Common Pitfalls in Game Design

The reason you might not have seen your new idea out in the wild is that it’s not actually that great, not because you are the first to think of it. However, that is not to say you won’t be the first person to really crack it.
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Picture courtesy of Pixabay.

To help you on your games design journey, here are the common pitfalls in the journey you might like to be aware of. I have fallen for all of these in some way at some point. These are specific design choices or approaches that often lead to challenges or suboptimal outcomes.

The D12 Dice Trap​

There is an ocean of games that use D10 dice pools and all manner of D20 games. D6s are ubiquitous and while games like D&D use all the dice, the poor D12 tends to be rolled very rarely. Most designers notice this and seek to redress the balance by deciding to make a game system driven by only D12s. No one else is using this much maligned dice, making your new system unique.

Now I have nothing against the D12, it’s a great dice. But part of the problem here is the starting point. Trying to make a game specifically to use a certain dice is not a good idea. Use the dice that works best for the system you want to use instead. There is also the matter of marketability. Any gamer will have a crop of D10s and D20s, and any non-gamer will have a pile of D6s. Making a game based on D12s means a trip to the dice shop for most people (which is expensive but not all bad…).

The main reason the D12 tends to get left out as a core dice is the range though. Humans think mostly in base 10, so dealing in 5, 10 and 20 is more natural for most people. When it comes to difficulty numbers any dice with fewer than 10 sides might not give you enough variety, hence why many low sided dice systems use multiples of said dice. So for your “roll 1 dice to resolve an action” system we tend to come back to D10s and D20s.

So, if you are going to use a D12, use it to do something other dice can’t do. Just as with the Imperial versus Metric measurements, values of 12 can divide in half without going to fractions one more time. For a d12 that means 12, 6, 3 instead or 10, 5, 2.5. That gives you four distinct sections for any D12 roll (0-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10-12). However, a D20 can also break down to 4 sections (1-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20, another reason they are popular) so you’ll need to create something that divides rather than just uses stages ideally.

Respecting the Tarot​

Many of us get into Tarot at some stage as plenty of geeks run with the alternative crowd. I’m an occasional Tarot collector myself so I get the attraction. Tarot has been used as a storytelling aid for many years and it works very well for this. You have four numbered suits and 22 numbered trump cards making them cry out to be used as a gaming tool. This is doubly so when the suits and trumps divide the same numerical results into different sections.

The problems with Tarot cards are twofold. Firstly, Tarot decks have significant spiritual meaning to some, both those who practice its use and those who are unfamiliar with it. This means that there is more likelihood people playing the game will be seen as “playing with dangerous occult forces,” to say nothing of just trying to get hold of a pack to play the game.

The other issue comes from those who do know Tarot. The cards have meanings that have been passed down over centuries and just grabbing them as a “say what you see” narrative tool or a random number generator can sound very disrespectful. While the meanings are often vague and complex, if you don’t know them better than the tiny booklet that came with your first deck, you will stand out as an amateur. So, you should know how the cards are used if you are going to use them. This is no bad thing as the meanings have stood the test of time and using them properly will give you better narrative options.

Having said all that, these last few years has seen several games driven by Tarot cards. Many are journaling games, which is very close to the Tarot storytelling that’s been going on for years. The joy of crowdfunding has also allowed such games to be delivered with a deck created for the game (although 78 images from an artist is expensive so count that into your budget). There are also several gaming companies that have made even standalone Tarot decks. However, most of these games use the pictures and meanings as narrative prompts rather than the numbers as a game mechanic. Tarot, when used respectfully and with some forethought, can make for a great game mechanic -- just be aware of the pitfalls.

Magical Narrative

If you tire of rules systems you can go too far in the other direction and let the narrative decide the whole system. Go completely diceless! Let players do anything they can imagine! Their very words define success and failure! On the face of it, that sounds like the purest form of role playing.

The problem here is that rules are not actually a burden, they are an assistant. Rules give you structure not to control or limit but to build upon. If you want a totally narrative game (and that’s fine) you actually have more work to do, not less, than a more rules heavy game.

Firstly you need to figure out how your narrative will guide the story so everyone can take part, not just the loudest player. If the words people use will become the keys to success and failure, you need to define which words, how they do this, and how the players will be able to know which ones. A lot of this can be figured out by just letting them do as they will. Most story games do this by setting up a situation and letting that give the players the parameters their characters work with.

The second problem is explaining how you do it. It is not enough for a game designer to just say “and then you just tell a story”. It’s not actually that easy to randomly tell a story for most people. They need some help, some prompts and guidelines. The rules usually do this by telling them what actions their character can do and how good they are at them. Narrative games are much harder to do this with.

Despite role playing being among the most imaginative and creative people, not everyone is able to just jump into a game or pull narrative out of a hat at a moment’s notice. When we made the Doctor Who game I remember talking to people at conventions who would ask “So what characters can you play?” to which my answer would be “Anything you like across all of time and space!” For me that’s a selling point, you can play literally anything or base a character on anyone in the series across 60 years. But for many people that was just a scary option with no direction to help them out. The same applies to rules and system. So whatever your game is like, write examples, for everything, a lot.

Your Turn: What common issues have you seen in game design or tackled yourself ... only to discover it in another game?
 

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Andrew Peregrine

Andrew Peregrine

Curious, what is your issue with that point of view? Do you feel they have too limited a scope to draw from?
People who've only played one game, like D&D think they have invented something new when they are likely just going over well-trodden ground. There are plenty of games that don't have classes or levels and don't use a D20 or any number of other things that games other than D&D have done since the 70s.

Learn about the history of what's been done aleady and use that to make your own unique impact. I am one of the mods elsewhere, and I have had a new designer screaming at me because he invented Runequest. Runequest is by no means a bad game, but I'm looking at my copy of it from the 70s right now.
 

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Learn about the history of what's been done aleady and use that to make your own unique impact. I am one of the mods elsewhere, and I have had a new designer screaming at me because he invented Runequest. Runequest is by no means a bad game, but I'm looking at my copy of it from the 70s right now.

Does this site have a do not or do post? I have seen a few that lightly touch the subject. I mean I have the experience of decades right here on my screen, and playing all those games will be quite the feat.
 

Learn about the history of what's been done aleady and use that to make your own unique impact. I am one of the mods elsewhere, and I have had a new designer screaming at me because he invented Runequest. Runequest is by no means a bad game, but I'm looking at my copy of it from the 70s right now.

Does this site have a do not or do post? I have seen a few that lightly touch the subject. I mean I have the experience of decades right here on my screen, and playing all those games will be quite the feat.
I know it might seem like a lot, but playing many different games (or, at the very least reading them) is fun. I know that there are dozens of influential games out there, and I hope some of the folks reading this thread will add their suggestions, but I have five games to check out to get a sense of "what has come before:"

  1. Call of Cthulhu (to get a sense of what BRP--Basic Roleplay-- is like).
  2. Hero System or GURPS (I prefer Hero).
  3. Star Wars from West End Games.
  4. A Powered by the Apocalypse game (I prefer Monster of the Week).
  5. Blades in the Dark.
 

Reading games and breaking down the design from the player perspective and reading up on designer intent and how that translated is the reason that I have purchased so many games that I'll probably never play. I just enjoy it! And when I have had to design something, it has helped a lot.
 

One of the most common pitfalls I see in skill-based games is skill inflation: too many skills, at least in games where the baseline is incompetence. It's easy as a game designer to see a situation and go "Oh, we don't have a skill for that, and it doesn't fit neatly into one of the other ones, so let's add another skill." I'd rather see fewer and broader skills, with the option of adding specializations on top of that to reflect narrow competencies.

It's less of a problem in a system where characters are assumed to be reasonably competent at most things, and where skills or the equivalent are bonuses on top of that baseline competency. One example of the latter is Star Trek Adventures, where each character has six attributes (Control, Daring, Fitness, Insight, Presence, Reason) reflecting your baseline aptitudes usually rated between 8 and 12, and six disciplines (Command, Conn, Security, Engineering, Science, Medicine) reflecting broad levels of training and rated 1-5. When doing a task, you normally roll 2d20 with each die showing at or below the sum of one attribute and one discipline, as determined by the task, being a success and a 1 being a critical = two successes. So you probably don't want Beverly Crusher at the helm when flying through a debris field pursued by some Romulan Warbirds (Daring 8, Conn 1), but at least she has a fighting chance. Worf would be better though (12 and 4).

So far it's pretty simple, but your character can also have Focuses, which are areas of more focused training. When doing something where one of your Focuses apply, any roll equal to or lower than your appropriate Discipline is a crit. For example, Lt Cmdr LaForge has Reason 12 and Engineering 5, so when he can apply his big brain to thinking about some engineering problem he rolls at a very respectable 17. He might be working on repairing the phaser banks or something. But if something happens with the warp core, he can apply his Focus of Warp Engines. He'll still roll at a 17, but now any roll of 1-5 is a crit, not just a 1. In a system like this, it's fine to have a bazillion different focuses available, because they're an add-on to what is expected of the system.

On the other end, you have something like GURPS. GURPS has literally hundreds of different skills. Sure, you can use them with defaults, but those defaults tend to be very low – in the realm of stat-5 (so if you're good at a stat you probably have like 12-14, giving you a 7-9 or lower on 3d6), and that's before applying penalties for unfamiliarity (which would usually apply another -2 to the default). So unless the thing you're trying to do happens to be just the thing you're trained for, you're probably going to suck at it. And adding more skills to a system like this just means there will be more things at which to suck.

But that does bring up the thought that RPGs are missing out on that goodness - our systems are so big on "make number big" that I can't think of anyone who has built dice mechanics around divisors. Hm.
I've seen some roll-under systems using fractions of your skill for various special results. RuneQuest (at least RQ3, which is the one with which I am at least passingly familiar) used skill/5 or less (on d100) as the threshold for a Special result, and skill/20 or less for Critical. I think many other BRP systems are similar. Alternity did the same with a d20-based system: half your skill or less was a Good result, and a quarter or less was Amazing.

These days, I think it's more common to tie such results to the roll itself, because that way you don't need to do math. For example, in The Troubleshooters you get Good or Bad Karma on a roll if you roll doubles on your d100 (11, 22, etc) – Good Karma if it's a success and Bad Karma if it's a failure. Karma isn't necessarily a critical success/failure, but can be a stroke of good/bad luck that just happens to coincide with the roll (you drive across the railroad just before the train comes, forcing your pursuer to wait for it to pass and giving you a good head start).
 

The more flexible a game system is, and the more open it is to supporting different playstyles and story types, the more useful it'll be to more people. Not a consideration if you're just designing for your own table, of course, but a big consideration if you're trying to make any money off it.
Not sure I agree with this. Generic games can end up being bland, and can easily leave out niche play in an attempt to encompass everything. For example, look at how poorly D&D mechanically handles heists. If I was playing a campaign around that sort of thing, a Forged in the Dark system that provides mechanical support for avoiding the timesinks and getting right into the action is an easy preference. If I was doing a game centered around relationships I wouldn't pick either but go for a game that mechanically centers on those in the genre I want, from Smallville to Monsterhearts. Even different genres have different sets of priorities and rules -- a supers game, a Cthulhu horror, and an SF game don't share the same tropes. Because a good system doesn't allow the tropes, a good system encourages them.

I'd rather have half a dozen laser focused games at my disposal that mechanically do what I want them to with extreme precision than one game that can half-handle any of them. I can't see why I want play or run a generic or big tent system over one tailors for the exact experience I want except for ease of players not wanting to learn new rules. That's not nothing, but for me and the groups I play/run with it's not a heavy consideration.
 

Not sure I agree with this. Generic games can end up being bland, and can easily leave out niche play in an attempt to encompass everything. For example, look at how poorly D&D mechanically handles heists. If I was playing a campaign around that sort of thing, a Forged in the Dark system that provides mechanical support for avoiding the timesinks and getting right into the action is an easy preference. If I was doing a game centered around relationships I wouldn't pick either but go for a game that mechanically centers on those in the genre I want, from Smallville to Monsterhearts. Even different genres have different sets of priorities and rules -- a supers game, a Cthulhu horror, and an SF game don't share the same tropes. Because a good system doesn't allow the tropes, a good system encourages them.

I'd rather have half a dozen laser focused games at my disposal that mechanically do what I want them to with extreme precision than one game that can half-handle any of them. I can't see why I want play or run a generic or big tent system over one tailors for the exact experience I want except for ease of players not wanting to learn new rules. That's not nothing, but for me and the groups I play/run with it's not a heavy consideration.
I think there's one consideration being left out of generic systems that evens the playing field. That is adapting the system for that genre with genre-specific rules. Thereby you have a solid, known foundation, but have this same flexibility when dealing with specific settings. You see this a lot with Fate, Savage Worlds and GURPs, and to a lesser extent (based in-house or not fully open) with YZE and others like it.

I think a lot of what drives the flexibility is the designer, not the system, in terms of Generic systems being bland.
 

I've seen some roll-under systems using fractions of your skill for various special results. RuneQuest (at least RQ3, which is the one with which I am at least passingly familiar) used skill/5 or less (on d100) as the threshold for a Special result, and skill/20 or less for Critical. I think many other BRP systems are similar. Alternity did the same with a d20-based system: half your skill or less was a Good result, and a quarter or less was Amazing.

These days, I think it's more common to tie such results to the roll itself, because that way you don't need to do math. For example, in The Troubleshooters you get Good or Bad Karma on a roll if you roll doubles on your d100 (11, 22, etc) – Good Karma if it's a success and Bad Karma if it's a failure. Karma isn't necessarily a critical success/failure, but can be a stroke of good/bad luck that just happens to coincide with the roll (you drive across the railroad just before the train comes, forcing your pursuer to wait for it to pass and giving you a good head start).

That used to be common in the BRP-adjacent sphere, but I think there's being some tendency toward taking a blackjack approach now (which might just be me overfocusing on limited samples), so they're tending to, as you say, bake it into the roll in other ways.
 

I think there's one consideration being left out of generic systems that evens the playing field. That is adapting the system for that genre with genre-specific rules. Thereby you have a solid, known foundation, but have this same flexibility when dealing with specific settings. You see this a lot with Fate, Savage Worlds and GURPs, and to a lesser extent (based in-house or not fully open) with YZE and others like it.

I think a lot of what drives the flexibility is the designer, not the system, in terms of Generic systems being bland.

And honestly, sometimes I've seen "bland" meaning "not exception based to the degree I'm used to and comfortable with."
 


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