A month ago or so I wrote this post about some questions I like to ask myself throughout the design process. One of my big mantras from doing Dice Exploder this long has been “specific examples! More specific examples!” So I thought I’d come back and show these questions in action on my most recent design (check out Band-Aids & Bullet Holes on Kickstarter!)
Let’s get right to it.
If your game has scenes, who frames them and who cuts them? How are they framed and cut?
Band-Aids & Bullet Holes is extremely scene-based. You go around the table taking turns, and on your turn you frame a scene. You do that by answering these questions:
Which character do you want to play?
What do they want?
Who do they want it from?
Someone picks up the “who you want it from” character, and then you roleplay it out. Everyone else becomes “the City,” a de facto Greek chorus.
It’s then formally the City’s job to cut the scene, but in practice the scene ends when the main character either gets what they want or definitively does not. Everyone reliably feels that that moment is the end of the scene.
If your game has conflict, what kinds of conflict does it have, and how is each kind resolved?
Yeah baby. I like Vincent Baker’s thing about how the basic moves of a pbta game tell you what the arenas of conflict are going to be in the game. I think Band-Aids & Bullet Holes is pbta and is a good example of that in action.
I wrote up a whole post about all the basic moves in this game which may or may not be published by the time this goes live, but here’s some arenas of conflict and how they’re resolved:
Physical violence: the threat of it is ever-present, it’s the underpinning of the revenge genre. Violence itself is a big, drawn out event that comes up in every third or forth scene. But also essentially every scene in the game is building towards some inevitable violent encounter: “where is the person I want to kill? Will you help me kill them? Will you hide me from my would-be killer?" etc etc.
Emotional vulnerability and lack thereof: this one is much more subtle in its presence. There’s a move for what happens when you “catch them with their heart exposed,” and it’s dangerous: it can lead to people suffering wounds, likely emotional, but which are mechanically identical to physical wounds. This ever-present threat of pain coming from emotional vulnerability turns the act of being vulnerable into a delicate negotiation. If I want to do it without pain, I have to sniff out whether I think you’ll be receptive or not first. All that is emergent from the rules and not explicitly laid out in them.
Debts and favors: once mechanized but now even more subtle. People understand from genre convention that you gotta take it seriously when you owe someone a favor in this kind of world, and there’s one hypodiegetic rule, a law laid down by the people who run the local assassins guild, that says “assassins must repay their debts in the manner their debtors demand.” This is subtle enough people don’t bring it up often, but there’s still this lingering sense of duty and honor as an arena of conflict in the background of the violence and emotional repression.
What in your game are you leaving up to play culture, and what are you creating rules for?
In the aforementioned post about the basic moves of the game I get into this a lot. The short answer: I created a ton of rules for setting up a powder-keg of a situation and the people in it, then I tried to get out of the way as much as possible once people got into scenes and embodied roleplaying so they could do those parts however they liked. This is very much my preferred style of play.
Another interesting example is calling cards. Characters in BABH are a small deck of “calling cards”: playing cards with a short descriptive phrase written on them like “erratic flamethrower,” “disarming accent,” or “a good heart.” As you play some of these are assigned to characters, but you also get to invent your own. I have some guidance on writing your own calling cards and what works well, but it kind of has to be left up to the culture of play what kinds of things people write down. Some stick to the basics (“a revolver with a single bullet”) while some get really poetic and weird with it (“tragically identifying privacy” - shoutout to Ric Heise).
Who is your game for? This is not an abstract question. Name the people you want to play your game with. What choice about whatever problem currently has you stumped would most delight them?
My first audience for this game was my friend David who I believe had come up with the idea of a deckbuilder rpg using standard playing cards but wasn’t sure what to do with it and doesn’t have the design bug the same way I do. I took it and ran with it and hoped he’d enjoy where I took it.
As I played more and more, the game became for the Burbank, CA biweekly one shots meetup at Geeky Teas. I playtested the hell out of the game there, and while it was a good fit from the jump, a game naturally evolves to fit the community you’re playing it in.
Probably no one had more influence on the game than Lady Tabletop, an early lover and champion of the game who became my go-to person for kicking ideas around. We also playstormed a few times early in the process which really solidified the core mechanics.
What is the bare minimum you need to do to get from where you are now to running a playtest? Include recruiting players and scheduling and consider workload relative to other projects. Is it time to back-burner this project?
The very first playtest of Band-Aids & Bullet Holes was basically just me going “okay, characters get calling cards and we take turns framing scenes. Who wants to play?” I called on my friends Aaron King and Victor Lane - this was probably 6 months after having the initial idea when I finally felt like my plate was clear enough to make it happen.
I vividly remember we all wrote our own calling cards, and I hadn’t yet figured out you could write stuff that wasn’t just gear or physical description. Aaron wrote the cards “bisexual lighting” and “orchestral score” in that very first playtest and they have been two of my go-to examples of what makes this game special ever since.
Could [X piece of the game] use a specific example? For example:
Should your rule to define a relationship during character creation instead be a list of d6 juicy relationships or a specific predetermined relationship?
Should your procedure for generating widgets instead be list of your d6 favorite widgets or simply your single favorite widget?
We love a specific example. This question is why BABH comes with over 200 calling cards in various places throughout its text: sample cards to help you write your own, cards for venues to help set the scene, cards from an unexpected genre you might use to mix things up…
This is also how I got to (mostly) pregenerated characters. In that first playtest it was fun coming up with random calling cards and back-filling what kinds of people that made our assassins, but I immediately saw the ways pregens would help. You’d get more consistent characters, always play with the some of the best and most functional calling cards, and you’d never want for a villain because I could make some of those guys obviously smarmy assholes that everyone wanted to punch.
This question is also also how I got to the idea of powder-kegs—prewritten scenarios that you basically “cast” from the pool of pregen assassins. For a long time you were given a bunch of assassins and told “okay now figure out where’s the beef.” This question helped me realize I should be providing the beef: one assassin hates another because they broke a law and got away with it, or one of them left another for dead, or one of them killed the other’s mom…
When there’s a question about the fiction, in what order should players turn to their own imaginations, the game’s text, a GM’s prep, real world knowledge, or something else? What tiers of truth does this game operate under?
This is a new question for me, coming after BABH development was basically over. I think in a lot of ways this is about anticipating a play culture.
For BABH, here’s roughly the order of primacy I’d suggest for sources of truth:
Anything someone says at the table that goes uncontested. You know your table best.
The game’s text. There’s not a lot of setting material in there, but what’s in there is evocative and helpful in ways designed to propel the game forward.
Real world knowledge, both in terms of how the laws of physics and culture work but also in terms of understanding the John Wick esque revenge movie genre.
If your game has a GM, what if any tools will they need for prep? Be honest. If the answer is they may need many but you’re leaving that up to culture of play, be up front about that.
There’s no GM and no prep for this game unless you start to get silly with it, but there is an extensive section on ways you might hack the game, optionally rules, and other shit like that.
There’s also a section that should probably be longer about taking a deck of cards you written all over in marker while playing and reusing it in another game in the future. Frankly I just haven’t done that enough to write as much as I probably should about it.
Could [X piece of your game] be shorter? Do you really need it at all?
I think this game could be like 50% shorter, but I’ve put a bunch in that feels like design and play culture manifesto masquerading as play advice and rules. I wrestled with whether I wanted to include that stuff and landed on yeah, I do actually.
I also cut a solid few pages out over the course of editing because sometimes you’re just repeating yourself.
What happens when you playtest this thing you’re struggling with? Does it work in practice the way you expected it to?
My whole BABH Design Diary series is essentially many answers to this question. For the third time I’ll plug this other post about all the basic moves I considered for the game throughout development for a bunch of examples of what worked in playtesting and what didn’t.
Has some other game already solved your problem? If you take their solution, will it play differently in the new context you’re giving to it?
I’ve got an upcoming podcast episode about how BABH started as a Firebrands hack until I quickly realized every scene was the same minigame. You’ll hear more of that soon, but I think it’s a great example of something (the “choose a minigame” structure) playing really differently in a new context (different genre).
Fiasco was then a game I stole from liberally when thinking about how to format scenes instead.
How do you want people to feel while they play your game? How do you want people to feel immediately after playing your game?
This is another one I spent forever thinking about. I’m going through a… crisis is a strong word, but let’s go with it—a crisis of faith these past couple years about the kind of art I’m making. I’ve been making a bunch of stuff that feels very “commercial” or “pop,” which in turn feels less meaningful or Important than a lot of my favorite works of all time and also a lot of my favorite work coming from my peers. Does what I’m writing and designing matter? Does any of it matter? What is the meaning of life? Why are we cursed with mortality?
Anyway, this question often sends me down a spiral like that unless I can sus out some heavier theme or meaning at the heart of what I’m making. In BABH, the closest I’ve got to a good answer here is that I want people to end up sloshing through a trough of “is this worth it?” I want them covered in emotional mud even as the game feels poppy, fast-paced, fun, and then I want them walking away feeling a little empty, a little unsatisfied… You know, classic revenge story things.
I dunno. I do think there’s something deeper here I could’ve stived for. I think some tables will find it anyway, and I think where I ended up is still fun as hell. Maybe that’s really what I wanted above all else.
How do you want your game to end?
Someone dead, someone feeling bad about it, and the players going “oof, yikes.”
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