Game Designers: Support Your Game

One of the things that inspired me to start my own roleplaying games is the fact that I was often making a lot of tweaks and changes to the games I played. Sometimes this has been a result of positive experiences: there were things I liked and I really wanted to distill them.

Sometimes this was the result of things I didn't like. I found myself quite often making things for games that a company producing a game should be doing for players: reference materials, form-fillable PDF character sheets, Roll20 support. At that point I figured I was halfway there anyway, so I should just keep going.

Keep in mind that I started doing this back in high-school, so for most people the level of experience required is not great. It's also the sort of thing that could be easily outsourced to a freelancer even if it was beyond any of the team members' abilities.

One of the things that always frustrated me is the fact that it's hard to find good reference materials for playing a lot of games, and even when such things are available they're often provided as a second purchase. Yes, I might want to buy a physical GM screen so that I have it for reference, but I'm getting a tangible good there.

We live in the 21st century, however, and as a result you need to make your game a lot easier and more accessible than other games. This is, I believe, a large portion of why Dungeons and Dragons dominates the tabletop roleplaying game industry–it has popularity, but it also has support in the form of D&D Beyond and loads of fan-made and first-party support materials.

If you want to play D&D, you can step into it with little effort and find lots of stuff to support you.

Sometimes when I look at games, even really good games (I'll use the example of Degenesis, which is one of my favorites of all time), I find that they're missing a lot of stuff. Example characters, quick-start guides, quick-reference rule-sheets, character creation aids and digitally interactive character sheets (to its credit, Degenesis has the latter two features) all help players get into the game with a lot less effort required, which is something that you're going to have to do to get market share. Now, I'm not always great at doing this either; velotha's flock is only getting example characters in a (free) add-on, though it does have a character creation cheat-sheet.

Now, there are a few things to be said against this. For starters, it's really difficult to do some of this stuff. I'm including a WIP version of a reference chart I'm making to help novices build gear in Hammercalled, and it's taken a remarkably long amount of time to make (I'm doing it by hand in Inkscape because I'm not happy with any of the other software that I've found).

This "flow-chart" (it's not really a flow-chart, but it isn't not a flow-chart) has taken a lot of time that could have been used on working on things for the game (like those positive status effects I say tools will be able to inflict).

One upside of working on something like this, however, is that it helps you as a designer figure out what's important.

The thought process as you make any reference material is "How do I give players what they need to do this?"

This requires an inspection of what really matters for gear. One of the things that I've mentioned in the past is that Hammercalled has so many options that it's been an important task to make sure that all the options are significant and have their own role. To create a reference like this, a developer needs to go through and make a short list of all the possible choices; I could do one for every last gear quality in the game, but that would not only be prohibitive but also confuse the user.

There are a lot of possibilities in Hammercalled, which means that the players can really get overwhelmed. Easy reference materials help make this less confusing. As much as I love Degenesis, there's no quick and ready reference for a lot of the things in it out of the box, leading to awkward moments where one has to reference things in the book, slowing down a session while things are looked up (even with over a year's worth of weekly Degenesis experience, I still have to look up things more often than I'd like to admit). Add to this the fact that the digital copy I have doesn't have bookmarks (though it does have internal hyperlinks), and it's a real joy to try to find things.

So for gear creation in Hammercalled, something which is a not entirely straightforward process because it has many options, having a flow-chart like this allows me to highlight the play styles that players might want. It allows me to whittle down the confusion by saying "If you want to have X, do Y". It lets players choose a winning strategy; for instance, status effects in Hammercalled can be powerful, but you don't necessarily want to stack five of them on an enemy. It also serves as a way to communicate some basic information: you get 10 points for free at character creation, and it gives you the cost to buy more points. It also includes the point values of various qualities. It would be nice to have references to these qualities, but it's not quite feasible with the space provided.

In this way, it's helpful both for novices, who get to see how to achieve certain goals, and also for veteran players who are looking to quickly create gear.

The idea behind this is that it will help Hammercalled get more of a market; if people look over it and think "Huh, there's some neat stuff but I can't wrap my head around it." or "I don't have time to learn this." the game won't do well. I think that this is something that a lot of indies could benefit from; it's a natural extension of having things like examples in the text and providing a character sheet.

Making the game convenient to play gets you more players than just tossing out some rules and saying "Here you go!"