A TRPG Toolbox 0: Primer

Greetings ye who wander here!

Game design is one of the arts that is constantly evolving. It requires that anyone engaging not only enjoys it but also develops it to keep learning and iterating and creating. However, it can also be some of the most arcane of crafts, even with all the resources available all over.

Games have been a part of my life for a long time, I’ve engaged in games of many a genre, with my favourite being the, at times daunting, roleplaying game. Even though I’ve only put two products out there, a Monster Hunter-esque rebuild of 5e OGL, Slayer’s Frontier, and a modern magic RPG wholly of my own making, Mancer, I feel that my near lifelong experience in games as a general and around 15 years in the tabletop RPG space would still give some insights that could be helpful to newer designers.

So, the purpose of this series is not only to deepen my own knowledge in different aspects of game design when it comes to tabletop roleplaying games but also to share some insights that I feel may have been a bit overlooked in general discourse.

The main crux for this article series will be What do specific design choices mean in the game’s narrative. Granted, discussion on ludonarrative (literally gameplay storytelling), especially when it breaks the games internal logic, can be fraught with bias and general opinion, I feel that the general discourse at the moment in the TTRPG space is how a specific mechanic feels in gameplay, rather than what sort of story it tells within the game’s context and how it can actually guide, quite heavy-handedly, how player characters approach any narrative. When everything’s a nail and all that.

So, I hope you, dear reader, will enjoy this article series and that it will be of use to you if you are making your own games!

Without further ado, we’ll get into the first topic, one of the core aspects of all games: Conflict Resolution!