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Lore Building: Playing the Villain

You are reading Lore Building, in this series I lay out some tips and tricks for aspiring and new GMs for how to keep your TTRPG sessions more engaging for your players, with a focus on narrative storytelling. When you are r unn ing a TTRPG campaign you are called upon to bring life to a myriad of NPCs. Through your voice and actions they are made real in the minds of your players. While I may do a broader article later on how to juggle running so many characters, I am going to hone in on one aspect of GMing. Playing a villainous character. More specifically we’re going to discuss one way you can improve your villains at several different layers of depth. The idea we’ll be getting into is answering the question “Why is this character doing villainous things?” Starting shallow with a rudimentary motive, and getting more involved each stage until we have a deep understanding of the reason your villain behaves the way that they do. This understanding in turn will help you to portray those...
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Game Design Log: Rules of Enragement (Part 2)

This is a part two from my previous article, you may want to read that one to get my definitions of the terms I’ll be using, like gamer rage. Because I might be using it in a different way than you would assume. To recap briefly anyways, last article we went through the definition of gamer rage, why it is important to consider when designing a game, and have begun to zero in on why it manifests the way that it does. We finished last time outlining the type of gamer rage that is caused by being cheated by fate. Meaning random chance aligned in such a spectacular and improbable way that a player feels frustrated. Today we’ll discuss the other two ways to incite gamer rage, being cheated by game balance, and being cheated by teamwork. And we’ll cap it off with some conclusions. So first, what does it mean to be cheated by game balance? This is a problem in many competitive games where each player does not have access to the exact same abilities. Stepping out of the realm of board games fo...
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Game Design Log: Rules of Enragement (Part 1)

Have you, or anyone you know, ever quit playing a game after an incredibly frustrating sequence of events? Every single roll of the dice lining up, seemingly deliberately, to tell you specifically there is no hope? I’d be willing to bet that you’re lying if you say that you never even considered rage quitting a game in this way. Gamer rage and rage quitting are a well known phenomenon in video games at this point. And we all know the childhood stories of flipping over the Monopoly board when you’re losing. I’ll take the honesty leap here, and admit there are a wealth of moments I would like to forget where I was a sore loser when playing a game where I felt like nothing was going my way. But where does this rage come from? And how can we do our best to mitigate that feeling in players when building our own games? This is somewhat a continuation, and somewhat a refinement, of my first article in the Game Design series “Putting the Fun in Functional Game Mechanics.” That isn’t required r...
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Lore Building: How to Railroad in Secret

You are reading Lore Building, in this series I lay out some tips and tricks for aspiring and new GMs for how to keep your TTRPG sessions more engaging for your players, with a focus on narrative storytelling. Raise your hand if this has ever happened to you, you’re GMing a game and you bring your players to a crossroads. You present them with three options of plot threads that they can pull on. Avenues they can pursue to further the story. However one of your players was paying attention, annoyingly taking careful notes and cleverly trying to determine the best course of action for the party. They recommend an option you did not present to the party, a secret fourth path they believe you have hidden on purpose. But there was no hidden path. In fact you did not have any intention of them ever going to the place they now want to go. You are at a loss, completely unprepared for the curveball a player has thrown your way, and are scrambling to come up with a whole new area for them to exp...
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Lore Building: What's in a Name?

You are reading Lore Building, in this series I lay out some tips and tricks for aspiring and new GMs for how to keep your TTRPG sessions more engaging for your players, with a focus on narrative storytelling. If you GM more than, let’s call it three campaigns, you have certainly been here. A player who is engaged and enjoying your world starts talking to a random NPC on the street, and asks their name. And in that moment the flow of the game is broken as you just… freeze. You’ve written out a hundred names for every major villain and ally through this potentially years-long adventure, but not for this one singular NPC. So, after far too long you blurt out “Bob Hoskins” because you just rewatched Who Framed Roger Rabbit last week (which holds up better than you expected it to.) After the party is done giggling, and at least one of them has to google the name, they all start talking to Mr. Hoskins. Over time he morphs from a funny moment to a main character of your campaign. Indignity u...
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Game Design Log: Taking Turns

  Most board games have turns. Unlike a video game or sport where the action tends to happen in real time, the nature of board games makes them unsuited to process player actions without some kind of turn structure. Anyone who has sat down to play a game of Monopoly or Risk knows basically how to take a turn in a board game. It is a rare board game that can eschew turn taking altogether, and those games usually intentionally lean into the chaotic nature of everyone trying to do different things all at once. Captain Sonar is my favorite example of a game that utilizes a turnless system, and it can be a particularly loud and hectic play experience as a result. But assuming (for this article) that you aren’t recreating Two Rooms and a Boom we can leave these outliers and move into the topic with the understanding that you need to have some kind of turn order to make your game functional. TTRPG and board games have a set turn order for each player to perform their actions in sequence. ...
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Game Design Log: Putting the Fun in Functional Game Mechanics

People play games to have fun. A concept that has caused me more headaches than any other while building my own games. The immediate issue is that “Fun” is an entirely subjective measurement. Some people will never have more fun than when solving a crossword puzzle, while others go cross eyed just looking at that giant, blank grid. Taunting them with its withheld answers and clever (or “clever”) wordplay. Even worse, if you’re like me you have been both of those people at different times, sometimes for the same puzzle. Trying to make everybody on Earth always have the most “Fun” playing your game is a path to true madness that I do not wish on you dear reader. That is not to say that some games aren’t substantially more fun mechanically than others. I’ll be using the genre of hidden role games to explore this idea. Hidden role games are based on social deduction and deception, where the “Evil” player or players must accomplish some nefarious task, while not being uncovered by the “Good...
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