Sorry if you've been asked this before, but what would your advice be to someone who wants to try out ttrpg development if they currently have no game design experience? Where should one start?
1. Start small. A lot of people want to write the next Dungeons & Dragons when they’re just starting out, but… well, do yourself a favour and look at the page opposite the table of contents in your Player’s Handbook. Even if you don’t count illustrators, consultants, and the marketing team, thirty-four people are credited for that book alone – and the core rules span multiple books. A game of that scope is several years’ work for a team of dozens. Calibrate your ambitions accordingly.
2. Conversely, don’t start too small. The other big mistake that folks make scope-wise is deciding they want to start with a one-page RPG. This is basically game design hard mode; it’s not impossible to write a one-page RPG that actually hangs together as a functional game as your first project, but you either have to be a very skilled editor or be prepared to do a lot of playtesting and revising to pull it off. Give yourself some breathing room.
I find a good starting point for your first game is to aim for something in the 4–16 page range – or 1000–5000 words, if you’re not aiming to publish in print. (For comparison, this response is about 850 words long.) If you find yourself exceeding that, reassess and see where things are getting away from you – you’ve probably got a case of scope creep on your hands.
3. Start with premise. If you’re into mechanics, you might be thinking “hey, I’ve come up with a neat dice trick, I should try to build a game around it”. That’s a good way to end up with a bunch of elegant math that doesn’t actually add up to anything playable. Focus on what your game is about, in descriptive terms, and if you find an opportunity to slot in a neat dice trick, bonus.
4. Be specific. If you don’t have a clear idea of what a typical session of your game is supposed to look like, that’s going to come through in your writing, and people are going to look at it and go: “That’s neat, but what do I do with it? What do player character actually do?” Your game should have an answer for them! D&D’s core premise, for example, is a fantasy heist caper: 3–5 dysfunctional weirdos with complementary skill-sets break into a secure location and rob it blind. A narrow premise is better than a broad one when you’re starting out, and for heaven’s sake don’t try to design a “generic” or “universal” game on your first go; all game rules encode baked-in assumptions about how the game ought to be played, and if you try to get rid them, all you’re going to do is write a game whose baked-in assumptions you yourself don’t understand.
5. Do your homework. There’s a phenomenon in tabletop RPG circles called the “fantasy heartbreaker”, which is when somebody has a bright idea they think is going to revolutionise the hobby, but because their actual experience with the hobby consists of having read one specific edition of D&D, what they end up producing is just a very slightly modified version of D&D – and most of the “innovations” they think they’ve come up with are just clumsily reinventing features that have existed in games that aren’t D&D for thirty years, to boot. It’s by no means restricted to fantasy – you see a similar trajectory in other genres when novice game designers start with some popular non-D&D game as their sole point of reference.
The only real thing to do for it is to expand your horizons, both to see how other games have tackled premises that resemble yours, and to expand your mental library of game design approaches. Actual play experience with a wide variety of games is best, of course, but if it’s not immediately practical for you to get it, you should at least read up. I’ve recently put together a reading list of free and pay-what-you-want titles I think are worth checking out if you’re not in a position to splurge on rulebooks at the moment.
6. Try for a game that’s aimed at episodic or one-shot scenarios. Supporting long-form campaigns adds a whole extra layer of considerations and complications, and guidelines for advancing or levelling up are a stone bastard to get right even for experienced designers. Save yourself some headaches.
7. Don’t spin your wheels endlessly iterating on refining the rules without actual play feedback to back it up. Playtesting is the most important part of the design process. If you don’t have your own group, see if some of your online friends will volunteer to run a chat-room session or three and report back to you, or at least recruit some beta readers. The best time to start playtesting/beta reading depends on how fast you work, of course, but personally, I find that if a game has been in a vaguely playable state for a couple of weeks without any major overhauls, it’s time to stop tinkering and start listening.
Beyond that, there’s not a lot I can say in terms of generic advice – anything further would depend on what particular sort of game you’re trying to write!
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