10 Things RPG Developers Do That Need To Fucking Stop

1. What The fuck's an RPG?!

This has got to be the worst part of any game book. Should there be an introduction for beginners? Sure. Absolutely. But often, this section turns into one of several things:

• A rant about how much other RPGs suck and why this one is obviously better. (I'm looking at you, Palladium Games)
• A boring "actual play" transcript which contains none of the fun of actual play.
• Several pages of the developer rambling about how great they are personally.
• Incredibly vague and largely misleading, resulting in misunderstandings and hurt feelings. (FFS, the DM is not a "god", Gygax! What have you done?!)
• A condescending "solo adventure" which contains no elements of being a game.
• An almost spiritual defense of gaming as an art form.
• A simplified description of the current RPG as though all RPGs are exactly the same.

I've read so many terrible "What is an RPG?" chapters that my eyes bleed whenever I see that heading in a table of contents. They are very rarely, if ever, even vaguely effective. Most of the time, they are either boring or infuriating. Just give a general explanation in the introduction. That's what the introduction is for. If I can do a complete primer on role playing in 2 pages, I'm sure a full professional dev team can compete.

2. The Common Core

D&D sets the trends in the RPG hobby, let's not pretend otherwise. One of the strangest trends is that of the "3 Core Books" publishing scheme. The original D&D game was made of paperback pamphlets whose thickness was limited by the staple size. As a result, the material was divided into 3 books and sold in a box. These 3 books were wholly unlike the corebooks that would later appear, they were a disorganized mess with related information spread out between them...

...Ok, never mind, they're exactly like the corebooks of later editions!

And, really, that's the problem right there! In order for the players to play, they need to understand the game. Trying to separate the information into DM-only, player-only, resource-only, etc., makes no sense in the long run, because there is no clear line. In general, the more every player understands every part of the game, the better it runs! When you try to divide your game across multiple sources, all you do is make it harder to learn and harder to run. ALL of the information necessary to run the game should be in one book and organized categorically in order of access frequency.

D&D holds to the 3 corebooks structure out of tradition alone, but everyone else is just copying them without regard for whether it actually makes any sense. Here's the fact: it doesn't make any sense. Unless you find yourself on the dev team for the next edition of D&D, don't do this.

3. Shameless Product Plugs.

Any game made by an actual publishing company does this if they have even so much as 1 supplement published or planned. 5th edition D&D is shockingly guilty of this, and sometimes reads like a sales catalogue. Throughout the pages, it makes references to old D&D adventures, published settings, other books that were in the works, and even the damn novels!

Here's a hint: if I bought your product, I am already your customer. You have me. Don't oversell it. Don't upsell me. If your product is good, the accessories will sell themselves. If your product is crap, no sales pitch can help it. Advertising is inherently insulting, and advertisers are the scum of the earth. Keep that shit out of your rule book. Put it in a pamphlet at the end, or package a flier inside the shrink wrap. Don't plaster it all over the back cover or sneak it into the writing.

Do you want to know what happens to advertisements in my rule books? I either cut them out or black them out with a sharpie marker.

4. D&D, but with hookers! And blackjack!

RPGs as a hobby and as an industry are utterly weird. One game, still in circulation, sets the tone for everything else. D&D isn't just the first RPG, it's the core of the hobby. Hundreds of games have been designed purely as a reaction to D&D. FUDGE, Hero, Omnisystem, Amber, and many others sport systems that are intentionally designed to resolve perceived "problems" with the D&D system. Some take it really far, like FUDGE or Hero. Others just fiddle around with the task resolution and chargen, like Palladium and Pathfinder.

The problem with many of these systems is that they come across as more of a commentary on D&D than actual games of their own sometimes, especially when they have paragraphs that prattle on about "the limitations of other/older RPGs". When a designer cares more about reputation, influence, revenge, or some other intangible unrelated to actual play entertainment, they run the risk of diminishing the quality of their game as a whole.

So if the alignment system in D&D offends you, just don't use it in your game. Don't mention it at all. Don't talk about what makes your game different or special, just talk about what your game is.

5. Theory adherence.

I love RPG theory. I believe it gives us a useful language with which we can meaningfully discuss and critique RPG design and play. However, I'm not a big fan of many RPG theory adherents. My main problem: they're damn ignorant most of the time. See, a lot of RPG theory was written by people who primarily played RPGs as some sort of an artistic experience, without much consideration for the subject as a game. As a consequence, RPG theory seems really isolated and weird to anyone who has any understanding of game design on the whole. As an example, maybe one day I'll write an article trying to consolidate the Bartle player typology with the trifold model of player agenda.

The point is, designers who hold really tight to theoretical expressions of role playing tend to make really weird games that don't even really feel like games. The more theoretical and abstract the designer is, the less game-like their creations are.

6. Theory disregard.

On the other end of the spectrum, of course, are developers who just don't have a clue- and stubbornly refuse to get one. This is the category where most of the blind design comes from. What Ron Edwards affectionately called "fantasy heartbreakers" (RPGs built in the mold of D&D) all fall into this category, and the sheer bulk of the hobby occupied by this category of games reveals how powerful D&D's influence has been.

Simply put: these games only get published because the developer didn't have enough knowledge of the industry to realize how derivative there work really is, and publishers didn't know enough about game design to tell the difference between one product and another. The result is an ocean of samey rulebooks about generic fantasy settings with baroque rules that nobody remembers.

Except me. I remember. My bookshelf is a gaming graveyard.

7. Your mom's basement is not a "publishing studio".

And trying to assert that it is is pretty damn arrogant and egocentric of you.

If you stray from the major publications, you will find no shortage of developers who happily toot their own horn at every chance. The most annoying of them write with the delusion that they are the forefront of a new movement in gaming. These folks happily announce their one-man operation to be a whole company or studio, even as their book is published under the name and copyright of an actual private company.

Let's get something straight: unless you have people working on your dime to produce and market a playtested product, you are not the be-all-and-end-all of gaming.

8. Aleena the Bard Scowls at your Hipsterism.

There are a class of art-piece RPGs which attempt to hold reader interest by writing their rulebook in narrative form, or something close to it. I can think of 3 major examples of this taken to its extreme: D&D Basic boxed set, Amber Diceless, and Polaris. The truth is, when done right, it works well! I was thoroughly entertained by all three of those! But it's rarely done right and often comes across as trite and hackish.

The real problem with this is that it makes the game harder to run. Because the information isn't encyclopedically organized, making any kind of a rules reference becomes a nightmare! This form of writing just adds to the filler text you have to sift through on your way to the crunch. So, while it gets people interested in playing, it also pissed people off when they actually do play.

9. Fall rate and fall damage is specified in the featherfall and flight spell descriptions.

Overall disorganization is like a tradition in the D&D franchise. It's renowned for forcing players to go digging for single obscure sentences in inappropriate locations for basic rules spread out across multiple sources. Not surprisingly, trend-setter as it is, many people in the hobby copy the same sort of haphazard information management seen in D&D. 5th edition is probably the first time D&D has ever seen a halfway logical presentation, and happily the hobby as a whole has been moving toward a more encyclopedic format.

Here's the deal: rules describe content, content uses rules, but content is not rules. Rules are how things are described and how things work. Content are the things being described by and interacting through those rules.

For example:

• Rule: Weapons in this game can deal damage of slashing, piercing, or bludgeoning type.
• Content: Shortswords exist in this game. They deal 1d6 piercing damage.

In general, rules should be described in standalone format, grouped by relevance to each other and importance of reference frequency. Content should be described in subsections under the rules used to describe that content. It seems pretty obvious when explained that way, but you'd be amazed how often publishers will fail at this distinction and sort the information in reverse order by mistake.

10. White boys club.

There exists in the RPG hobby, a strong tendency toward juvinility. While many are quick to blame the individual players, the truth is that a problem at the bottom always stems from a problem at the top. If gamers are crass children, it's because the people in charge of the movement are crass children themselves. Now, perhaps Gygax was just a product of his time, but the racist and sexist themes of pulp fantasy charged the game he made, and the blind imitation of his fans has sustained those themes even through to 5th edition, ironically held as one of the most inclusive RPGs to date.