In the 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 don’t want to change the system itself. At the end of the article, I said I’d revisit some of the ideas I’ve used to shake up campaigns 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, instead of just recapping, I thought 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. What we started here was a column on “how to make your game feel like a certain genre” or “how to reinforce the genre tropes of the game you are playing”. In fact, the first fifty or so of these articles are about shifting your game from one genre to another.
We went deep. 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, the 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? If you want a game to feel unique and give your players the feeling of playing in a specific type of story, it’s important to know the themes and elements 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 compared to 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 whilst still serving 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, or 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 but 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? Most games are basically made up of a series of choices about the following ‘dials’: Continuity, Longevity, Duration, Time, Narrative, and Character. We later added another dial to the mix: that of the Players.
Each of these things is a choice you make about how your game is going to look when you design it. 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 else is new? We also learned that we can box ourselves into thinking about a game as having separate pillars we need to meet, and we sometimes forget they mix easily. You should be able to drop RP beats in the middle of combat, or explore socially.
After these four, it becomes harder to summarise, but I will say that amongst the specific gameplay help, I noticed we’ve added something to the sheet that I hadn’t talked about before. I think it’s important to realise for ourselves.
5. The Self
A newer idea in the way we’ve been talking about games covers the mental processes of design, how play affects the psychology of players, and how you as the GM should find your own groove. Go with what you love and make sure you are comfortable.
What did we learn? That, actually, this sort of thing is super important. The thing that is going to lead to the biggest change in a game’s feel is what you as the GM are feeling and what excites you. It is about the discourse you’re having with your players. That 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 a roleplaying game to feel like, and then tried to deliver that?
Some of my players love Arcane, The Dragon Prince, The Magnus Archives, or A Court of Thorns and 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, go back through those first three pillars, and work it out. Let’s take a game based around Arcane for a moment and imagine we had to run it in 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 article).
If we went through the four other qualifiers for a second:
- 1. Genre: We’d note the influences of Steam/Dieselpunk tech, and the combination of a grimdark body count and hopelessness, combined with mythic battle elements. We’d also think about the punk element of the game and add in some cosmic horror rule stuff (but not too heavy), and think about where in the rules we can reflect all of these things.
- 2. Physical: Imagining 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 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 consists of two very short, focused seasons that jump around in time. So, we’d adjust our longevity and time dials, skipping sections of time in a montage and knowing the game is not going to go on forever. We would have the character dial jacked right up so that things players decide have massive consequences.
- 4. Pillars: We’d mesh the combat and social pillars, with major combats being about the clashing of ideologies and discussions happening during the action. Then we’d use the fact 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 Piltover? What is buried beneath the lower parts of Zaun?
As you can see, combining the 5th step (The Self/Player preference) with the others allows us to have a real idea of a very different game, despite it 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 credit: Trial by Storm and By the Light by JakubJagoda and cyl1981’s Chun Yu Lin Design’s Fantasy Creatures: Chimera.
