What are the best tips you have, or that you have read elsewhere, that you would want RPG authors to know?

What issues / concerns / ideas / whatevers do you feel RPG authors do not address (or address enough)? (not social issues, game issues)

When designing a setting can you at least PRETEND to understand the math and science behind civilization spreading?

Can you at least PRETEND to understand the math behind population expansion when designing your PC races?

It's not a difficult college course, and most colleges offer it, even though e-learning.

Read a goddamn book.

Oh, AND ANOTHER THING!

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE look up real world human ability to travel, march, walk, and the like. I know that you might not have walked a whole mile in the last ten years, but adventurers and PC's are the equivalent of Olympic athletes, stop acting like they couldn't run 5 miles and then go partying at the bar.

Your forced march and travel distances and penalties are bad and you should feel bad.

In no particular order.

1. 400 page tomes may please the obsessive freaks, but they repel fresh blood.

2. No one really cares about your standard-issue fantasy god pantheon, so keep it simple and concise.

3. The sections relevant to players should be filled with cliches and well established tropes to make your game easy to grasp and approach. UNoriginality is actually an advantage in pitching and starting RPG campaigns. Put all your weird high concept new stuff in the GM's section.

4. Too many fancy moving parts and even the players (who only have one character to worry about) will start to forget they have them. The GM's powers of recollection and concentration are even more of a limited resource. Less is more.

5. Related to point 4, a lot of fancy 'powers' players get are actually redundant slightly tweaked copies of each other. Don't clutter your game with stuff like "This gives you more armor" and "this makes you dodge better" and "this gives you more hit points" when in actual play it all just feels like "you are more durable in a fight".

6. If character creation takes the entire first session, your game will have a higher risk of abandonment.

7. A good world map makes a big impact.

8. Getting an artist to design distinct emblems for each of your factions is very appealing.

9. Don't give 'character build points' for taking disadvantages, it rarely pays off in play and encourages the worst in many players. If you must include disadvantages, have them give bonus XP IF they seriously hamper a player during a session.

10. If you build hero points into your game that can be spent on rerolls and fancy genre tricks and stuff like that, don't then say "any you haven't spent at the end of the session turn into XP". Players will almost never sacrifice potential XP, so the actions you wanted to encourage won't happen.

11. Put some effort into your names. I never want to see another "Ironroot Mountains" or "Blood Sea" or "Shadowlands". EDIT: Oh, and "dark lord". Fuck all future dark lords. FURTHER EDIT: Oh, oh, you know what, fuck the word "shadow" in any and all combinations. It's done people, it has lost all impact.

12. If you want to have supernatural PC badasses (wizards, psychics, etc.) fighting alongside mundane PC badasses, don't make the supernatural badasses too versatile.

Quote from: Warlord Ralts;915906When designing a setting can you at least PRETEND to understand the math and science behind civilization spreading?

Can you at least PRETEND to understand the math behind population expansion when designing your PC races?

It's not a difficult college course, and most colleges offer it, even though e-learning.

Read a goddamn book.

Oh, AND ANOTHER THING!

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE look up real world human ability to travel, march, walk, and the like. I know that you might not have walked a whole mile in the last ten years, but adventurers and PC's are the equivalent of Olympic athletes, stop acting like they couldn't run 5 miles and then go partying at the bar.

Your forced march and travel distances and penalties are bad and you should feel bad.

Spot on. And hello, Ralts. Long time no see.

If you're going to have a lot of powers, widgets and moving parts in your system for the love of fuck put stuff in a doc or an srd or SOMETHING I can navigate on a cell phone rather than just a pdf.

This makes 3.*ed, Pathfinder, SotC, ACKS, S&S and similar games so much easier for me to use.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;91591211. Put some effort into your names. I never want to see another "Ironroot Mountains" or "Blood Sea" or "Shadowlands". EDIT: Oh, and "dark lord". Fuck all future dark lords. FURTHER EDIT: Oh, oh, you know what, fuck the word "shadow" in any and all combinations. It's done people, it has lost all impact.

Well better those than made up words for local geography. Don't have a problem with simple place names like, say, all of the English language place names in the Hobbit.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;9159123. The sections relevant to players should be filled with cliches and well established tropes to make your game easy to grasp and approach. UNoriginality is actually an advantage in pitching and starting RPG campaigns. Put all your weird high concept new stuff in the GM's section.

Makes sense.

Quote11. Put some effort into your names. I never want to see another "Ironroot Mountains" or "Blood Sea" or "Shadowlands". EDIT: Oh, and "dark lord". Fuck all future dark lords. FURTHER EDIT: Oh, oh, you know what, fuck the word "shadow" in any and all combinations. It's done people, it has lost all impact.

Hmmmmmm...

You know, almost all of Shipyard Locked's points echo my own sentiments, so I won't repeat them. Only #11 is really where I don't agree - make place names easy to grasp.

And for the love of Pete, if you include weird names, include simple, easy pronunciation guides. I'm looking at you White Wolf! Also, sound things out, and run them by people. Even Tolkien made a city in the Silmarillion named "Tuna". Ugh.

Make cultures easy to approach, and stop worrying about being "new" or "clever" or "original". Making your pseudo-european nobility some kind of mash up of Wuxia and Aztec cultures does not make it better - it makes it weird and hard to relate to or grasp.

Never, ever, ever, ever make "Martial Arts" better than "Unarmed Fighting". They are the same thing. If you want to include supernatural martial arts, make the dividing line obvious.

If you have a rule in one place, stick to the same rolling convention wherever possible. One of the greatest strengths of the Classic WoD games was you could make a character quick and explain the rules in 2 minutes. Every single rule worked on the same premise - it was a big bonus when it came time to get new players involved. "Count dots. Roll that many dice. Score successes equal to the difficulty I call out. Ones are bad, 10s are good."

Keep. Character. Creation. Simple. If I have to go through 50+ pages to set up my character, I'm probably done.

Do not make me write down a full page of text for a character. I remember when I was teaching people PF, and someone would go "I wanna be a wizard." Then I'd say "ok you need write down this first string of powers...then write down all these spells...then all this stuff..." and so many would go "screw it, let me be something else."











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Quote from: Spinachcat;915894What are the best tips you have, or that you have read elsewhere, that you would want RPG authors to know?

What issues / concerns / ideas / whatevers do you feel RPG authors do not address (or address enough)? (not social issues, game issues)

They should not forget that these are games which are played for fun.

A lot of issues that are considered fun and talked about by people online, are not fun at all to 90% of Actual Play gamers.

Dice gimmicks and fancy presentation tricks are no match for solid playtested rules and good useful artwork in your publications.

Starter sets of RPGs which do not include character creation are crippleware.

If you have to pay the same price as your basic game in order to buy specialty dice or whatever to play your game, you have already failed.

Splitting what was in a single core rulebook into multiple rulebooks is an obvious cash grab. Most of your former customers will feel insulted and not buy the new edition if they have to pay for multiple books just to get a whole game.

- Please do not include your horrific fan-fiction in your game. Chances are if you were really that good at writing fiction you would be doing that instead of writing a role-playing game.
- Do not require the GM to read verbatim whole swaths of your shitty prose at the table. Nobody likes that. If that's what you do, you suck.
- If I'm going to need to construct a complex spreadsheet to handle the math behind building an imaginary laser pistol - that's not really a DIY system no matter how much you wish it could be.
- Please stop including specific passages telling me it's ok to have female/transgendered/gay/Buddhist/whatevers. If my players or I want ladyboy elves we're not going to ask permission.
- Please stop trying to be funny. Again, if you were really as funny as you think you are you would be a comedian, and not a game designer.
- Do not, and I'm looking at you Haven: City of Violence, include any lengthy mission statements. I don't give a single fuck what games you played as a 10 year old, what color you are, what you do for a day job, what your religious choices might be, or your opinions on real or imagined controversies surrounding your game. In fact, if I see any of that, I'm going to stop reading right there.
- If you're self-publishing a retro-clone in a small print run of 500 copies, you don't need to include a chapter explaining what a role-playing game is or what polyhedral dice are and where to buy them.
- There's no need to invent new terms for things like Hit Points, Skills, or Profession. There's also absolutely no need to invent a whole bunch of obtuse acronyms. I shouldn't have to construct reference sheets to understand a stablock or a character sheet.  
- STOP calling your old-school modules The NOUN PREPOSITION the ADJECTIVE PLACE. For that matter, you can also stop including those ugly blue-scale dungeon maps too, dumbass.
- Further, you're not fooling anyone by copying TSR trade dress.
- Playtest. Better yet, get several other people to playtest it when you aren't around. If they come back with 'Dude, the combat system makes absolutely no sense' or 'Character creation is completely broken' that doesn't mean they didn't realize your vision. It means you didn't.

If the game is longer than a few dozen pages please remember to put in an index.
Our group recently started playing Mongoose Traveller 2e and we're all learning the game together as we play... but the book doesn't have a fucking index.

Quote from: Daztur;915926Well better those than made up words for local geography. Don't have a problem with simple place names like, say, all of the English language place names in the Hobbit.

For sure. Tolkien may have had gobbledygook* names for everything, but the brilliance of The Lord of the Rings is that you are gradually introduced to those names. First you get Hobbit (i.e. English) place names, then you learn what "educated people" call them: thus, Brandywine before Baranduin, etc.

Best thing about GRRM "Song of Ice and Fire" books is the Westerosi place names - all just names like people speaking their own language would say them, not an untranslated random bunch of vowels and apostrophes.


* Note: I love me some Quenya and Sindarin, but it still boils down to gobbledygook, especially with Tolkien imitators.

Quote from: Simlasa;915947If the game is longer than a few dozen pages please remember to put in an index.

I want to weep tears of joy when I see a good index, and probably actually do when a PDF has one with linked chapters and index.

Quote from: Simlasa;915947If the game is longer than a few dozen pages please remember to put in an index.
Our group recently started playing Mongoose Traveller 2e and we're all learning the game together as we play... but the book doesn't have a fucking index.

This lack of an index was actually brought up during the playtest, and ignored.