3. How did you start creating TTRPGs?

I got my start designing tabletop RPGs in Game Chef 2009, which is something of a microcosm of my history of trying to design games while engaging with the Forge/StoryGames community.

But first, some history...

Tabletop RPGs had never really been a big part of my youth. While I was aware of D&D as a game my older brothers played (one of my brothers ran me through character creation for Basic D&D once, but we never played) and I was fascinated by the rulebooks I never actually played D&D. I tried playing some MERP with some of my friends, but it didn't go great, so I never really considered myself a roleplayer. Later in life I got into CRPGs like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. I knew they were based on licensed rules, but from the discussions in the forums I got the (perhaps mistaken) impression that if you played regular RPGs it was all about the GM delivering a story experience by fudging dice rolls and using other “illusionist” techniques. I thought that was stupid – if you were going to play a game why not play one that works? – so I never looked into actually playing any mainstream games. And during this process I never really thought much about the “designers” of these tabletop games, I just didn't give much thought at all to what sort of behind-the-scenes jobs contributed to making a tabletop RPG. By chance I happened across The Forge and the essays of Ron Edwards, and I had the impression that this was much more up my alley: these people thought game design did matter and since it did you might as well make an effort to do it well.

I was still focused on video game RPGs at the time, but I bought some Forge/indie games to see if there were interesting ideas I could apply to the related medium of CRPGs. Eventually I gave up on the idea of being a video game developer, but since I had these Forge game just lying around I wanted to give them a try. None of my local friends or acquaintances seemed up for it, but I happened upon a podcast that was a recording of game sessions played over Skype, and I decided to try playing that way. I got into it and started actually playing indie games and having fun in the process. During this time I had been listening to other podcasts, too, and in the interviews with indie game designers they didn't seem like they had any special skills or magical powers that made them game designers, they were just people who happened to be engaged in this artform of making RPGs and who sometimes posted on internet forums. I figured that designing a game myself might be something fun to try. I knew there was an annual game design contest called Game Chef, and that games like Bill White's Ganakagok and Ben Lehman's Polaris had come out of it, so I thought I'd use that as my starting point The first one that came up after I decided to give it a try was Game Chef 2009.

Game Chef 2009

In 2009 Game Chef was run in an unconventional way. Rather than run in a dedicated forum, the person running it decided to try to base it around blogs and RSS feeds. Every entrant was required to start a blog where they'd post about their game, and the feeds were all aggregated into a central site. Additionally, rather than having a conventional judging and winner selection method it was based around the idea of “badges” or “achievements” for achieving certain milestones. The ingredients didn't inspire me at all, but rather than give up I decided to shoehorn an idea that I had already been mulling into the contest: a game about the Epic Fantasy genre of literature. I created a game called Trilogy, but right before I finalized it I found out that someone else had created a game called Trilogy for a different design contest, so I renamed mine to Final Hour of a Storied Age.

During the contest I was doing my best to get things done and be a positive presence in the community by commenting on other people's posts, etc. But many of the “big names” that I recognized in the contest were relentlessly negative about the format: there were nonstop complaints about how the entire thing should be happening in a forum. While I could understand people being fond of the traditional format, it seemed to me that there was nothing you could post on a forum that you couldn't post just as easily as a comment on a blog post. I got annoyed at what I perceived as entitled whining, and did my best to try to make the best of the situation. I redoubled my efforts to read other people's blog posts and comment where I could, and I even participated in some playtesting via Skype. And, as a reward for my efforts, the contest disappeared out from under me because the person running it flaked out before the final round of achievements could be finalized.

A microcosm

That experience of trying very hard in my own imperfect way to make the community more functional while people with much more social capital and ability to effect change just moaned about how much they disliked the situation seems like it's emblematic of most of my interactions with the Forge / StoryGames / indie games world. Usually that leads me to burnout and resentment, but I never quite get to the stage where I give up completely. I still think there's a lot of potential in independent RPGs, but with so many microfamous designers being satisfied with their current situation and too many people trying to recreate a system that looks like the “mid tier publishers” of yore rather than thinking back to some of the original “indie” thinking of the Forge, I'm skeptical if the potential I see will ever be reached.

The list of questions for #AprilTTRPGMaker

(from Kira Magrann's twitter