Worlds of Design: What Should Be in an RPG Book?

There are lots of books about playing tabletop role-playing games, but what makes a great book about designing one?

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Picture courtesy of Pixabay.

Pros and Cons of Self-Publishing​

Nonfiction books aren’t what they used to be. My generation saw books as a treasure-trove of information, organized and presented well by an expert. Good books still are, but now they compete with many other information sources online, including self-published works that can flood the market by dominating with search engine optimized (SEO) keywords, such that it can be difficult to distinguish the “chaff from the wheat” when searching for a topic, including tabletop RPG design.

This is good for pro-am designers, but challenging from a quality perspective as the bar is much lower to publish, and thus there’s no guarantee a non-fiction book has been thoroughly researched and edited. Conversely, self-publishing is good for game designers, who now have a real chance at publishing their game and reaching a broader audience. And they’re likely the target audience for a guide to tabletop role-playing game design.

The Target Audience​

I have my own ideas about this topic as I’ve thought about it for some time. Years ago I pitched (to the editors of the “Idiots Guides” books) an introductory game design book. I was told there was “not enough sales velocity” in the topic! That book was for games in general, not specifically RPGs. Then again, they want books that will sell very well.

Things have changed since then, and Dungeons & Dragons is more popular than ever. But to sell well, we must find the target audience in order to offer sufficient sales potential to attract a publisher, and it likely needs to be broader than “RPG experts.” I think the target market has to be the many aspiring designers who will likely sell no more than 500 copies of their game, should they ever publish it, or who will just play their game with their friends. And obviously, people who are sufficiently curious about the topic to read the book.

What’s in the Book?​

A book, just like a game, is subject to a variety of constraints, the same kinds of constraints that affect all books. Answering these questions will help shape any future project touching on this subject.
  • Length: One that comes to mind immediately is the length. “TL;DR” (Too Long; Didn’t Read) is a big problem today, as are readers who just skim (a big problem for rules writers) and think that the words that they miss somehow don’t matter. To my mind 100,000 words is the target length for a nonfiction book of this sort, the length of my 2012 book Game Design.
  • Gamemaster or Rules Writer: Such a book needs to teach people how to design an RPG, but there are lots of possible questions. For example, the GM has just as much influence on how an RPG works as the author of the rules themselves. So how much of such a book should be directed at GMs rather than at ruleset creators?
  • World Creation vs. Rules Creation: World/settings are often part of a role-playing game, but not part of devising mechanisms and writing rules for the game. Advanced D&D took the default fantasy setting (see “Baseline Assumptions of Fantasy RPGs”) . How much should a book address world/setting building?
  • Adventure Creation: We also know that good adventures can help make an RPG seem better than it really is, and conversely that poor adventures can do the opposite. How much of such a book should be aimed at adventure (and level) creators?
  • Storytelling: Can a book like this teach people how to write stories? There are lots of existing books about writing stories, books written by people who are expert in writing stories. How much should an RPG design book try to compete with all those books?
  • Artwork: Artwork is very expensive for a small market book (which this would be). Unless you use out-of-copyright art. Nor will artwork illuminate the topic, insofar as game design is an activity of the thinking mind. On the other hand, some people will not read something that doesn’t include (lots of) art. So how much art should be in such a book?
  • Print vs. Electronic: Obviously the book must have an e-book version. Nearly a third of the sales of my book Game Design are ebooks, and if global tariffs impact book sales, electronic sales will be a must. I think a book like this also must have an audio version, because so many people listen to books. Professional audio books, it turns out, are expensive to make. Which is why there is no audio version of my 2012 book.

The Choice is Yours​

Remember, too much material will probably lead to fewer sales. You can’t have everything you want. So what’s really important, and what isn’t?

Your turn: What do YOU think should be in a role-playing game design book?
 

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Lewis Pulsipher

Lewis Pulsipher

Dragon, White Dwarf, Fiend Folio
What's that? I searched and found a monster hunting RPG. Is it that one? Since it's a bit too pricey for me to check out, what's so great about it?
Thank you for asking. Really.

Yes, that's the one. Teeth RPG urls:

Here's my detailed opinion on why I consider Teeth RPG to be one of the most accessibly designed books in RPG history so far, with examples in no particular order:

1. The introduction to the setting completed in a single page titled "A Petty History of the Vale" (p.11)

2. The setting pages provide an overview, allowing one to delve into details at leisure, and without breaking reading flow:
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3. Table of contents is very detailed. Just look at the entries:
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4. There are beautiful OSR-style tables. There are encounters (the so-called prompts). But you also get: Vivisection Table, Cursed Pie Table.

5. The PDF has well-thought bookmarks. For those with shorter attention spans, there are Quick Reference bookmarks for Rules and World. In other words, you're not expected to read the book as a whole! At least not on the first attempt.

6. The system, while I am not very fond of Blades, comes together into one well-fitting whole:
  • there is a well set-up zone for exploring
  • random tables for filling up spaces
  • the PCs have an agenda - it's often that adventurers do not have a role to play in a setting.
  • the progress of the story fits well into passage of time (Agenda Track and Season Clock, and Phases of Play).
 

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After the first paragraph (removed), this appears to be a discussion of what to put in a role-playing game. But the discussion is what to put in a book about designing role-playing games, which is quite a different thing.
Ah, I misread it to mean "what would be a great way to design an RPG. My bad!
 

one nitpick: D&D did NOT "take" the default fantasy; it created one.

As for what I want to see more of is GM's cheat sheets in the back... Like WFRP 1e, or a handful of more recent games.
Nitpick: there were many fantasy games (though not RPGs) before D&D, and many, many fantasy stories, that took the default. Don't think D&D was the "beginning of everything", it was not.
 

"Rules of Play", one of the more well-known books about game design, stared with 80 pages defining what a game was, then admitted that by their definition RPGs are not games, and that they hadn't considered puzzles at all. Duh. Some RPGs, at least, do not have explicit victory conditions.
I prefer dictionaries for definitions:

Oxford - a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.

Merriam-Webster - a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other

Wikipedia -
The rules of a game may be distinguished from its aims. For most competitive games, the ultimate aim is winning: in this sense, checkmate is the aim of chess. Common win conditions are being the first to amass a certain quota of points or tokens (as in Settlers of Catan), having the greatest number of tokens at the end of the game (as in Monopoly), or some relationship of one's game tokens to those of one's opponent (as in chess's checkmate). There may also be intermediate aims, which are tasks that move a player toward winning. For instance, an intermediate aim in football is to score goals, because scoring goals will increase one's likelihood of winning the game, but is not alone sufficient to win the game.

An aim identifies a sufficient condition for successful action, whereas the rule identifies a necessary condition for permissible action. For example, the aim of chess is to checkmate, but although it is expected that players will try to checkmate each other, it is not a rule of chess that a player must checkmate the other player whenever possible. Similarly, it is not a rule of football that a player must score a goal on a penalty; while it is expected the player will try, it is not required. While meeting the aims often requires a certain degree of skill and (in some cases) luck, following the rules of a game merely requires knowledge of the rules and some careful attempt to follow them; it rarely (if ever) requires luck or demanding skills.

I'm confident that the definition of "game" from Rules of Play is incorrect (y)
 

Nitpick: there were many fantasy games (though not RPGs) before D&D, and many, many fantasy stories, that took the default. Don't think D&D was the "beginning of everything", it was not.
No, it's not. But before D&D, there really was not a default; and it was years until D&D became the default. The closest to a default for fantasy prior would be Dunsany... and Dunsany is D&D adjacent... Sword And Sorcery is D&D adjacent. Most Planetary Romance is D&D Adjacent. Dying Earth is D&D adjacent... but none of them was a wide-audience default.
Gygax's Chainmail was, if not the first, then one of the first truly fantasy based minis wargames, too...
Tolkien was leaning towards being a default, but it was competing with all the other fantasy subgenres. D&D raided them all for parts, and created what would become the default of the 80's... both by novels, and by adventures being played, and an outsized impact on Hollywood... Denying it's effect on fantasy literature is as bad as denying Tolkien, Howard, Dunsany, Borroughs, or Lovecraft. D&D is the mixing pot of sources that literally became the standard... not just my belief, but that of the two different reading programs I've used in teaching. They tiptoe around naming it, but a "major new kind of fantasy game" in the 1970's is about as blunt as one can get without using trademarks.

Fantasy from before D&D looks quite a bit different from after... and that's also part of why many find D&D exciting, it's a novel blend. (pun intended.) Then, of course, we have the wide array of D&D directly licensed novels, and many more clearly drawing from (such as Costikyan's Cups and Sorcery duology, Mary Gentle's Grunts, and indirectly, all things Warhammer.)

No elves in Conan, and the dwarves therein are humans with genetic issues.
No humans save John Carter on Barsoom...
Few flashy combat magics on Middle Earth... restricted to the immortals. But separate species of humanoids... some already bent to evil by their creation.
None of those have the things man was not meant to know and things that eat your brains of Cthulhu...
Few have intelligent swords, but Elric's Stormbringer is a character in its own right... a demon bound in to serve... fed by sucking the souls of its victims...

All of those make it into various D&D novels, and all of them into both Greyhawk and FR by the mid 1980s, and fantasy literature outside D&D is influenced heavily... some directly, some because D&D inspired Lord British, and his Ultima Games inspired a bunch of Japanese anime, manga, and novels, and the "JRPG" genre of computer games.

D&D sets the default... by stealing from everything and thus encouraging others to do so, too.

D&D steals all of those.
And hundreds of Hearbreakers steal from D&D.
 

No, it's not. But before D&D, there really was not a default; and it was years until D&D became the default. The closest to a default for fantasy prior would be Dunsany... and Dunsany is D&D adjacent... Sword And Sorcery is D&D adjacent. Most Planetary Romance is D&D Adjacent. Dying Earth is D&D adjacent... but none of them was a wide-audience default.
Gygax's Chainmail was, if not the first, then one of the first truly fantasy based minis wargames, too...
Tolkien was leaning towards being a default, but it was competing with all the other fantasy subgenres. D&D raided them all for parts, and created what would become the default of the 80's... both by novels, and by adventures being played, and an outsized impact on Hollywood... Denying it's effect on fantasy literature is as bad as denying Tolkien, Howard, Dunsany, Borroughs, or Lovecraft. D&D is the mixing pot of sources that literally became the standard... not just my belief, but that of the two different reading programs I've used in teaching. They tiptoe around naming it, but a "major new kind of fantasy game" in the 1970's is about as blunt as one can get without using trademarks.

Fantasy from before D&D looks quite a bit different from after... and that's also part of why many find D&D exciting, it's a novel blend. (pun intended.) Then, of course, we have the wide array of D&D directly licensed novels, and many more clearly drawing from (such as Costikyan's Cups and Sorcery duology, Mary Gentle's Grunts, and indirectly, all things Warhammer.)

No elves in Conan, and the dwarves therein are humans with genetic issues.
No humans save John Carter on Barsoom...
Few flashy combat magics on Middle Earth... restricted to the immortals. But separate species of humanoids... some already bent to evil by their creation.
None of those have the things man was not meant to know and things that eat your brains of Cthulhu...
Few have intelligent swords, but Elric's Stormbringer is a character in its own right... a demon bound in to serve... fed by sucking the souls of its victims...

All of those make it into various D&D novels, and all of them into both Greyhawk and FR by the mid 1980s, and fantasy literature outside D&D is influenced heavily... some directly, some because D&D inspired Lord British, and his Ultima Games inspired a bunch of Japanese anime, manga, and novels, and the "JRPG" genre of computer games.

D&D sets the default... by stealing from everything and thus encouraging others to do so, too.

D&D steals all of those.
And hundreds of Hearbreakers steal from D&D.
Default setting. Not default game methods. Two very different things.

"Baseline Assumptions of Fantasy RPGs"

Contrast with science fiction:
"Is there a default sci-fi setting"
 
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This isn’t exactly an idle discussion, as I’m currently writing an RPG design book, likely but not certainly to be published (next year) by the same company that published my Game Design book in 2012. (Why not certain? Size of market, among other things.) Their number one market is libraries, so I looked for such books in my local library (county population 250,000). They don’t have a single “serious” book specifically about RPG design, though they have some clearly aimed at non-adults. In fact I don’t know of any “serious” book about RPG design (other than books of essays, which lack integration and focus), though I haven’t tried hard to find one.

I’m quite far along, with the significant problem that it’s FAR too many words at this point.

There are two separate market questions: will people read such a book, and will people buy the book? The first might contribute to purchasing numbers, especially by libraries. The second is the only way anyone makes any money.
 

An admonition to look outside the genre (tabletop RPGs), to read and play widely across all game types (video games and boardgames especially) and styles before trying to design something. To take what works no matter the source and adapt it to serve the game you’re designing. Tabletop RPGs seems to be one of the few creative spaces where “read and borrow widely” is not only not encouraged but rather actively discouraged.

I'd add that Sports is a good one to consider here as well, though people tend to think I'm speaking illiterate pig latin when I suggest that Baseball can inform RPGs.

Improv Theater is another one that I've also harped on about, as it is a game.
 

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