful. Then I actually do it and realize it's some of my best work.
Fun fact about me:
Currently developing a some stuff for Daggerheart that'll help play a fun Hollow Knight campaign
Most of the work is setting/story based actually the mechanical side of things is smoothed out a tonne cause I think the Ikonis from the Motherboard campaign frame can be changed a small bit and then it perfectly reskins to provide a mix of the Charm notches from OG Hollow Knight and a little bit of the Crest stuff from Silksong. Conceptually its coming together really well
Oh and the Campaign is called
Hollow Knight:
Avarice
CATS or What Is This RPG or Setting The Table
So I just heard about CATS courtesy of the good folks in the PlusOneExp discord server. CATS was written by Patrick O'Leary for the 2016 200 Word RPG Challenge.
It's nice and short (200 words even) and it's a compelling formula for the classic What Is This TTRPG segment that warrants a page at the front of every good RPG book.
I find it particularly interesting that this is imagined as a micro-RPG in its own right, a table activity for the start of game night that sets out to address what I have always found to be the most painful aspect of playing any TTRPG (besides tedious and arcane character creation rituals – I'm looking at you 5e PHB 👀): the friction that arises from players having discordant, conflicting, contradictory or incompatible expectations during play.
We can formulate the basic strucure of CATS in a variety of ways: Concept/Aim/Tone/Subject Matter, What/Where/When/Who/Why/How, Premise/Overview/Goals/What You Need, etc. all of which can be applied in two immediate directions:
In a What Is This RPG section, these are just codified methods for teaching the player/reader (more of my thoughts on the player/reader here) how to read and communicate everything that comes next in a way that's both more focused than a blurb (which might basically constitute the Concept/Premise/Hook) and more comprehensive than an elevator pitch.
As a launchpad for table play, these structures guide the conversation to establish the pillars of the shared fiction, and I especially appreciate CATS for the fact that it ends on Subject Matter. It could be the consequence of a tortured acronym, but having set the stage in every other way it seems appropriate to hop into safety tools as the final as the final negotiation before play, once all context is provided but nothing is yet set in stone.
That's all he wrote on CATS.
Patrick O'Leary
In THE PERILOUS PEAR & PLUM PIES OF PUDWICK I wrote a conversation guide to the meat of the adventure on pg. 11, following an introductory segment of the game that functions as a session 1 prologue of sorts before delving into the hexflower "dungeon" microsetting, inciting incident et al. It's interesting for me to look back at the way I structured this from the perspective of CATS.
If you're curious about TPPAPPOP and want a sneak peak of what you can expect, here's that segment from pg. 11, Inside The Tree:
Resources: the insects of the tree live in darkness and have varying weird diets – you might decide that tracking resources like light and food is important, or maybe at this scale adventurers can survive on the honeydew, leaves and strange meats that the insects eat. Sights and Sounds: footsteps might sound like earthquakes, voices like distant thunder. What are the twitches and mannerisms of the chittering language of insects? How does artificial light disturb the denizens of the tree? Setting and Tone: to adjust the game to your group's preference, you might lean into the existential conflict of intruding on and potentially dooming these fledgling societies, or downplay the crawling horror of an insect world to allow its cuter side to shine through.
This shit is so fucking exhausting. This is what I mean when I talk about the damage done to the TTRPG scene by Wizards of the Coast. This is why I'd rather explain what I work on to my completely uninformed boss than to a person whose sole exposure is D&D.
I'm so fucking tired.
Ideally, is TTRPG char gen . . .
. . . an optimization problem?
. . . an act of self expression?
. . . an act of discovery?
. . . a gacha pull?
. . . other (please comment)?
Please repost.
Final for my tabletop design class- Hoards and Heroes!
Nemoriko´s : First Self loading Skull Dice Tower
http://kck.st/3k8eUHH
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nemoriko/first-self-loading-skull-dice-tower
When you're designing your rpg's book, never skip the press proof. You'll always catch something in your book or zine's test print that would drive you wild if it snuck into the final print run.
