Where I Came From and Where I'm Going

I.

Five or six years ago, my friends and I were in high school, it was lunch period, and we expressed interest in playing D&D. So my good friend Max said, "Sure, we can play D&D," and he pulled out some dice and we made up some characters and he improvised a dungeon on the spot.

I must have had some familiarity with D&D tropes back then, because I made up on the spot that I wanted to be a quarterling (half-halfling, half-gnome) and that my name would be Borris Bilburrow. I had just read The Hobbit for the first time, and I think I was trying to poke fun at the concept of fantasy races, which I thought seemed especially dumb.

We didn't get very far that day, but we played a few more times and I always used the same character. Max got us to fill out full fifth-edition character sheets sometimes, but I don't think we were ever using the actual rules of 5E, and my impression is that he never had much at all prepared. It was a free-wheeling kind of thing with a focus making the table laugh more than anything else.

My favorite memory from around this time is going on a long walk around my neighborhood with Max, during which we improvised an entire duet game without any rules or dice.

He simply asked me, "What is your character's main goal?" I said the first random thing that came to mind: "To have the world's best tomato garden."

Max said, "A thunderstorm comes along and the flooding kills all your tomatoes. What do you do?"

From there, I resolved to seek out the highest mountain in the land, climb it, and kill the sky.

To get to the mountain, I had to enter a forest of bioengineered flesh trees, avoiding government security helicopters that seemed to want to defend the forest from entry. I encountered some sort of flesh-tree baby, who initially followed me around like a child before trying to kill me. Finally, I climbed the mountain, screamed at the sky, and got struck by lightning. I descended the mountain and returned home feeling that I had discovered, in some fashion or other, true wisdom and humility.

II.

I don't think I was really interested in running my own game until I binged the first season of the actual play podcast, The Adventure Zone. I had already been a fan of the McElroy brothers from Monster Factory and My Brother, My Brother and Me, and the strength of TAZ: Balance is that it leverages your attachment to the performers moreso than the characters (as later seasons attempted).

Sooner or later, I wanted to develop an original setting. I was always obsessed with creating things--even if perfection anxiety meant that most of my ideas never left my notebooks--but the promise of D&D was that I wouldn't have to draw or animate or code anything to realize my vision, and that, if I could get my friends to play, I would have a captive audience and/or team of collaborators.

I started watching Matt Colville's Running the Game series on YouTube and ran a couple games, but my first attempts pushed up against certain basics of adventure design. I thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting if the monsters in the dungeon were good people and they were just trying to defend their home?" But, I didn't have an answer to the question, "What do the players do?"

At the same time, I was frustrated with what I saw as a low signal-to-noise ratio in D&D 5E's implied setting. In particular, I never much liked that morality was baked into the physics of the world (what with alignment and the Planescape cosmology), and I hated feeling like I had to have a place on my world map for every godd*mn player-race in the book. (I realize now that I did not, but I started out with something of an obsessive, top-down approach to worldbuilding.)

Max had found Goblin Punch (Arnold K.'s blog) at some point, so I was aware of the existence of a simpler, do-it-yourself system called the Goblin Laws of Gaming (or, the GLOG). Perhaps inspired by William Blake's quote, "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's," I made my first attempts at breaking out of 5E.

Game design started to occupy more of my free time as I took an Introduction to Game Design elective in college, in Fall 2019. As it happened, my professor was designing his own TTRPG, and I got to play a few games with him. Late October 2019 is also when Skerples released Many Rats on Sticks, the second edition of his GLOG-hack, just as I had already been trying to make sense of the GLOG. The note pictured below is the earliest "design bible" I have, from mid-November 2019.

There's some interesting stuff here, looking back. Apparently I became interested in the idea of a "low fantasy" tone fairly quickly, as an alternative to the cosmic morality tales of 5E, and I had a great interest in domain-level play thanks to watching Matt Colville. But I don't think I was fully on board with the Old-School Renaissance (OSR) playstyle for which the GLOG was designed. I had just thought that starting from the GLOG would be a lot easier than taking apart 5E.

Apparently, I disliked that dying in 5E had no mechanical consequences, and felt that restarting at level 1 ought to be the norm without being as severe a punishment as it would be in 5E. Nowadays I feel that losing a character you're attached to is probably enough punishment. In any case, I think the "roguelite" concept of bonuses for character death was largely inspired by the weird indie MMO, Realm of the Mad God, which my friends and I had been into for a time.

III.

Like a lot of people, when the pandemic came around, I dove harder into RPGs than I ever had before. Previously, it was one hobby out of several. Beginning with the pandemic, it became pretty much the only thing I do.

I think there are a few reasons. TTRPGs are uniquely suited to virtual hangouts, in a certain way. You can play videogames over the internet, but you don't get to talk to your friends as much. You can try to play board games, but it's not going to be the same as having all the pieces in front of you. So, like a lot of people did, I joined a 5E campaign.

I also think game design is qualitatively different from writing fiction or poetry or creating any other kind of art. It's been hard to put my finger on, but I know that while I've been too emotionally exhausted by the events of this past year and a half to make any of those things, game design feels comforting, almost meditative, like what I imagine whittling down a piece of wood must be like.

Suddenly, I was reading and trying to understand what the OSR was really all about. I was reading a lot more about the history of D&D and trying to grasp its inspirations and the assumptions the earliest players held. I was reading more of Skerples's posts on realistic medievalism, thinking I could find in that a counter to dull, boring fantasyland. I was starting to question why the GLOG was so much more complicated than the other rulesets I was seeing like Into the Odd and Knave and whether that was really necessary.

At some point, I discovered Red Ink Adventures 2.0 by Sam Doebler (a.k.a. Dreaming Dragonslayer), a combination of Maze Rats and Electric Bastionland, and I was blown away. In the time since, I've become a much greater fan of Bastionland for all the interesting mechanical features that it has that Red Ink lacks... not to mention that rolling a d20 feels better than rolling 1d6 all the time.

But, the fact is that Red Ink hooked me immediately whereas Bastionland took many months to sink in. The former, in its mechanical simplicity, is much easier to grasp for someone new to the basic ideas on offer--three stats, no DC for checks, no attack rolls, etc. It doesn't bother with the esoteric stuff like ability loss, the Special Attacks system is brilliant, and it's so much more accessible: just one six-sided die is necessary to play the entire game!

It was my discovery of Red Ink Adventures and my fondness for Skerples's posts on medievalism that led to me finishing my first game, Squires Errant, and submitting it to Yochai Gal's "Eclectic Bastionjam," an event for which designers were to submit content based on or inspired by Electric Bastionland.

The initial version of Squires Errant was Red Ink Adventures with a simple class system and the Many Rats on Sticks rules for tracking time in a dungeon. It also transformed the concept of starting debt into a price that squires must pay for knighthood in a late-medieval setting, which I liked because "nobility wandering around with weapons" feels a lot more historically grounded than the "random commoners wandering around with weapons" we get in most D&D games.

The early development of Squires was a complicated time for me. With the onset of the winter months, my depression and anxiety (already exacerbated due to isolation amid the pandemic) seriously worsened, and there was a time where developing Squires became an obsessive sort of coping mechanism. I had to take a break from thinking about RPGs for a time, later on, for my own health.

But, I was able to run a few playtests for the game in November, and I learned a thing or two about the direction I wanted to take the game. Those two playtests remain, to this day, the only time I have ever playtested my designs.

IV.

The 5E campaign I had been playing in was to lapse around the end of 2020, and my depression and anxiety were to remain more of a problem than usual throughout 2021. Due to lack of energy, I more or less stopped playing RPGs altogether in 2021. Instead of my live experiences at the table, my design over the past year has been largely inspired by the videogames that I have had the energy to play.

It wasn't obvious at the time that this was taking place. I continued to refine Squires Errant based on my playtest experience until I decided that, actually, I wanted the game to focus on one-shot dungeoncrawls alone, rather than any kind of campaign. I renamed the in-development version of the game D&1d, and, later on, Goblets & Grues, removing any reference to a medieval setting that would be irrelevant in dungeon-only play.

In February, I joined Yochai Gal's "NSR" server on Discord, and (I think it's fair to say) I have been one of the most active users there ever since. In a number of conversations, I expressed interest in designing a game that was about dungeons and dungeons only. I wanted to assume, if you were even playing with the same characters, you would just skip straight to the next dungeon after finishing the last one. Why would I be interested in any of that boring, in-between town stuff?

But, more recently, it occurred to me that I might want to run an asynchronous, text-based game for a good friend of mine who's unable to commit to sessions over voice. And, as soon as the prospect of running an actual game appeared before me again, I remembered: I do want to run all that in-between town stuff!

Because, the heaviest influence on the development of Goblets & Grues thusfar isn't my experiences with role-playing games... It's my experience with my favorite videogame of this year, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury.

Both games, included in one package released for the Nintendo Switch console in February of this year, are triumphs of level design. I can't tell you how many times I have thought to myself over the course of 2021 thusfar, "How can I make an RPG more like these games? Can I design a campaign like 3D World's world map, with nodes leading linearly from dungeon to dungeon? Can I design a pirate-themed game where each dungeon is an island, like Bowser's Fury?" I became obsessed with creating a framework in which I could focus on level design--that is, dungeon design--to the exclusion of all else.

As soon as the opportunity to run a campaign presented itself, I started, unconsciously, to pivot my design. I thought, "How can I make G&G more friendly to traditional campaigns?" It wasn't long before, having tasked myself with inventing a one-shot game that was campaign-compatible... I found myself drifting so close to vanilla Electric Bastionland that there was no longer any reason to be making a different game.

V.

So, look, maybe there's still a scrap of an interesting idea in G&G. I think there's something to the idea of creating a system so simple that it forces the GM/designer to focus on the fundamentals of interesting level design. "The big monsters automatically kill you if you fight them head-on" was probably the best idea I had (and/or stole from Cthulhu/Trophy Dark) in this regard; it forces the level designer to focus on the monster's behavior and the enviroment rather than statistics.

I still have a whole setting I was making for G&G where Gothic castles full of vampires were a major centerpiece. I still have ideas for a more grounded medieval setting. These are all things I can circle back to. But, I think for now, maybe I need to stop designing systems in a vacuum and go back to running and playing RPGs for a while.

I think, if I had to name the high point of the whole process of designing Squires/D&1d/G&G, it was when it felt like I was making something that we could have played at the lunch table or in a club room after school. Something that anyone could break out and play in the space of an hour. Something that I could play with any of my friends, even if they had never played an RPG before.

I've learned a lot over the past year or two, and I look forward to learning a lot more.