How audiences suspend their disbelief — Every story is set in another world. And those worlds are always built. For most of us, the term worldbuilding conjures images of fantasy authors drawing maps of imagined lands or sci-fi movies exploring technological what-ifs. …

Insights from food trucks and Kickstarter data — Each year since 2019, Kickstarter has hosted a tabletop roleplaying game design event called Zine Quest for small-budget design projects. Creators launch campaigns and run them for just two weeks, and Kickstarter promotes them. Here, I discuss the potential of Zine Quest (and similar events) to transform and expand the…

The what, why, and how of character motivations — There’s a lot of advice on the internet for how to create compelling characters in Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop RPGs. Give your character a memorable feature or core gimmick. Give them a guiding aesthetic. Give them a backstory with dramatic potential. A lot of this advice is good…

How bad design haunts us — There are two kinds of design flaws in tabletop RPGs. First, there are the “flaws” — really, tradeoffs — that we can disagree over. These are mechanics that serve a purpose but impose costs elsewhere that may not be worth it or enjoyed by all players. …

Randomness doesn’t have to be unbalanced — Many Dungeons & Dragons players enjoy randomizing their characters’ abilities. But D&D’s standard rules for rolling ability scores are flawed. Luckily, numerous better approaches exist that you can import to D&D — or almost any other RPG that has a set of variable core abilities. The problem Let’s start by considering the…

How interacting perspectives draw us in — Characters are as compelling as their perspectives on the fictional worlds they inhabit. Those fictional worlds are as compelling as the perspectives they house. …

Included in the introduction to the Player’s Handbook of Dungeons & Dragons is a set of rules so vital that they shape nearly every moment of play and yet so overlooked — so unconscious and assumed — that, unless you’re one of the rare players who’s consumed the book cover-to-cover…

Some version of damage and hit points mechanics is present in almost every tabletop roleplaying game, yet there’s a surprising amount of variation in these rules. The choice of damage mechanics shapes play in key ways and says something about a game system’s overall focus. …

Writers, artists, game designers — storytellers of every sort — have long utilized the power of worldbuilding. Now educators are utilizing it too. Constructed universes are powerful and flexible frameworks for designs to emerge from. …