1. You probably get this one a lot, but how would you recommend one start cracking into the game/monster/adventure design industry?
2. How do you handle building/balancing/playtesting encounters? Do you have general guidelines you follow? Do you just have a bunch of pre-gen characters that you throw into a party and run combat a few rounds to see if it feels right? Or do you run the encounter multiple times with different party builds?
3. Has there ever been a time where you built an encounter, and in testing it, found it surprisingly more difficult than you initially anticipated? Either due to a particular mechanic being much more powerful in play than on paper, or an environmental effect crippling the party more than you expected?
Thanks for your question, VandaExpress! I trimmed them back a bit as you suggested, but lemme see if I can shed some light.
1) I do get this question a lot, to the point where I wrote a whole book on the topic (
Kobold Guide to Game Design). I also run a Freelancing 101 panel at conventions often, and talked about this on the
Gaming Careers podcast last month, because there's not a lot of obvious ways to break in. Here's the short version, but I'll refer you to the Kobold Guide for more on this.
A) The entry level roads into RPG design are different now than they were back when, but the rungs I can point you to are 1) blogging well on design-intensive topics 2) self-publishing material for an open rules system or your own RPG system 3) winning a game design contest such as the recent Monarch of the Monsters contest for 5th Edition or Paizo's RPG Superstar and 4) pitch a project to a company with an open admissions policy (For Kobold Press, see the
writer's guidelines)
B) The field is tiny and pays poorly. Rather more people are astronauts than are full-time RPG designesr with a staff job and health benefits. Go in with eyes open.
C) As with all creative projects, finding your audience is a major step. Just like novelists need to connect with a readership, you need to find the players and GMs who dig your style. If you do it yourself, you get that personal connection to your audience, but it's more work to get there. If you sign up with an established publisher, you get a shortcut to an existing audience, but you give up the rights to your work (almost all freelance tabletop game design work is done as work for hire).
2) Oddly, there's a whole section on Playtesting in the "Guide to Game Design" as well. There's no super-formula here, other than to hand the manuscript to someone else and let them run it cold. Running your own playtests is better than not playtesting, but you tend to gloss over your own omissions. Finding good playtesters you can rely on for honest, useful feedback is extremely helpful, but it can take months or years. Not all playtesters are worth your time and effort. Cherish the ones who play it as written, deliver reports on time, and who provide clear data.
3) This happens to me often, especially when I'm starting out with a new system. I tend to prefer more-lethal games over less-lethal ones, and I like horror and a certain level of panic in players when they run into key encounters. So, I think that my designs sometimes skew deadly. And I say this knowing full well that some designers skew toward "easy win" encounters, and need to crank up the difficulty. Neither of these is preferable, because what you're designing toward is excitement and a sense of urgency.
Designing for perfect balance (and not for thrills or joy or discovery or terror) is a bit of a fool's errand. You should provide encounters that excite people. Nothing is less exciting than a series of perfectly managable encounters without twists or surprises. This tendency toward "ooh, let's push the party to the limits" is an attitude that I embrace when I'm writing, and that I deplore when I'm editing or developing an adventure.
It's important to find out where the failure points are, and then make sure you're calibrated correctly. Sometimes, "calibrated correctly" means "there should be a TPK if the party is dumb enough to try this unprepared."
Ok, sometimes I ramble a bit too. Thanks for your questions!