As a game designer, I am acutely aware of the fact that I am competing for each and every customer's time. The fact that our games are available for free doesn't mitigate that element of the equation, and our hope for financial success rests on growing market-share and decreasing the download-and-ignore and download-and-read rate versus the download-and-play rate.

We're looking at three major factors that go into getting a game played.

First, how painful is it to get ready to play the game? (Entry Barrier)

Second, how much benefit do we offer versus other games? (Appeal)

Third, how much can we overcome the inertia of the industry? (Saturation)

Passing the Entry Barrier

The entry barrier is a major deal for tabletop roleplaying games. Many people would enjoy the hobby, but aren't quite willing to invest the effort, and even people who are avid roleplayers have a whole list of things that they are and aren't willing to do for the sake of the game.

James Gee writes that games are essentially learning opportunities, and while he refers primarily to video games the truth of that is true in a tabletop roleplaying game (or a board game, or a wargame, or the like).

This means two things:

Your game is going to have to be learned before it can be played.

Your game is going to teach your player something as part of the process of building its appeal.

The second part of this comes later, but right now it's important to consider just how much of a barrier learning a game can be.

An average tabletop roleplaying game is between 150-400 pages long. It's not unheard of to have games be 700 pages long (though as a reviewer I avoided games of that length because I found they were rarely coherent or able to warrant such reading: exceptions like Degenesis, which has a deeply developed setting and a relatively sparse ruleset aside).

How many of those pages contain something that players will need to reference or memorize?

There are a few ways you can make this easier.

Boil down the mechanics to just the core, and start from that point. Include lots of examples, make a quick-reference sheet, produce a tutorial or guide. Do this and you'll have a quick and simple tool for getting players ready quick. This is why most of the big RPGs have quick-start guides or basic editions out there. These also make a great marketing tool, but that's again not the primary purpose.

You get players more quickly if they're able to engage with relatively little effort.

You can benefit from shared experiences and peer-to-peer learning, but only if you're working from a fairly broad starting seed. A lot of players who learn your game will only share their knowledge with the group they're currently playing with.

So it's important to consider what rules your group has the tolerance for. A lot of systems do really well with different people: I'm too timid to learn GURPS, despite wanting to do so (a New Year's resolution, perhaps), but I've learned to play at least thirty games over the years, from simple dice-pool based systems to percentile systems to things that are more complex like The Legend of the Five Rings.

Designing a game that's easily learned is key. If you want to have something more complex, there are a few paths that can help.

One is to have a video game adaptation with transparent mechanics. I learned D&D, or at least the basics, from the various Bioware games. That is outside the budget of 90% of studios, but it's becoming increasingly more accessible as development tools like Unity allow indies to really shine.

Another is to have appealing examples that click with players. I still remember the intro fluff to Earthdawn, and the basic rules explanation that accompanied it, because it was so powerful for me when I read it. Humor works well too, if you're capable of doing that. It doesn't have to be used solely in comedic games; Shadowrun has a lot of dark humor in its examples (like the "Chunky Salsa" rule), and still maintains its tone.

There is a point where you can go too far with this, but it's still generally better to try and fail than not to try at all.

Another way to deal with this is to push to having a social media-based distribution, where you get fans to play your game in a way that everyone can see. The issues with this are that you generally need to do the footwork for this yourself–the game also has to be good enough to convince people to play. I've known people to try to get streamers to play their game, and that works pretty well sometimes, but it's not necessarily a guarantee, especially if you're not one to do a lot of public interaction personally. By letting people see your game in play, they get to understand the basic mechanics and also see people enjoying it (hopefully; good marketing doesn't fix bad games).

Above all, you need to test, gather feedback, and iterate until people can understand your game easily. You might need to figure out what language works well without rubbing people the wrong way, and you'll find that explaining things certain ways will get your point across more quickly and memorably (remember that players generally prefer to memorize, rather than reference, rules, but they don't like the act of memorizing).

An example of a good mechanic to keep games simple and fluid is Shadowrun's dice pool system. Although it changes each edition, the concept of roll X many dice looking for a result of Y is easy enough that players memorize it quickly.

An example of an abysmal mechanic for games you want to be accessible is the hit location system and complex critical system in pretty much any game ever. You are going to wind up with people being forced to reference charts, which slows down play, and it's too complex to memorize in the majority of cases (unless people actually set their minds to memorizing it). These aren't bad mechanics in and of themselves, but they need to be used sparingly (and not in situations where people want high-speed low-drag operations).

Finding Appeal

You need an elevator pitch for your game. 75 words is probably too long, but I write a 75 word pitch for each of my games. Here are some for games that I'm working on now, have worked on, or eventually plan to work on:

moonlight casts shadows on the deeds of the just
and the sun brings to light the worst of crimes
long ago their world was lost
long ago their exile began
now their time is dwindling
their Adversary moves quick
but their stygian wings are swift
their souls carrying the memory
of their crimson sacred goddess
even as they give up hope
and accept that they may never find
the promised land
they are velotha's flock

velotha's flock

When the war with the machines began, one man knew what had to be done. Sacrificing everything, he mounted a defense, and when the ash began to fall he was king. That was too long ago for memory. Now he sits on his throne, watching the world return to the way it was, vibrant once more. But weeds have sprung up where there was was civilization, and his rule is fragile like his ancient frame.

The Ashen King

Courtly music plays softly as the drinks are passed out; the man in black is not who he seems to be. When he opens his mouth, programmed contagion clings to his words, and the minds of the courtiers accept a new truth. Alarms go off, quietly, and far away. With a flash the protectors arrive, bringing magic and plasma rifles to bear. They are too late to save the newly maddened crowd. The war begins.

The Legacy of Eight

A knight stands at the front of a host of soldiers, charging at an alien being of pure energy. A sorcerer twists the arcane energies of the universe to bring light to the darkness while his opponent sings the songs of creation to quench the flame. A priest tends to the wounds of a gunslinger who fell afoul of bandits. A devil is sent out from the underworld to claim iniquitous souls. This is Othenar.

Othenar

Ruling with an iron fist is good, until you find your better. With Lethe's death, the whole universe shook, then returned to its old ways. The Hammer will not allow it to happen again. They will avenge their homeworld, and protect the whole universe alone if they have to, but they cannot do it alone. For that, they need assistants and specialists. They send desperate pleas out to the far reaches. They need the Hammercalled.

Hammercalled

Obviously there's a fair amount of quality difference between these, but doing this lets you figure out what the appeal of the game will be and what sort of design you're going to want to look at in the end. I've also focused heavily on setting. Because you want your system to be an extension of your setting in any event this probably shouldn't set you back too far in your own practice.

The things that you've put into your elevator pitch need to be the things your game will deliver on. Figure out how to build a game that does that (and make sure that your pitch is good) and do it better than the competition.

One of the things that we do is undercut the prices of our competition (we give away our games under our own free and open license), so we have a little more appeal, but cost isn't really the main factor. It can be a barrier to entry if it's too high, but it won't bring people in, because the largest cost will be time no matter what.

Our main focus for appeal is focusing on storytelling and quick play. Our games do not devolve into rules references and meaningless numbers. We still have a lot of those crunchier mechanics in some of our games (Hammercalled being the obvious one, which has a very full-bodied system).

However, appeal can also involve things that are hard for indie creators. We have abysmal customer-facing product designs, and that hurts us but we're not in a situation right now where we have the skills or resources at our disposal to do much about it (hopefully soon we can remedy that). You need cool factor, and a lot of that is visual. Hammercalled will be our first product to have a veneer of appearance that matches our professional standards (and some of the other sub-projects, like Segira, are much higher budget than our earlier velotha's flock).

Some of this comes down to exposure. I like to try to get everyone I know to play Symbaroum: "It's like D&D, but it's got fast-paced play..."

Your appeal needs to be something that's competitive. This is how Pathfinder and OSR have succeeded where so many have failed: they took things that people knew they were going to enjoy and then attacked their weak points, fortifying them with design principles that were more of what people wanted (my own personal dislike of the mechanics in Pathfinder and Starfinder aside, Paizo is great at delivering high-demand products to market, and their quality is top-notch).

Hitting Saturation

Once you have a system that can be introduced to novices (and is easy enough for them), and a reason to play your game, you need to get it played before you're a success.

Part of the process of this can be linked with other steps: having someone play your game on YouTube provides newbies with a frame of reference for the rules and mechanics, but also serves as marketing.

I'm not quite sure the secrets to this step, but I can say that there are a few things that almost certainly contribute:
• Build a brand and keep it afloat. Modiphus does this well: I have a whole section of my shelf devoted to their games, and I keep finding myself doing more.
• Engage with players. Open Legends lived by this premise before launching a very successful Kickstarter, and it resulted in a very well-rounded game with few weaknesses.
• Fill out a product line. You want to have enough material that people don't feel like they're only getting a small taste of your universe. The FASA games always did this well in my opinion (Shadowrun, Battletech, Earthdawn, etc...)
• Make (stand-alone) character sheets and tools for your game (or share community-made ones). I'm not going to name specific examples, because pretty much every successful game does this.
• Get word-of-mouth. You need to keep people playing and sharing. Support your supporters on social media and listen to their feedback. Crowdfunding can do this too. Open Legend is an example of doing this well, so I'll shout out to them again.
• Support GMs with content that they can use. Don't be afraid to toss out an occasional freebie, and give tools to your GMs that expand their ability (like an adventure path, quick-reference screen, or GM's guide).
• Get a "key" to easily hook people on your game/system/setting. You should have in mind a number of target audiences and figure out how to sell them on your game doing what they want. See Pathfinder, again. Paizo did a great job of selling Pathfinder as D&D 3.75, and it worked.

Here are some things that I've found haven't worked well, though again this is largely based on personal experience:
• Traditional marketing. Even if you have an ad platform that lets you target gamers, they're not necessarily going to go for your product based off of a general-purpose ad. Things like DriveThruRPG's ads are a noticeable exception to this.
• Hands-off approaches. Sitting back and waiting for a game to shine kills it. Even great games fizzle out. I recall several games I reviewed that were really excellent, but only got a core rule-book and then disappeared into the digital ether. Their creators were effectively absent, and the games just didn't see support.
• Pricing poorly. Free has a stigma to it, something we're hoping to get around by garnering a reputation with Hammercalled (stuff like velotha's flock, much as we love it, is just paint thrown at a wall: it's not going to make an impact). If you are going to charge for stuff, go at a moderate price (if you can command it). Being super cheap can help (like, $0.50 sells too), but it'll minimize long-term profit and encourages inflated sales numbers rather than useful engagement. $5-$25 is a good price for a "core" PDF, depending on your quality and length. Going above $50 digitally is asking for trouble, since you need either a commanding market force or a darn good appeal to your average audience. Crowdfunding makes this a little better, since you can have the exorbitant products marketed at whales and your lower-end tiers marketed at half-interested half-curious players.