#RPGaDAY2021 - Day 26: THEORY

 

It's Day 26 of #RPGaDAY2021, and Thursday is a "TH" day, and so the word for today is THEORY. There are so many books out there on Game Theory, and I'd love to have time to read them all. But the greatest theoretical piece of advice I've been given when it comes to writing tabletop RPGs is "What do you do?" 

I spent ages working on WILD, and about half way through the design process where I had a game system, and a setting, and so many ideas in my head, someone came up to me at a convention and said "So, what do you do?" And I was floored. I had no answer to that. There was no simple 'The players do this'. So I had to go and re-evalutate everything. 

Now, going into any game idea that surfaces (and I usually have a dozen or so bubbling under the surface) the first question I ask myself is "What to you do?".

If the players don't have a definite idea of what they are PLAYing, then the GM won't have a definite idea of what the story is going to be.

After that, I went back to the ORIGIN of WILD, and tried to work out what you do, going back into the writing with a RENEWed vigour.