What are the tools a designer has to shape, add to, and mold the experience of everyone at the table during a tabletop RPG session? What are some pitfalls you’d warn against a designer using to try to control the table?
inspiration: Who Tells the Story in a tabletop RPG? The Designer? – Clerical Considerations
Too many people focus on rules. Yes, rules are the building blocks with which the designer works. But so many books focus on explaining rules, but fail to explain what type of experience the rules are designed to create.
“If you roll a 20, it’s a critical hit. You do double damage.” Why? Why is this a rule? What’s the goal?
It’s a bit pointless to design a game and write some rules if the person at the other end (the GM/customer) can’t successfully comprehend the dynamics are play and an entirely different experience happens at the table.
I work in the video game industry, and way too many designers focus on mechanics. Designer are, before anything else, creators of experiences and dynamics. Mechanics are pieces to achieve that. They serve a purpose, if they don’t, they should be cut. And designers are also communicators. If you can’t effectively communicate your design intent, whatever your design cannot take life.
I think the number one thing I think about as a ‘designer of information’ is order, and order in relationship to attention.
If you provide things in a particular order, people respond. Ultimately, per me, the longer someone is capable of staying in stride with you in a single go, the more succesful your design is. They are not ‘pushed away’ by their own thinking, nor deterred by your approach.
So for me, it’s: how do I admit what interests a person. How do I intuit when they need a break to scour an image. Where can I grow expansive and allow them creative leash so they can imagine what they would do with my work. Where does granularity provide the specifics that make them feel safe and grounded, like they themselves could do work with this tool, rather than needing to fabricate themselves.
It seems like an exercise in attention-studying. Which comes back around to you. When do you read something and stop, and wonder, and stop reading? When are you sick of words?
I think tools a designer has most, more than anything else, is space. Section breaks, paragraph breaks, periods, commas, various forms of visual interest
As a designer you’re playing with the eye and playing with the head to keep the mind stimulated but not overly so. You’re trying to serve a plate of good food that satisfies without overfilling. You have to be able to say: no one is going to read this in one sitting, so what is one sitting, and how can I be real about that?