Design For Usability
Roleplay Products and How to Use Them.
Usually I am not too much into dichotomies, and the one we are talking about today surely has ample room for allowing both or neither to be done well. Like with so many things in system design, the philosophies and frameworks are more of a guideline to find one’s own approaches and preferences and thus cannot serve as rules for one side being declared better than the other.
The common dichotomy in roleplay design gets often presented as rules light or rules heavy. While some having proposed also rules deep, which is basically a very in-depth look into rules light, that I personally dig. But these rarely tell us much about concrete design approaches except or how voluminous the manual might be.
This brings us finally to todays topic, based on a YouTube video from Saibrock, in which he proposes a different dichotomy. One between content on one side and procedure on the other (even though he calls the latter engine).
I like that distinction. But I would go probably a step further and say that both directions have each a subcategory, together forming four corners of design. On the content side we have the old pair of crunch and fluff proposed by Robin D. Laws. But more interesting are the two prongs on the procedure side, which allows me to understand why I am simultaneous drawn to OSR design and also get always disappointed.
Content Crunch. Systems that have the content mostly focused on lots of small modular pieces. Like trading card games, which allow the player to fiddle them together on their own.
Content Fluff. Less on the mechanics side but more in regards of the lore and worldbuilding. Thus the splat-books come usually with metaplot NPCs and many other setting details.
Procedure Environment. Emulating the fictional world, often through random tables and other charts to create verisimilitude.
Procedure Narrative. The design is focused on a more narrative experience, generating momentum through dramatic decisions.
All the Content One Could Need
While I have enjoyed content heavy systems in the past and they have influenced my design philosophy for years, I became tired of them. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a value judgement. These are still very popular design philosophies, like we see in all the tactical games that have been inspired by D&D 4th edition. And it seems the metaplot heavy World of Darkness is also still going strong. But I am glad that my old love of Legend of the Five Rings moved more into the procedural side away from its heavy content origins.
One of the biggest issue of content centric design is power creep, but plenty of people have already talked about that old chestnut, so I skip to a different issue I see in this design approach — content gloat.
While this video is not directly about the roleplay hobby, but it captures the issue that the contentification of many media and that threatens creativity in our space as well. By reducing play to plug-in options, regardless if it is abilities on a sheet or ready to use opponents, play loses the potential for emotional investment. Only relying on intellectual investment. Again, this is not intrinsically bad, and certainly has its place, but I for my part want the hobby to be more about expressing oneself and less about consuming content. And that is the issue with a content centric mindset, all the roleplay material becomes just about consuming time of the consumer while they consume these products — an endless ouroboros of consumption.
One Procedure to Rule them All
This is where old school and new school meet, not necessarily in intent, but at least in simplicity. In video games it is called the core loop, the central procedure that shapes the experience, and in the roleplay hobby as its root in a similar design philosophy, of only covering the central mechanism and leave everything else to a fruitful void.
Over the decades this got pushed to the fringes of the hobby, but the OSR brought back the precaudal play around the settings environments, and many indie games provided for the same in regards of narrative play. In the latter I see myself at home. But the rules light, easy to learn and details in the fiction or precedential cases within rules question left up to be sorted out in the moment by the table are what is common in both the procedural design approaches.
The content focused system usually also needs a solid core mechanism, but there are plenty of games that sell despite lacking in that regard. On the other hand some very brilliant systems which pushed their mechanism to perfection barely get noticed because they lack personality.
For me as designer in exactly this ocean, I have to find a core mechanism that is simple and elegant, but also stands out from the masses. And since my last article about design already contained a look at a mental model, First Principles as it were, I want to take the time here at the end to talk about another. Today:
Blue Ocean Strategy. This mental model is mostly associated with marketing, but design is not irrelevant here. A red ocean would be a highly competitive environment, which would be for our purposes here all the roleplay systems that only provide minimal iterations, but in the end try to stick with the established paradigms and familiar playstyles. However, if the competition gets left behind by innovating or just breaking away from the paradigm, then a blue ocean can be turned up.
In this regard my blue ocean strategy is to abandon the paradigm of competency focused play and have my core procedure revolve around drama. If that will be a good hunting ground only time will tell. And while I prefer a more minimalist approach to worldbuilding, I am aware that I should provide themes which allow for emotional investment.