Question 16 for #AprilTTRPGMaker is “Any design partners?”. The answer there is mostly no, with a weird exception. Generally I'm not good at either side of forming a partnership: finding people I can trust and want to work with, and getting people to trust and want to work with me. This is a problem for me in general, but probably also manifests in my game design stuff. There are certain weaknesses I have that could be covered by a person with a different personality that would likely make my work much more successful, for example a charismatic person who enjoyed social interaction and doing the work of social coordination to get things like playtests to happen, but it's unlikely that I'd spontaneously meet a person like that and have them want to partner with me.

I'm not good at getting people to trust me

I have a lot of social anxiety and I can be somewhat socially awkward. It's my perception that a lot of people build trust based on the kind of “freeform socializing” of smalltalk and telling stories about their lives that I'm terrible at (and I also, perhaps self-servingly, am deeply skeptical that this is a good way to evaluate who is trustworthy). The kind of stuff I think I'm better at, like analyzing systems or digging into a philosophical issue, make me seem negative, argumentative, and combative (and maybe those are fair characterizations). I am prickly, and I don't always have enough positive emotionality to keep myself feeling good, let alone have enough to be a cheerleader for other people (which is what a lot of people think they want). I'm also really reluctant to make commitments unless I'm certain I can keep them, and I tend to be open about doubts I have or problems I see, and most people prefer less ambiguous signals of support.

I'm a lot better at working toward a vision than I am at trusting people

This might be a self-serving way to look at myself, but I think I'm a pretty good team member when I'm part of a group working toward a vision I believe in. If anything I can be a bit of a workaholic and uncomfortably intense about wanting the vision to succeed. People are a lot more complex, and it's rare for me to find people I'm comfortable supporting without questions or caveats. (As an illustration, I find it bewildering that anyone can be an enthusiastic supporter during a political campaign – I find it difficult to find people I trust enough to vote for, yet some people are so enthusiastic they go out to rallies). In an ideal world that wouldn't matter, because others (in games or in business or in politics) would articulate their visions and I'd find one I could get behind and support that, but it's rare for people to do that, often because they find it more effective not to.

Less cynically, I can see that other people would face the same “trust problem” looking at me: there's no good a priori reason to assume that I'm trustworthy. It's a tough problem.

Threeforged

The time where I sort of did collaborate with others on a design was the Threeforged design contest. It was structured such that one designer would start designing a game, then it would be anonymously handed off to another who would work on it some more, and then it would be anonymously handed off to a third designer who would finish it up (or at least as finished as contest games usually get).

As I've talked about previously, I think I did some good game design work on these games. I'm not sure I would have been able to do that if it had been an active collaboration, my initial reactions to the games I got was pretty negative. The fact that the structure of the contest completely forbid the part I'm the worst at (i.e. the social interactions) was probably a big part of making it workable for me. So I think I'm potentially good at the nuts-and-bolts aspect of doing game development with a team or a partner, but probably really bad at getting into a situation where I have teams or partners who are mutually compatible enough to want to work together.

When Paul originally created the contest I think he thought that it would lead to people collaborating more. I don't think it had that effect, people mostly reverted to their pre-contest status quo, possibly due to the nature of design contests, possibly because finding collaborators you want to work with is just a really hard thing to do.

The #AprilTTRPGMaker questions

(From Kira Magrann's twitter)