Design Patterns of Successful Role-Playing Games (DRAFT) by Whitson John Kirk III Forward by Mike Holmes 9 / 26 / 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Whitson John Kirk III. Some rights reserved. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 You are free: · to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work · to make derivative works Under the following conditions: Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor. Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. · For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. · Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license). The full text of the license and disclaimer can be found at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ Table of Contents Table of Contents Table of Contents ................................ iii Success Reward .............................139 Dedication.............................................iv Template ........................................142 Forward..................................................v Trait................................................146 Acknowledgements ..............................vi Trauma Gauge ...............................149 Introduction ...........................................1 Wound Trait...................................153 Defining “Success”............................3 Design Anti-patterns..........................156 The First Step in Designing an RPG .4 RPG Design Anti-pattern Catalog .....156 Definitions .........................................5 Game Summaries...............................157 Gauge Diagrams ....................................8 Ars Magica (Fourth Edition) .........157 Design Patterns....................................11 Call of Cthulhu (Sixth Edition)......161 RPG Design Pattern Catalog ...............13 Capes..............................................164 Alignment ........................................13 Code of Unaris...............................168 Anonymous Rule.............................17 Dogs in the Vineyard .....................171 Attendance Reward .........................21 Donjon ...........................................174 Attribute...........................................24 Dungeons & Dragons v.3.5 ...........177 Class ................................................28 Elfs.................................................180 Class Tree ........................................32 Fudge .............................................182 Conflicted Gauge.............................37 Great Ork Gods (in Beta)...............187 Contest Tree.....................................40 GURPS (Third Edition, Revised) ..190 Currency ..........................................45 HARP (High Adventure Role Endgame..........................................49 Playing)..........................................193 Failure Reward ................................52 HeroQuest......................................196 Game Master ...................................56 Hero System 5th Edition.................199 Gauge...............................................61 InSpectres ......................................202 Generalized Contest.........................64 My Life with Master......................205 Gift...................................................69 Nicotine Girls.................................208 Hit Points.........................................72 Nobilis............................................210 Idiom................................................77 Paranoia xp ....................................212 Last Man Standing...........................82 The Pool.........................................216 Level ................................................86 Puppetland .....................................217 Loose Coupling ...............................89 The Riddle of Steel ........................219 Modularity.......................................95 RIFTS ............................................225 Narrative Reward.............................98 Rolemaster Fantasy Role Playing Negotiated Contest ........................103 (Second Edition) ............................228 Point Spend Attributes...................108 Shadowrun (Second Edition).........232 Priority Grid...................................111 Sorcerer..........................................236 Random Attribute ..........................115 TORG ............................................239 Rank...............................................117 Universalis .....................................242 Resource ........................................124 Warhammer Fantasy Role Play .....246 Safety Valve ..................................127 The World of Darkness..................249 Skill................................................130 Appendix A: Design Pattern Ideas ....253 Skill Tree .......................................132 Structured Story.............................136 iv Dedication Dedication I dedicate this book to my loving wife Melissa, who has not only patiently endured my obsession with role-playing over the many years of our marriage, but has damned well made sure I did a proper job of it. Forward v Forward I first got to know John Kirk through The Forge, and then giving him some design commentary for his game Legendary Quest (www.legendaryquest.com). John, well versed in legend, had put together a lot of research for the game, but the system was pretty traditional in some ways. But with definite potential. Often times when you try to give advice to an author like this, they decide that you're an obnoxious poof, and ignore you completely. John, on the contrary, took to theory and design ideas like a sponge. A fellow programmer, and educated as an engineer, John understood implicitly that there are simply better and worse ways to approach any process. And that you at least had to know what you were dealing with in detail. So he started really looking around at other game systems to see what the state of the art was, and just how it was that people approached different problems. While this benefited his designs somewhat, after a while John announced to me that what he wanted to do was to write this book. To emulate what had been done in programming in terms of enumerating the methods which people use in RPG designs. He wasn't the first to propose doing this, and given the rate at which his game design tended to advance, I was skeptical that he'd be the one to do it. But I should have realized, given his background in research and programming, that John was precisely the man for the job. More than that, he'd cracked the essential problem in terms of making such a document, how to partition the information such that it could be presented in a manner that made sense to the reader in terms of how one method is distinct from another. He had a template to work from, and all he had to do was to fill in the blanks. That's a lot of blanks (as you'll see), however. So he gutted it out, and what's here is the product of that effort. At the time of this writing, the document is in a sort of a "beta" format. He and I have batted it back and forth a bit, but we’ve realized that it’s now time to get more hands on it. That is, it's understood that his research couldn't possibly be entirely comprehensive, and that some reorganization is probably in order. But it's more than just a start, it's got enough meat on it that much of it will stand as written, and those adjustments to it will be informed by what is already there. I think that John is doing a great service to the community by presenting this book in that, if it is accepted by the community, it will have taken another leap forward in creating a shared vocabulary for us that, started by Ron Edwards et. Al. at The Forge, has served to make it possible to have intelligible discussions about these matters. So take it for what it is, a tremendous effort at organizing the design elements found present in RPGs. Using these definitions and notations about them, and adding to them, I think this will be an important tool for the design community going forward. That is, it will be as good a tool as we all hone it to be. Mike Holmes vi Acknowledgements Acknowledgements Before writing this book, I had been designing, writing, tweaking, and rewriting my own role-playing game, Legendary Quest, for over twenty years. In that time, I created seven editions of the game to which only my close friends and I had access. The experience gave me great practice in designing games and taught me much about how a role-playing game should work. Because I had approached my designs from the vantage point of making the best game possible for my gaming group, I didn’t look too far afield for how other games approached similar problems. My friends and I created designs that suited our interests and we were happy with the results. And, in fact, we should have been pleased. Through our efforts, Legendary Quest evolved into a fine game. I would like to thank all the LQ playtesters over the years in helping me in my various game designs. I would especially like to thank Matt Ault, Dave Bailey, James Bockmon, Mike Brown, Denys Carrico-Bockmon, Mark Chester, Leroy Hills, Melissa