TTRPG Designer From A Ghost Star 🪐

but then I realised that same challenge would be infinitely more funny with folks who have atypical or horror OCs

𓍊𓋼𓍊 My piece for "Together from Afar: a How to Train Your Dragon" tribute exhibition at Gallery Nucleus! The show runs from April 11-26 and opens tonight from 5-8pm (free + no RSVP needed) 𓍊𓋼𓍊

I've talked in the past about how Hasbro's efforts to deceptively market Dungeons & Dragons as universal entry-level game have fostered a culture of play in which any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game is regarded as evidence that you have a "bad GM", and how, in order to avoid being a "bad GM", it's necessary to treat it as a normal part of the GM's responsibilities to constantly monitor the outputs of the rules and quickly paper over any gaps between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to be play, like a cartoon train conductor frantically constructing the very tracks along which the train they're conducting is riding.

The trouble is that most players aren't stupid, and readily see through the act. They (correctly!) observe that the particulars of the rules don't actually seem to matter all that much, because most of the desired experience of play is the product of the GM's constant interventions, rather than the product of interpreting the outputs of the rules – but instead of identifying this as a problem, they conclude (again, quite reasonably, as they've probably never seen it done differently) that this is what tabletop roleplaying is. The GM merely pretends to be moderating a game; in truth, they're a pantomime-leader whose job is to maintain the illusion that we're playing a game with rules, when in fact what we're really doing is guided improv theatre.

And of course there's nothing wrong with guided improv theatre – it's a fine pastime, and one I've enjoyed myself on many occasions. However, it does put folks who really do want to play a game in a bind, because now there's this insurmountable communication barrier. You can say "I want to play a game, and these are the rules of that game", and receive what seems to be enthusiastic agreement with that premise; however, a significant portion of the people expressing that agreement think they're participating in a bit of kayfabe, like very dedicated professional wrestlers who stay in character even outside the ring.

Critically, nobody is necessarily acting in bad faith in this equation. The folks who don't bother to learn the rules because they think games aren't real mostly aren't fucking with you on purpose; they honestly thought they were yes-anding your improv prompt by pretending to care about the mechanics of play, and when they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math, from their perspective it genuinely looks like you were the one misleading them. It's just a fucked up culture of play garbling all the signals in both directions.

Like you describe, I play roleplaying games as a guided improv thing. As a player, I describe in-universe actions that I think my character would take. In this view, the point of the rules is to:

Make something happen in response to that.

Make that thing interesting. Different people find different things interesting, which is why there exist multiple games.

Resolve disagreement. The world should feel real and players should not often think "come on, that's bullshit". Consistent rules make this a lot easier.

All these goals are perfectly well served if one player makes everything up, but when that's what "GM" means, it sure gets hard to find a GM. The reason to have rules is to take some of that work off their plate.

I'm willing to do the fiddly dice maths as the price of a fun improv night. But I don't enjoy it: it throws me out of the imagined world. So obviously I want the rules to be as light as possible.

Wait, actually I've found another possible source of disagreement:

The folks who don't bother to learn the rules they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math

The D&D 5e player's handbook is 293 pages long. I'm perfectly happy to read it several times and work through a dozen examples before I show up to the table, and to bring various cheat sheets, and to try to learn the rules that others explain to me. But I am simply not able to:

Learn the rules well enough to be able to play without constant assistance, in less than 3 or so sessions

Learn rules that don't come up for my character at least a couple times per session, ever

Quickly read and apply a rule for a given situation; either I get help, or it's a laborious, game-halting process

It's not that I don't bother. I actually, highkirkuinely can't.

It's the same for non-roleplay board games. A decent board game player reads through the rules of a medium-complexity game, forms some idea of how to play well just from that, and usually can review the game after playing once. I need one or two playthroughs just to figure out how to make legal moves, never mind a strategy.

I've included dnd 5e as a familiar point of comparison, but other than that, all of these are games I really respect the design of.

You have rules-light unopinionated games, like Into The Odd, where the mechanics are kept extremely minimal so you can bring them in at key moments but mostly just resolve everything through the conversation loop. You have rules-light oppinionated games, like monsterhearts, where although the mechanics are simple and streamlined, you'll refer to them quite often, and they'll be shaping play quite heavily. You have rules-heavy unopinionated games, like dnd 5e, where there's a lot of crunch and minutia to the game but a lot of it actually boils down to GM interpretation or gets handwaved away. And you have rules-heavy oppinionated games, like Vampire v5, where the game mechanics are pretty detailed and robust and will be pushing the direction of the game quite hard.

But lets discuss the one you asked about, "Highly Oppinionated + Rules Heavy". Vampire v5 is a game about playing as vampires, but it's not just that. It's a game about playing in vampires in a very specific setting, with a very specific tone and themes. Even compared to other editions of Vampire, it zeroes in on one particular experience you can have with vamp games: it wants you to play as younger, less experienced, less enfranchised vampires who need to come to terms with what they are, and must struggle to hold onto their humanity in the face of the monstrousness of vampiric existance. V5's mechanics all act to reinforce this. There's a tight loop of feeding and getting hungry, and the mechanics constantly tempt you with power (extra dice to your rolls) if you accept the risk of getting hungrier. And as you get hungrier, some of the dice in your dice pools are replaced with hunger dice. And when those hunger dice roll well enough, you'll start to lose control of your actions (there's a table you can roll on for the specifics of how) as your hunger takes over. And as well as creating complications you'll need to deal with, when you lose control of your actions, you'll go against your moral beliefs, and your humanity tracker will be degraded, making it mechanically harder and harder for you to relate to humans. Of course, if you want to stay in control of yourself, you can reduce your hunger by hunting, but hunting still requires rolls that can create complications, and the easy methods often also risk your humanity tracker. So, you see how it's all a big feedback loop? Each bit of this process is mechanically relevant. All the parts interlink and your actions have mechanical consequences that intersect with other aspects of the game. So when you're playing vampire, you'll find the rules are constantly nudging you one way or another, incentivising or disincentivising certain actions, or sometimes even actively forcing events. The way these elements intersect reflect the setting and its themes.

Playing vampire is what I'd call mechanically hands-on. At any given point, you need to be remembering to apply the mechanics so that the feedback loops actually work. If you handwave things in this game without requiring rolls for them, the game stops working because now you aren't tempted to increase your hunger, and so you aren't risking those complications and the whole loop of the game falls apart.

For the game to work, underneath the narrative conversation-loop there's a second layer of tracking the mechanics of things. And sometimes those mechanics will rear up and say that, right now in this moment, this is happening. And that loop will push the game forward without even really needing much GM planning. You can set up a situation and just kinda let the players do their own thing, and the push and pull of the dice mechanics will create a cascade of consequences and complications to deal with, and there's your narrative right there.

This might seem like it's hard to learn, but it's really not. The actual mechanics of a vampire game are pretty simple - I'd argue simpler than dnd 5e - but they kick in constantly. By the end of a session, you'll have got the hang of it, because you'll be getting a lot of practice and it's all the same underlying mechanic. Sure, last time you rolled Manipulation + Ettiquette to blend into a fancy party, and this time you're rolling Strength + Athletics to kick down a door, but it's basically the same mechanic every time, and the consequences - success, failure, bestial failure, messy critical - are the same each time.

Anyway. Here we get to the actual point of my argument, which is that simple rules needn't mean incomplete rules that require constant improvisation to make them work. There are a lot of games where the mechanics are extremely tightly written; they're simple and streamlined, but you will be using them constantly, and they will drive play. Like how I described vampire working, but with a much smaller character sheet.

Let's take Monsterhearts as our example here. Monsterhearts is a game about playing supernatural teen melodramas & romances - think buffy, twilight, riverdale, etc - and it's very much about queer characters. You play as a collection of secret vampires, witches, etc that are all attending high-school together and are all engaged in petty overblown teenage relationship drama. It's a lot of fun.

Monsterhearts uses the PbtA engine, which means it uses a mechanical system called moves. A move consistes of two parts: a trigger and an output. A trigger is something that happens in the fiction - "when you lash out angrily at somebody" or "when you're put on the spot" - and when that thing happens in the fiction, you always trigger the move. Generally you'll rolls some dice, and get one of three results: - The GM uses a GM move, from a list of Things To Do to push the narrative forward. - You kinda get what you want; the move will explicitely say what this means mechanically and in the fiction. - You totally get what you want; again, the move will tell you what this means. There's not really much interpretation. You do the back and forth of RP, and then a move is triggered. You pause the narration, resolve the move, and the move will tell you what happens as a result. You add that to the fiction, and then continue roleplaying. Like with the vampire example, simply applying the moves will create complications and consequences. You don't need to make these up, the game mechanics will tell you; generally, there's a list of options to pick from. For example, let's say you rolled the mixed success to Run Away. The move tells you that you get away, but have to pick; either you cause a scene, you encounter something worse, or somebody left behind gats a string (a metacurrency for emotional influence) on you. No need for the GM to make much up, the events flow naturally from the rules.

Monsterhearts's mechanics are very simple. I could teach you how to play in fifteen minutes. You can make a PC in 5 minutes. You can fit everything you need to play - literally every bit of mechanically relevant information - on two sheets of a4 paper.

I think the problem is that dnd 5e gives people a really bad impression of what learning a game is like. 5e's mechanics are fiddly and pedantic and unintuitive and full of exceptions and special class abilities in a way that means there's a lot of mechanical slop to slog through, but underneath that there's not really any underlying depth. So starting off with 5e conditions you to think that this horrible learning-burden is what all games are like, which simply isn't true.

The thing is that DnD's mechanics aren't really oppinionated. There's not really an underlying feedback loop like there is with Vampire, and applying those mechanics doesn't naturally push the fiction forwards like Monsterhearts does. So, combine that with how dense and finicky they are, and of course people will struggle to engage with them! And if you're not engaged with them, particularly if all the mechanical heavy lifting is being done by the GM, you're not going to learn them properly, and this is - as OP says - a self reinforcing probblem.

Once you're in this mindset, you'll take the 5e approach to other games, meaning that you *won't* see how they're different. If you try to run vampire v5 like dnd 5e, you'll be applying mechanics in a wishy-washy, arbitary fashion and ignoring bits when you don't feel like it, and the game won't fucking work. So the conclusion becomes that all games are the same, and the effort of learning a new game is wasted, because the game is never actually engaged with properly.

(Also, the dirty secret: everybody makes mistakes playing rpgs. That's normal. It matters less that you're getting every detail correct and more that you're keeping the big overarching mechanical systems - like hunger in Vampire - moving as intended.)

Maybe this sounds harsh, but reading through your post, it genuinely sounds like you've never actually engaged with an oppinionated game on its own terms; hence you view game mechanics as the 'price' you have to pay in order to do freeform RP.

Serious question: why not just do freeform RP? You can just do that! It's fun, and it's free. I do it all the time! Why are you actually bothering with all these dice and character sheets and rulebooks?

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

Design Notes; The Seven Deadly Sins

Greed points at everything they want and grasps anything they can. Their true form is unseen. Their own hand partially blinds them. Different eyes puncture their crown, stolen from others. They float, detached from all. Their stick is sharpened at both ends

It is the first and oldest design, dating back to 2023

The stick sharpened at both ends is a reference to Lord of the Flies (in the book, one end of the stick goes into the earth while the other holds a severed head) I wanted it to symbolize violence

Sloth exists in a wrapped cloth that provides comfort but muffles all sensations. Sloth doesnt see, speak nor hear. The cloth overwhelms them. They are bound by a rope whose edge reaches inside their confinement, giving them the ability to free themselves if so desired.

I made an extra effort to put the rope within Sloth's control, to avoid associating inertion from mental illness to laziness

I wrapped my Blajah plushie with a bed sheet and used my robe's belt as rope to get a picture reference for the upper body. Despite eerie origins, my designs come into paper with a lot of silly methods.

Pride exists inside a golden, hollow statue. Their gaze is set upon a cracked book of pages set in stone. Their laurel crown is sharpened to the point of horns. Pride can be set free if they break the outer shell that binds them with the gavel they use to condemn others.

The pose and clothing is a reference to the painting The School of Athens, by Raphael.

Being mettalic, the book only reflects back themselves. Even if you interpret it as stone, it would still work since the pages remain static

I like to imagine the rotten legs dragging their heavy statue shell around. Ever since I was little I have a strange fear of statues moving

Gluttony is a stomach, living and consuming themselves within their confinment. They’re not represented by an underweight or overweight person; it had to be something everyone has. Their scale is purposefully unspecified; because everyones is different.

The design resembles the Horseman of Famine because gluttony and famine are connected; the excessive hoarding by some people causes famine to others. They're like two different plates on a scale

While the basic representation is just fat, I never considered drawing an underweight person to counter it and appear subversive. When talking to a friend recovering from an eating disorder they mentioned how cheap and uncomfortable it is when people use extreme thinness just for the sake of horror and I have to agree. I always avoid drawing real bodies for horror

Lust is the only one who tries to disguise itself with a human appearance, tho it has too many hands. One hand to beckon, one to threaten, and one to silence you. It kneels because not all of its victims are adults. It lives undercover and invites you in as well

Many asked about the fourth hand: it's the one you only notice afterwards and are left wondering what it means, whether it's an innocent gesture or not. How it made you feel.

It has 2 other variation designs. While what I made before is beautiful, it is not unsettling enough. It has the artstlye of an angel rather than something human and dangerous

I settled on the design after a passage in the book Second-Hand Time, by Svetlana Alexievitch. It was a passage about a teen abused by a military squad, killed when she got pregnant, and mocked over how underveloped her body was. Because of that my original idea was to have Lust wearing military boots, but that would restrict the concept too much. I thought that drawing would make that passage less haunting to me, but to no avail.

Envy is a slowly burning and constricted heart. It covers its identity with a mirror; the more it seeks to resemble the reflection of others the less it will resemble itself. But even the reflection is broken, inaccurate, and unsatisfactory.

Many have said the concept looks like a chrysalis or a flower bud, unable to flourish. I like when people interpret my drawings, they often find beautiful meanings that escaped me

I pondered whether to paint the mirror in front of them black, to symbolize phone screens, but decided against it because it would blend into the background

Least popular design but one where people have told me ''I cant stop thinking about it'' the most, which made me cherish it a lot

Wrath is not a beast acting ravenous, but a human thing slowly crawling towards you. All of their actions are justified by the halo they claim to be righteous. The closer they get, the more they shed their humane appearance

It was a challenge to make wrath differ from someone being rightfully angry. It applies to all designs; how to portray dangerous excess to very common and not entirely wrong emotions.

Wrath has no legs. Nothing to stand on

''Little by little, it turned into that wild fury in which the eyes camouflage with a black veil, the fists contract with a tremedous force and your very teeth find the enemy'' Roughly translated quote by Nikolai Gumilev that I kept in mind while designing it. Amazing writer