An overview of my tabletop RPG design projects, introspecting about why I feel more positive about some than others

Prompted by @paulczege's post about “Venning” your game design projects, I decided to create a Venn diagram of my various tabletop RPG design projects:

Since that's probably just a bunch of random names to most people, here's a quick overview of each of the projects:

Final Hour of a Storied Age This is my oldest game design project, it's an RPG about the Epic Fantasy genre, stories like The Lord of the Rings or the stuff that Brandon Sanderson writes. I consider this to be in “beta testing” at this point. I'm pretty sure the guts of the game work, but I haven't had enough external testing to be sure. There are some areas where I could probably improve the way the current draft reads, but it's tough to “crack the codebase” on a project that I haven't touched in a while. I originally created this as part of the Game Chef design contest in 2009, although it has evolved considerably since then.

Getting There in Time This is my “Doctor Who with the serial numbers filed off” game. It's also a embeds some of my ideas about how I think the classic incarnation of the show was structurally better with contained stories with solid sci-fi premises, rather than all-arc-all-the-time timey-wimey nonsense. This was another Game Chef game, from 2012. It's developed a little bit by then, but it has hit some weird snags in playtesting.

Last Year's Magic This is a bit of a weird one, a roleplaying trick-taking card game. The players are all wizards who are meeting at a pub to discuss things, and they are all trying to socially position themselves as they propose the best way to deal with various calamities that occur. This was originally designed as part of the Threeforged design contest. I probably need to clean it up a bit to make it playtest-ready.

Rusty From Disuse is a game that's designed to produce an “anthology style” story about a weapon and the various people whose lives intersect with it as it's passed from owner to owner. It's another one of the games I worked on in the Threeforged contest, I think this is suitable for playtesting.

Doing Justice is a game inspired by the Netflix series Daredevil and reality television. The idea is that there's a gritty street-level vigilante superhero, and they're making a documentary-style reality show about him. From a structural POV, the idea is to take some tasks that are traditionally considered “GM” tasks, like arranging for adversity, and making them player tasks based on their job – for example, arranging for appropriate adversity to make the story interesting in the Producer's job, and vividly describing the action during a fight scene is the Documentarian's job. Metaphorically it's about trying to do the right thing, trying to create art in a medium that people don't take seriously, and how much to care about the perceptions of others. In some ways I think there's merit to all of the ideas I was trying to make work here, it just isn't gelling into something I want to work on. This was originally going to be my first-round submission for Threeforged but it grew beyond the constraints. This is mostly some scattered notes in a design doc at this point, not a complete game.

Unraveling the Story Inspired by Steve Hickey's surreal sci-fi game Left Coast and the often bizarre real-life stories of journalistic “scoops” that fall apart under scrutiny, this was a game about journalism and trying to get a big story, with the twist that the journalist player is also experiencing a surreal, hallucinatory “reality is breaking down” experience. Thematically it's about confirmation bias and “fake news” (although it was written before that idea was cool, or became uncool again). This isn't really a fleshed out game, just a starting point that was my initial submission to Threeforged that didn't get followed up on during the second round. Although I think this is a solid premise for a game and could be developed further, I can't work up much enthusiasm to work on this either. Part of that might be because there's not much audience for a political game that argues for a stance of reasonableness, skepticism, and intellectual humility.

Speaking of political games with no audience: Crazy Greedy Hitler Puppet was one of my entries in the 200 word RPG contest. While I think it's probably technically playable as a game, this was mostly me mocking some political rhetoric that I found silly because of its overheated nature and incoherence. The core message of the game is: He who fights with monsters ridiculous caricatures should look to it that he himself does not become one.

Wittgenstein's Monster is my other entry into the 200 word RPG contest, and also essentially a joke in the form of a game. It's basically me engaging in a little “game design as performance art”, where what matters more is what I'm saying by presenting this as a game rather than whether the game itself works as a game. Generally I'm skeptical of very short games, even though they're like catnip in certain design communities, so this mocks that concept by claiming to be a 200-word RPG but presents rules which require you to grab more rules from a random selection of RPG books you already own, which also serves as a bit of absurdist commentary about some schools of thought related to RPGs. It's also kind of an excuse to tell a philosophy joke. And it's a bit of a self-deprecating joke at my own expense, sort of engaging in arty self-indulgence ironically to poke fun at my own potential snobbishness about what counts as good game design.

Brick & Mortar: Last of the Independents is a survival horror game set in a struggling retail store. Basically that's the satire: retail stores are beset by implacable forces just like the humans in a zombie movie, so having zombies (or whatever) actually attack a retail store highlights the absurdity. There's a little more to it than that, although maybe the way the ideas are embedded into the mechanics and game design is too subtle for people to pick up on. In the playtest I realized it's sort of caught between cultures: the people most likely to play a game like this are “story gamers” who expect to have a lot of “narrative control” over the world, but one of the key mechanics of the game is pretty dependent on the more traditional gamer habit of coming up with elaborate plans to solve problems. The dice mechanic also isn't great. Those are probably fixable problems, but I feel no real urge to try to take the game anywhere else. I created this for a round of the Ronnies design contest where I used the ingredients “amazon” and “chains” in the form of Amazon.com and big-box retail chains.

Sunshine Over My Shoulder is a satirical game about software development and corporate culture. The premise is that the “Profound Positivity” movement has taken the country by storm, and you work for a software company that has gotten a government contract to implement a nationwide database to track negative people so they can be prevented from sabotaging everything with their negative attitudes, then everyone will be happy and the power of positive thinking will solve all problems. Have doubts about that? You might not want to express those negative opinions too loudly... This was another Game Chef game. I think there are some interesting things in it. The software development and testing mechanics try to embed some of my experience as a hardware and software engineer into a game-y abstraction. It's a criticism of a society that seems to value fake cheerfulness over everything else (which tends to make life hellish for me). And the absurdity of the situation in which you're bitterly struggling to hang on to a job you probably hate is some commentary about contemporary American culture. I think it's a solid piece of work for a contest game. But even though those features I just described are things I care about I really feel no urge to do anything with this game, I'm happy for it to just sit on a shelf. This might be completely playable, I haven't tried.

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So what are the takeaways? Paul noticed that even though I say I hate cards they're in 50% of the projects I consider viable. I actually do kind of hate cards in games: holding cards tends to make me nervous, like I need to be especially attentive to not bending them, etc., and they also tend to suck for online gaming via audio or video chat. The reason they're in the games is because they were contributions from other designers in earlier rounds of the Threeforged contest. When I got handed card-based designs I groaned. But then I mentally said, “All right, if you want to make a card-based RPG I'll show you the right way to make a card-based RPG”. And I think I did some solid design work with those games. I think the puckish, combative attitude I had while I was working on them is part of what makes them seem worthwhile to me (how much of that is due to me doing better work and how much is the emotional associations I can't say).

That's a common thread with the other games in my “worth continued development effort” circle on the diagram. Final Hour of a Storied Age was originally trying to prove a point about the way “plot” can be a workable concept in an RPG, dynamic story generation and railroads weren't the only options. I've had a lot of trouble convincing anyone to playtest Storied Age for me, and I've heard a lot of excuses or explanations for what would make a game more playtestable. “There should be pre-gen characters”, “There should be a pre-written adventure”, “It should be playable in a single session”. I suspected most of these were rationalizations rather than genuine reasons, so when I was sitting down to design Getting There in Time my impish impulse was to give people what they claimed they wanted. Surprise, it's still hard to get people interested in the game (although I'm not sure the game is ready for external playtesting anyway).

With Last Year's Magic part of what helped me get the design working was thinking philosophically about what makes something a “game” and about the definition of “roleplaying game”, things which some commentators say is at best useless and at worst a cover for malicious gate-keeping. Again I was proving a point with this game: thinking about RPG Theory is valuable for actually doing good game design. With Rusty From Disuse I'm trying to prove that solid, workmanlike craft has a role in the indie design world – they don't all have to brilliant inspirations, it should be valuable for me to be able to deliver a game that achieves someone else's vision, even if I'm not even completely sold on the vision.

In contrast are Doing Justice and Sunshine Over My Shoulder. These games have a lot of things I care about in them. With Doing Justice, I love superhero television, and I love reality television. As someone who desperately wants to succeed at creating things via game design, the theme of trying to create art in a medium that's considered by many to be intrinsically frivolous speaks to me. In Sunshine Over My Shoulder I'm somewhat doing the “write what you know” thing, both in terms of trying to translate a sliver of what it's like to be a technical professional into a game, and also how my struggles with anxiety and depression make me feel alienated from a world that seems to expect nothing but faux happiness from everyone and punishes you if you don't provide it. In some sense I feel like these are the kind of games I'm “supposed” to create, games that are expressing something about me. But looking at it now, I think that might be wrong. In one of my college classes we watched a show about Andy Warhol, and one of the things that stuck with me was how at one point in his life he had some idea that a “real artist” needed to drip the paint, but he let go of that for the Soup Cans. I may need to let go of the idea that I should create games that are “about” things I care about. I feel like I'm at my best, like I'm my true self, when I'm being a bit intellectually combative, when I think I'm right and someone else needs to be proven wrong. I don't think Doing Justice or Sunshine Over My Shoulder would prove anything, maybe that's why I feel like I'm fine with them sitting untouched on a virtual shelf forever.