u/__space__oddity__

Maybe it’s just me but I keep seeing the same setting posted over and over again. It’s sort of fantasy-ish, the world has been destroyed, it’s dark and dangerous and you’re one of the few who brave to go out there.

It’s never completely over the top grimdark like Warhammer 40k, it’s not deeply melancholic like Shadows of the Colossus, it’s just kind of bleak and bland and it feels like reading the same thing every time.

Darker settings can work great but think they need to be a bit self-aware and not take themselves too 100% seriously. Allow room for fun. If it’s all just bleak and dark and dangerous and no hope, why do I sit there with my friends and go explore it.

I think the strength of a dark settings is that it makes the lights that are there shine brighter. But you’ve got to have those lights, otherwise the setting just reads depressing.

Let’s talk about something game designers might be doing without telling anyone, maybe even without realizing.

Playtesting. The purpose of this exercise is to test the game as you have it written in your document. If you don’t align the two, you’re essentially flying blind. There could be a massive issue in your game that only shows if you follow the written instructions but you don’t know, because you never actually played with that rule or you had some house rule preventing the issue that got cut from the final thing.

How this can happen, for example:

• Last minute fixes that you eyeballed and thought make sense but never tested

• Something that is very time-consuming in a playtest so you skip it, like a session zero (even though the game doc tells you to have one). Can also happen with more intricate subsystems like crafting or domain management.

• Making a “generic” system but then always adding specific rules for a setting / campaign, never actually running vanilla-only that 100% matches your draft.

• Optional rules that you wrote on a whim but never used

There’s some patterns here. The more focused your game is, the easier it is to playtest as written. A game about goblins cleaning a dungeon is going to playtest with a bunch of goblins in a dungeon on cleanup duty. A generic system that allows you to play anything is theoretically going to take infinite time to playtest because that’s how long you need to playtest every possible game imaginable.

The more forks and variants you include, the more variations of the game you have to bring to the table and actually play.

The more long-term campaign focused the game is, the longer the playtest campaigns should be that you are running to ensure that the game can perform in those.

None of this means that you need to design your game in a way that it’s easy to playtest. The message here is that if you make certain design decisions that make your game more complex to playtest, make sure your playtests reflect that.

The other message here is to have some self-awareness when you run your game. You’re doing every potential GM of your game a huge disservice if your document says one thing how to run this but what you actually do when running the game is something else. You’re the designer, you have figured out how the game runs best, that’s why you’re running it that way, so why are you publishing a worse version?

And yes there are reasons why you would want the game to appear as something else than what is actually happening at your table. Maybe what you put in the doc is some platonic ideal of a game.

Maybe it makes you look more trendy to include some thing that is in lots of games right now even though personally you don’t use it.

Maybe there is something that you do when running the game that you thought was so obvious that you don’t need to mention it, was actually not obvious at all and people who never experienced you running the game have no idea that they should do it.

Or it could be that you thought that making the game more generic would broaden its audience and in the process you removed the thing that made the game interesting and fun and special during your playtests.

And yes, professional games aren’t safe from this. The Skullclamp MtG card is a famous example for a last-minute fix that backfired. Ask any professional designer and they’ll have tons of examples where this backfired on them.

Food for thought.