Focus While Designing Games

This is the next post about Richard Rouse's Game Design: Theory & Practice. The first post is here. 

While Rouse is a computer game designer and that's where his book focuses, I find lots of interesting nuggets that can translate to TTRPG design, or at least provide a slightly different frame of reference to consider what we know about RPGs. 

The previous post delved into the major points of Chapter 1, although I skipped most of the meat of the chapter. I'll be doing the same here with Chapter 5. By the way, the book is written so that ever even numbered chapter is either an interview with a noted game designer or a case study of a popular game. So I'm skipping those chapters in this read through. Chapter 3 is about brainstorming ideas for a game, which is something I feel pretty comfortable skipping for the purposes of these posts. So, to get to business: 

Chapter 5 is about focus. What is it, how to achieve it, and how to maintain it through a long development process. Most of the chapter is focused on stuff not really relevant to RPGs, but early in the chapter, Rouse poses some questions that are designed to help foster focus on the game design project. 

While they're intended for use on the overall design of a video game, I think they could be good questions to ask when designing an entire RPG, a campaign world, or just the next adventure. And if you flounder or get stuck on some element, you can go back to your answers to these questions to help you get back on track.

• What is it about this game that is most compelling?
• What is this game trying to accomplish?
• What type of experience will the players have?
• What sort of emotions is the game trying to evoke in the players?
• What should the players take away from the game?
• How is this game unique? What differentiates it from other games?
• What sort of control will the player have over the game-world?

In applying these questions to an RPG, not all of them will be relevant to each level of design. For example, when designing an entire game, you probably don't need to worry about evoking specific emotions. That's something for scenario/adventure design level thinking, IMO. Maybe sometimes at the campaign level to help set a mood (heroic, dark & gritty, gonzo, etc.). The opposite is true of the question of control. That's primarily something to decide at the game design level, thinking about mechanics and how players will interact with the game world. The rules should pretty much answer that question, not individual adventures. 

So don't feel like I'm listing these questions as ones that you MUST answer about your game. Instead, they're more like guidelines. Use them as needed to help you focus on what you're doing -- whether that be game design, campaign creation/world building, or adventure/scenario design.