Peregrine's Nest: Another Four Game Design Tips

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.
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Here's four more tips and ideas for your consideration when designing a game.

Consider your skills list carefully​

It’s often very tempting to create a long skill list, pleased you have covered everything. But it can work against you. The more specific and numerous the different skills, the more they will cross over. So players will ask “why should I get herbalism if I have biology?” then the next question will be “if I have herbalism and biology, which do I roll and do I get a bonus for having both?” The longer your list the more points the players will want, as there are more skills they will want.

To deal with this you can make the skills much more general. Grant the characters a basic general knowledge and allow them to specialise. Now the character has a general rating in ‘Science’ with a speciality in herbalism which makes things clearer.

So, when defining a list of skills, make sure they are broad enough not to cause confusing clashes, but specialised enough to let all the players pick individual skill spreads.

Beware of Creeping Complications​

Once you have a basic system, you should make as much as you can be driven by it. But the simpler the system the more tempting it is to add fixes and additional rules for specific situations. Before long you can have a list of exceptions as long as your arm that no one is going to remember. D&D is especially bad for this. While the basic idea is now “roll 1D20 and add a bonus to beat a difficulty number” there are all manner of exceptions and situational modifiers that complicate it.

The simple answer is to decide if you want a simple system or a simulationist one. If you go simple, expect the game to rely on more narrative and broader options to make sense of the rolls. If you go simulationist you can develop a bespoke system for each situation, but be prepared for it to be complicated.

Gimmicks​

All game designers have a stage where they want to make a system that uses D12s or cards (often tarot cards). There isn’t anything wrong with this, but make sure your idea fits the game you are making. In Deadlands, huckster card sharp magicians using a deck of cards at the table is inspired. But otherwise it’s just another random number generator.

So if you use an oddity, give it a purpose that nothing else will do. Card decks have court cards, so use those for more than numbers above 10. A D12 (like feet and inches) will divide in half for a whole number more times than a D10 (12, 6, 3 as opposed to 10, 5) which might allow more staged results, such as three tiers on a d12 of 1-4, 5-8, 9-12. As a side note, avoid items so special that if you lose them they are hard to replace and you can’t play the game.

Mini or Macro setting​

This is a tough one, especially when you have a vast and expansive setting. Do you have a Core Rulebook featuring a guide to the whole world, or just one part? A wide gazetteer offers more character options and shows the variety and diversity of the world. But that can often be too much and a smaller focus can bring out more of the everyday detail that will make the world live. You only have a limited amount of pages after all.

For instance, I’ve played several different versions of Middle Earth games, and never really got the appeal until Cubicle 7 made One Ring. Its tighter detail on a smaller part of the world really brought out where Middle Earth was different from the D&D I was used to. So when we made Dune: Adventures in the Imperium we made Arrakis the focus (with some detail on the rest of the universe) as that was the planet most new people would be familiar with, and expanded from there.

However, in 7th Sea, whilst all the nations benefit from more background detail, they are easy to get to grips with for new players. You just need to say “Montaigne? Think 3 musketeers. Castille? Think Zorro. Eisen? Think The Witcher” and your players know where to start. So in this case a broad world overview was the best choice.

Whatever you do you can expand the rest in later supplements, but you should always be able to play the game forever with just the Core Rulebook (which I suppose is another tip in itself).

Your Turn: What tips did I miss?

 

[J.M]

The skills were probably the single most difficult design challenge we faced with ELEMENTAL. The only way you know you have the right balance is if playtesting shows you that players are selecting a wide variety of skills (if everyone always picks the same subset of skills and ignores others, that's a red flag). For us, the right balance ended up being fairly narrowly defined combat skills, and fairly broadly defined utility skills. Another way to think about it is to balance frequency vs. impact: If a skill is likely to come up less frequently, make it a bit stronger or broader. If it comes up more frequently, make it a bit weaker or narrower.

We designed a cinematic game, so another guide we used for defining skills was: What's the right level of skill granularity to define a movie character? "Hunting" and "Navigation" are probably too narrow, a movie character would always be able to do both, so "Survival" is probably the right skill. Likewise, action heroes don't have "Climbing" or "Jumping" or "Running", they have "Athletics".

 

[J.M]

Good point on creeping complications. Designers often make the mistake of judging rules in isolation. When you always succumb to the temptation to add one more rule, no matter how good it is, the game as a whole quickly becomes an unwieldy mess. Always think about (and test) how does this rule work when added to the rest of the system.

 

[GMMichael]

. . . The more specific and numerous the different skills, the more they will cross over. So players will ask “why should I get herbalism if I have biology?” then the next question will be “if I have herbalism and biology, which do I roll and do I get a bonus for having both?” The longer your list the more points the players will want, as there are more skills they will want.

To deal with this you can make the skills much more general. Grant the characters a basic general knowledge and allow them to specialise. Now the character has a general rating in ‘Science’ with a speciality in herbalism which makes things clearer.

Specific and numerous skill lists make it easier to avoid crossover, but a designer still has to be careful. Herbalism and Surgery don't overlap (too much), but Herbalism and Biology do. With more general skills, there can be more overlap; Science (which might include Herbalism and Surgery) might be listed next to Nature (which would also seem to include Herbalism).

Lists can cover more than just skills, and they're very important for theme/setting establishment. These might warrant a Nest egg as well

The Creeping Complications point is crucial, if you ask me. It's very easy when designing to think, "ooh, I want to add THIS cool feature," and it's unfortunately a feature that complicates other rules, or breaks them, or ultimately doesn't actually need to be in the game.

 

[payn]

Nice section on skills! Im a big fan of nuanced skill systems and you really nailed it with general and specific boundaries.

Writing how to play examples for the sub-systems of an RPG is something I highly suggest designers practice. Id even suggest giving your notes and examples over to a writer and see if they can reproduce what you have done. Not only will fresh eyes give you pointers on anything you missed, but it will help the overall communication of your design to your users.

 

[Ramaster]

Very cool article! Looking forward to more of this kind of content.

 

[talien]

Specific and numerous skill lists make it easier to avoid crossover, but a designer still has to be careful. Herbalism and Surgery don't overlap (too much), but Herbalism and Biology do. With more general skills, there can be more overlap; Science (which might include Herbalism and Surgery) might be listed next to Nature (which would also seem to include Herbalism).

Lists can cover more than just skills, and they're very important for theme/setting establishment. These might warrant a Nest egg as well

The Creeping Complications point is crucial, if you ask me. It's very easy when designing to think, "ooh, I want to add THIS cool feature," and it's unfortunately a feature that complicates other rules, or breaks them, or ultimately doesn't actually need to be in the game.

Skill lists in every RPG ever have bugged me, particularly when they don't seem to mesh well with classes who should have them (like Nature/Religion as an Intelligence skill for druids/clerics). I know there are a few systems where you can make a reasonable overlap between skills you get a reduced bonus or extra dice, and that felt like a failsafe coverage if the skill doesn't make sense to a group (or you have that one player who is like "technically Sleight of Hand lets me do surgery in a pinch!").

 

[GMMichael]

I know there are a few systems where you can make a reasonable overlap between skills you get a reduced bonus or extra dice, and that felt like a failsafe coverage if the skill doesn't make sense to a group (or you have that one player who is like "technically Sleight of Hand lets me do surgery in a pinch!").

A little grey area is nice, and understandable. But since this is the Peregrine Nest, I want to see @Corone breaking out the designer ruler and swatting overlappers' wrists. "No! Bad designer! Bad!"

Also worth mentioning, regarding skills, is that one purpose of a skill list, in a character class system anyway, is to differentiate characters within and across classes. A super-short list doesn't do much to accomplish this, and can just be thrown out in favor of a class skill roll. For example, should the party's thief really have to choose between Sneak and Steal? Just make a Thief roll, and be glad that you have a Cross-Class point in Fighter, because the vault's security guard looks very burly!

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Nice article.

Skill lists in every RPG ever have bugged me, particularly when they don't seem to mesh well with classes who should have them (like Nature/Religion as an Intelligence skill for druids/clerics).

I have run games using several systems for younger players, and this was the trickiest thing for them. Traditional RPGs define a character, essentially, in terms of what they can do - skills. But players don't think of their characters as "what actions they can take"; they think in terms of "who they are". So, when running D&D for some young teens, they'd say things like "but I'm a ranger, why can't I use herbs to heal someone?".

For me, you have nailed the biggest issue with skill lists -- mismatching skills against character concepts. So rather than starting with a situationist approach to try and cover all options evenly with a good taxonomy, maybe instead start by thinking about the character classes / archetypes / whatever and ensure that your skill lists allow each class to have a clear set of skills.

Also, if you have the full traditional "skills + stats" system, give the GM permission to use different stats for a skill when it makes sense, so that evaluating a sword's quality uses SWORD + INT rather than a default SWORD + DEX.

 

[payn]

Nice article.

I have run games using several systems for younger players, and this was the trickiest thing for them. Traditional RPGs define a character, essentially, in terms of what they can do - skills. But players don't think of their characters as "what actions they can take"; they think in terms of "who they are". So, when running D&D for some young teens, they'd say things like "but I'm a ranger, why can't I use herbs to heal someone?".

For me, you have nailed the biggest issue with skill lists -- mismatching skills against character concepts. So rather than starting with a situationist approach to try and cover all options evenly with a good taxonomy, maybe instead start by thinking about the character classes / archetypes / whatever and ensure that your skill lists allow each class to have a clear set of skills.

That is an interesting angle to look at. Im playing Traveller right now that is actually the opposite of archetype concept. A character gains skills from careers and life experiences. They apply what they have during the game play. Though, folks who are of the fantasy mindset often look at archetype from an expectation of skill knowledge.

At any rate, it might be a good first chapter topic to cover when explaining how the game is meant to be palyed and designed.

Also, if you have the full traditional "skills + stats" system, give the GM permission to use different stats for a skill when it makes sense, so that evaluating a sword's quality uses SWORD + INT rather than a default SWORD + DEX.

This. Traveller actually has that GM/player discretion about making exactly that kind of adjustment as the narrative calls for it. A good practice in any RPG, IMO.