Last article, I was fully on the soapbox. I talked about how you can change up your expectations of an existing system if you feel stuck in a rut, but also don’t want to change the system. At the end of the article, I said I’d revisit some of the ideas to shake up the campaigns I’ve had over the years.
In attempting to write that article, I noticed that, interestingly, the column has changed. Nowadays, we tend to take a specific element and look at how it can be practically slotted into a game. The column used to take a wider view. The first 90 or so articles had arcs they followed, more like a series of themed works. So I thought instead of just recapping, I’d look at some wider elements of how we can shift our games in new directions.
1. Genre
It’s been a long time since I’ve talked about the title of this column, but let’s look at it for a minute, because what we started here was a column of ‘how to make your game feel like a certain genre or reinforce the genre tropes of the game you are playing’ and in fact the first fifty or so columns of these articles are about shifting you game into one genre another. We went deep. Like sure, we looked at how to change your D&D game into a sci-fi post-apocalypse game. But we also took time to investigate Shakespeare, surreal and Christmas stories as if they were genres we could run in a game. We tweaked different types of horror.
What did we learn?: That if you want a game to feel unique and give your players a feeling of playing in a specific type of story, it’s important to know the themes and elements that you are aiming for. Then you turn them into play elements, either in the structure of how you run a game or base changes to the mechanics. You want to make your mythic epic series feel more survivable than your grimdark one. You want to be aiming at different ideas with splatterpunk and cosmic horror. Take those tropes you believe the genre is about (or look them up, just go to this article, click my name in the ‘written by’ bar and scroll back to those first articles) and drill into them. This is the quickest way to make a game feel different and still serve players who want to feel like they are playing something familiar.
2. Physical Structure
After that, we embarked on looking at the physical elements of gaming that we could change. Things like game components, our performance and physicality, opening up our play space, and just playing in an open living room with no table, using music and art as options for play.
What did we learn?: One way to radically shift the type of gaming you are doing to feel fresh is to change something in the real-world physicality of the game rather than in the narrative elements. This can often feel the weirdest for players be very memorable as an experience. If you want to do it properly, you should lean into those elements you feel most mentally comfortable with.
3. Dials
We then started looking at elements about campaigns you can turn ‘up’ and ‘down’ in order to alter the way a game is played. Each one represents elements of gameplay that are about the structure of a game. By tweaking just a couple of them, the game changes rapidly.
What did we learn?: That most games are basically made up of a series of choices about the following ‘dials’ – Continuity, Longevity, Duration, Time, Narrative & Character we later added another dial to the mix, that of the players. Each of these things is a choice you make about how you game is going to look when you design it, and that these elements, more than world-building or any specific plot point, will dictate what your game looks like.
4. Pillars
After this, we looked specifically at D&D’s pillars for a while and how each element 5e had thought about (Social/Combat/Exploration) could be narrowed and widened as a focus.
What did we learn?: Well, pretty much that D&D wasn’t serving its player base, but what’s new? We also learned that we can box ourselves into thinking about the game as having separate pillars we need to meet, which sometimes causes us to forget that they mix easily. You should be able to drop RP beats in the middle of a combat or explore socially.
After these four, it becomes harder to summarise, but I will say that amongst the specific gameplay help, the thing I noticed is that we’ve added something to the sheet that I hadn’t talked about before, and I think it’s important to realise for ourselves.
5. The Self
A newer idea in the way we’ve been discussing games is about the mental processes of design and how play affects the psychology of players. As the GM, you should find your own groove, go with what you love, and ensure you are comfortable.
What did we learn?: That actually, this sort of thing is super important. The things that’s going to lead to the biggest change in a games feel is what you as the GM is feeling and what excites you. What discourse you’re having with your players. That this interaction is core to the dynamics of the game.
In fact, this is perhaps the newest structure-changing idea that I didn’t think about in the last article. What happens if you went to your players and asked them what piece of media they’d most like an RPG game to feel like and then try and deliver that? Like some of my players love Arcane or Dragon Prince or The Magnus Archives or A Court Of Thorn & Roses. Maybe I should be trying to base a game on these things, or at least understand what makes them tick and discuss why my players like them.
Take their suggestions and review the first three pillars to work out the details. Like let’s take a game based around Arcane for a moment and imagine we had to run in it D&D (I know there are better systems, I’m currently thinking about hacking SPIRE or Soulforged, but that is not the point of this and the last article) for a moment. If we went through the four other qualifiers for a second.
1 – Genre: We’d note the influences of Steam/Dieselpunk tech, the combination of Grimdark bodycount and hopeless combined with the mythic battle elements. We’d also think about the punk element of the game and then add in some cosmic horror rule stuff but not too heavy and think about wherein the rules we can reflect all of these things.
2 – Physical: Imaging for a second, we want to keep this reasonably traditional, we might consider that the soundtrack to that series is iconic and use it as background play music. We might also want to borrow some of the graffiti/casino style elements of some of the characters in the show by involving a couple of dice with symbols in them, like a set of shiver dice retooled to do something new.
3 – Dials: Arcane is two very short, focused seasons that jump around in time, so we’d like to adjust our longevity and time dials, skipping sections of time in a montage and knowing the game is not going to go forever, with characters jacked right up so that things players decide have massive consequences.
4 – Pillars: We’d mesh the combat and social pillar with major combats be about the clashing of ideologies and discussions happening in the action. Then we’d use the fact that the setting has a city with a number of very different levels as a way to add exploration in a tight space. How do we get to the high parts of Pilover? What is buried beneath the lower parts Of Zaun?
As you can see, combining the 5-step with the others allows us to have a real idea of a very different game, despite being something that feels easy and familiar to run. I hope this gives you a better idea of how to design. I’ll see you next time.
Creative Commons: Fantasy Genre: Character Design by GrlArts, Historical Genre Painting by mcw61969 and skull by icoppens.
