Designing TTRPGs is building a house out of smoke

[DeReel]

Hello,
In the spirit of this thread, a simple question to plumb the depth of the unknown

Everything Is A Designable Surface

I’m reading through the larp design book that came out of the most recent Knutepunkt conference (Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences) and right away Johanna Koljonen comes out and says EVERYTHING IS A DESIGNABLE SURFACE …and it is a very challenging and liberating idea. As game designers we’re building experience frameworks, and we are not limited to the traditional bits and bobs in service of that goal. In my own work I often think about ways to challenge accepted practice (“What if y…

What is TTRPG design like ?

frex :
It’s like weaving a bridge between a small sample of humanity and into a psycho-cultural landscape.
It’s like connecting ducts and pumps roughly similar to what I see others do, and try and guess where to insert what in order to get anything meaningful out.
It’s like building a model ship, rigging and all : now that it’s done, I just need to find a bottle big enough… err, wait… duh !

[Deodatus]

Designing a RPG is a solution to the problem you see in other RPGs.

[Gus.L]

Designing an RPG is a way to avoid having to play an RPG.

[DeReel]

Diversity : never enough of it .

Advantages and pitfalls of original systems - Original Systems

[Pyske]

Cynical: Designing TTRPGs is like imagining teaching imaginary choreographers how to teach imaginary synchronized swimming.

[seanpatrickcain]

When you design RPGs, you build doors and hope that other people open them.

[SeanGomes]

Designing RPGs is giving people guidelines on how to come up with fanfic.

[Rickard]

Designing a game by setting up an environment and guidelines to make people have a dialogue about a specific topic. When successful, it mutates into other topics.

[Paul_T]

Designing an RPG is a ritual wherein the sorcerer attempts to instantiate a future promise of joy and intrigue by writing furiously on many pieces of paper. If successful, it fills the sorcerer’s mind with powerful visions of imagination, friendship, and elation, usually informed by things they are missing in their own, dreary, everyday lives.

It has never been conclusively determined whether this kind of magic has any effect on the real, physical world.

[Alexi_Sarge]

Designing an RPG is agreeing to limits to trick yourself and your friends into saying more interesting things than you otherwise would.

[DeReel]

I gathered these from the TTRPG itch.io forum :

And a set of tools I snatched from @Nickwedig, I hope he never finds out who did it.

[Nickwedig]

Genuinely wondering what those tools are, because I for sure have forgotten whatever they were.

[Nickwedig]

I often think of writing an RPG as building a bridge between the fiction and the game mechanics. People always ask if you should start with the fiction or the mechanics first when designing a game. In practice it doesn’t matter that much. For a well-built bridge, you can’t tell which shore of the river they started building from, so long as the path between them is easy to navigate.

[DeReel]

Please, I will tell everything I know, and more ! The tools are there ! I am sorry I stole them !

Design Frameworks - Tools