COMPLETE KOBOLD GUIDE

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1 COMPLETE KOBOLD GUIDE TO GAME DESIGN Essays by Wolfgang Baur and a Team of Design All-Stars Edited by Janna Silverstein Cover by Jonathan Hodgson

2 Complete KOBOLD Guide to Game Design 2012 Open Design LLC Edited by Janna Silverstein Cover art by Jonathan Hodgson Designed by Stephen Wark Portions of this volume previously appeared in: The KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Volume 1: Adventures The KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Volume 2: How to Playtest & Publish The KOBOLD Guide to Game Design, Volume 3: Tools & Techniques All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of this book in any manner without express permission from the publisher is prohibited. OPEN DESIGN LLC P.O. Box 2811 Kirkland, WA Most product names are trademarks owned by the companies that publish those products. Use of the name of any product without mention of trademark status should not be construed as a challenge to such status. Open Design, Kobold Quarterly, and the KQ logo are trademarks of Open Design LLC. ii Complete Kobold Guide to Game Design

3 Foreword Contents A Stranger in an Oddly Familiar Land Game Design 1. What is Design? 3 2. Designing RPGs: Computer and Tabletop The Process of Creative Thought Design that Matters Seize the Hook The Infinite Onion Fortunate Accidents Basic Combat Systems for Tabletop Games More Empty Rooms Fantasy Realism Designing Magic Systems How NOT to Design a Magic Item Location as a Fulcrum for Superior Design Worldbuilding 87 Enhancing Adventures 15. Crafting a Dastardly Plot Challenge and Response On the Street Where Heroes Live City Adventures The Underdark Maps, Monsters, and Bottom-Up Design Monster Hordes Hardboiled Adventures What Makes a Night Arabian? The Mystery of Mysteries The Anvil in the Dwarf s Soup Using and Abusing Misdirection Stagecraft 166 v iii

4 Writing, Pitching, Publishing 28. The Three Audiences Shorter, Faster, Harder, Less Buckets in the Sandbox Collaboration and Design Myths and Realities of Game Balance Pacing Playtesting Promises, Promises Failure and Recovery Why Writers Get Paid Talent Won t Save You The Magic Bullet for Publication Creative Mania and Design Despair 232 iv Complete Kobold Guide to Game Design

5 Foreword A Stranger in an Oddly Familiar Land did not grow up playing roleplaying games. It was never my dream to write I RPG adventures or to edit them. Dice were always six-sided. Maps appeared in history books or at the beginning of fantasy novels. Monsters appeared in horror movies. I wasn t interested in being a hero not even a superhero. So how did I a novel editor end up here? The peculiar thing about employment is that it will often take you places you never expected. I went from editing science fiction and fantasy books to editing comics- and game-related fiction to writing flavor text, in-universe reference articles, and dialog for massively multiplayer online RPGs. And somewhere along the line, working around the periphery of RPGs, I got pulled in. Not deeply, mind you, but just enough to play a campaign here or a stand-alone adventure there. I realized that I knew this territory from the novel editing I ve done; at least, it was awfully familiar. Doing this work meant that I got to work and to play with some pretty extraordinary people: Monte Cook, Ed Greenwood, Michael A. Stackpole (with whom I ve worked for years as a novelist rather than a designer), and Wolfgang Baur among others. These guys have all kept me on my toes in one way or another, and though I was never much of a gamer, our work together has given me a new appreciation for the art and the business of creating games. One of the things I ve learned as I ve edited, first, the Kobold Guide to Game Design, Volume III: Tools & Techniques, and now this omnibus edition, is that editing and game design have certain key things in common: a need for clarity and specificity, an understanding of your market, and a deep respect for your audience. It s common wisdom in the game business that something like 10% of dedicated readers are gamers but 90% of gamers are readers. That means they re sharp, they re particular, and they know what they want. That information made working on this project a little intimidating for me. After all, I was an outsider editing a project targeted toward those who knew far more than I did and were working to break deep inside the business. At the same time, as I read through the essays from volumes I and II, and as I reviewed and edited the new essays we acquired for this volume, I was reminded of what I learned from working on volume III: our readers you are in the best possible hands. The material you ll find between these covers is written by guys at the top of their game (so to speak). While this book contains nearly all of the essays that appeared in the individual volumes, the new material we ve added for this volume Mike Stackpole s essay on magic systems, Willie Walsh s on v

6 humor, and Wolf Baur s on the costs and virtues of complexity just confirmed that understanding: you re learning from the best. If they can help me understand what it is they do and how they do it, you re going to find useful, practical information here that will take you to a whole new level as a gamer, writer, and designer. What s more, you re learning from people who truly love what they do. So not only will these essays provide you with a strong foundation for gaming and game design, they ll provide inspiration available almost nowhere else. Some of the content in this book originally appeared as essays in Kobold Quarterly magazine or online; some of it was written specifically as part of the Guide to Game Design project. And, as mentioned, some of it is new to this volume. A majority of these essays old and new were written by Wolfgang Baur; that being the case, any essay you see without a byline, you may assume was written by him. We ve tried to fill holes where we found them in the original books. To try to maximize the value of this edition, the material has been arranged along themes and, to a lesser extent, in order of where things may occur in the design process. While each of the Guides to Game Design was a complete volume in and of itself, we hoped to create a synergy with this collection to take those books and to combine them in a way that provides you with something more, something useful, powerful, something really special. I hope we ve achieved that goal. I ve been privileged and delighted to work with these designers. You already know how awesome they are. With their work here, they ll prove it to you yet again. Janna Silverstein November 2011 vi Complete Kobold Guide to Game Design

Game Design. Complete Guide to. by Wolfgang Baur and a Team of Design All-Stars

Game Design. Complete Guide to. by Wolfgang Baur and a Team of Design All-Stars TM P R E S E N T S TM Complete Guide to Game Design The Kobold...welcomes the best and the brightest of the industry to share their knowledge of game design. Jeff Grubb, Forgotten Realms designer by Wolfgang