RPG Design Patterns

Design Patterns won’t help you to design anything if you don’t have an idea of what it is you are designing. First of all, let’s suppose you have the following goals:

1. You want to design a “pen and paper” role-playing game, where real people sit around a real table and talk to one another face to face.
2. You want the game to be fun.

Good. That narrows down the scope of things you might be designing from, say, a hydraulic back hoe to something that this book can help you with. But, while those goals certainly help get us into this particular ballpark, they aren’t sufficient for this book to do you any real good. Before you start looking at specific design patterns, you need to have some clear idea of exactly what kind of game you are going about designing. RPG design patterns help you objectively decide what to include in your game based on your design goals. Without those goals, you’ve got nothing to guide you.

So, before you start, sit down and figure out precisely what it is that your game is going to be about. What are you trying to accomplish? What mood are you trying to evoke? What do the characters do? More importantly, what do the players do? What literary genre corresponds to your concept? What age group does your game target? What kind of activities do you want to reward and what kinds of rewards do you want to provide? Are you concerned about implementing this game in a computer at any point in the future? Are you expecting your game sequences to extend for many sessions or will stories play out relatively quickly? Do you envision a game that can be easily extended with numerous supplements or are you more interested in creating a single, self- contained book of simple rules? The more specific you are in stating your goals, the better off you’ll be and the more useful advice this book can provide.

< Introduction | Table of Contents | Definitions >