Matthew's Eclectic Engineering

What’s Missing in TTRPG Design

How I got into TTRPG Design

As anyone can tell from the rest of my blog, I’m obviously a huge nerd. Despite being an engineer to the core since I was little, I was lucky enough to go to a pretty liberal artsy high school and be friends with the theater kids. That gave me a chance to really get to know the game, and it’s something I’d like to get back to soon when I’m done with my master’s.

As an engineer with a penchant for systems design and good stories, I couldn’t help trying to learn how it all works under the hood and what makes a good TTRPG. After researching a lot about how other systems work and what some of the famous internet GMs have to say, I started thinking about how I might improve things. Eventually, my sister convinced me that I should try writing my own game. It’s currently unfinished because it needs more people to work on it, and I haven’t had a group in college, but I learned a lot in the process that I think is worth sharing.

Games Design by and for the Best GMs

People who design TTRPGs, and talk about them on the internet, are typically very experienced game masters. I think that, like in many competitive video games, this often leads to games that are designed and balanced around the professionals, even when it isn’t on purpose. I think one of the more subtle ways this shows up is that even very rules-heavy games rarely have much, if any, narrative structure built into the rules. If you’re already good at telling stories at the table, you might not even think about how the rules structure the narrative, and I’ve often heard internet GMs say that you can play any genre of story with any system if you want to. I think for most of us, who love playing TTRPGs but aren’t amazing at Improv and storytelling, making compelling stories without narrative structure built into the rules is a lot harder.

TTRPG Design Lacks Engineering Rigor

In playing D&D, and learning about other systems, I’ve often found TTRPGs to lack a lot of the design rigor that I’m used to, both in engineering and in most video games. TTRPGs often have a somewhat kitbashed feeling, with many great systems that don’t always fit together perfectly. I also found a real lack of clear frameworks for how players and GMs interact with rules and what mechanics to use based on more than just vibes and play testing. As an engineer with a decent grasp of narrative structure, I want to contribute some of those frameworks so that other people can make better games.

My Game’s Design Goals

Ludonarative Consistency

One of my core goals for designing a game was to have a strong and one-to-one correspondence between the mechanics and the narrative they represent. Hit points, for example, should have one clear narrative definition, and everything else in the game, including what status conditions you can inflict with an ability that does hit point damage should respect that definition. That kind of consistency makes it much easier to turn a mechanical interaction into a shared and believable narrative description, and makes it easier to fit unexpected narrative situations into a mechanical framework.

Extreme Flexibility

In my favorite books and movies, the hero’s will often shift from diplomacy to battles to epic chases to tense raids. I love TTRPGs because I want to play great, messy adventures with my friends. Making that work well requires not just having good rules for each kind of scene, but having them work as a cohesive whole. I want to be able to run a stealth raid, finish it with a set-piece battle, run an escape sequence, and then lead an army, and have my character’s skills and resource attrition translate smoothly.

Lean into what makes TTRPGs Unique

I think in an age of very sophisticated video games, it’s important for a TTRPG to not just lean into good narrative, but into what makes TTRPGs unique. The one thing no video game can do is build worlds and try actions that the designers could never have imagined. That means not just designing rules, but building scaffolding that’s flexible enough for players and GMs to build their own ideas with.

What I Have to Share

Translating Video Game Design Wisdom to TTRPGs

I think that there is a lot of game design wisdom learned in the much larger and more professional market of video game design that is not well translated to TTRPGs. One of my favorite examples is the oft-quoted idiom that “players will optimize the fun out of the game.” The crux of the idea being that people hate losing and will often play safe unless you give them a reason not to, even if it isn’t the most fun way to win. This idea of making loss aversion work for you, among others, often gets missed when talking about how to design a TTRPG.

The Intersection of Math and Narrative

Narrative has mathematical structures, even if they’re not typically something we think about. In a book, a movie, or a typical game, building a good narrative is about curation and a core understanding of how stories work. TTRPGs, on the other hand, provide a framework for people who are often not very good writers or storytellers to craft their own stories. That means learning how game systems like dice rolls and resources encode narrative structure and genre conventions so that we can build games that help people tell compelling stories.

Examining Character Through Economics

I also want to take a systematic look at character options, often through the lens of economics, to better understand why and how builds develop. I think it gave me great insight into designing better games with less bloat, and I want to share that. For example, we can model player options as differentiated goods to explain why some underpowered options are still chosen, and some become irrelevant.