Guiding Star Design in TTRPGs
Happy Wednesday, folks, today I want to talk a little about the process of game design.
I speak to a lot of new and aspiring game designers and one of the most common things I get asked is how to get started on a project. The idea of creating a new class for your favourite system, or creating an entirely new game from nothing can seem so daunting.
So today I want to walk you through the process that I use pretty much every time I sit down to design a major project, and I call it the Guiding Star approach to design. This is going to help you stay focused, reduce scope creep, and produce stronger designs in the end, so let's get into it!
What Is Guiding Star Design?
The idea behind the Guiding Star design approach is that at the beginning of the project you set out your design parameters, your goal for the project. This is your guiding star that you use throughout the rest of the writing process to keep you on course and help you make decisions that result in stronger game design.
The guiding star can be as simple as a sentence, or as complete as multiple pages of in-depth criteria, but by working with these ideas in mind, you're going to spend less time staring at the blank page and questioning every life choice you've made that's led you to this point.
I am an absolute fiend for scope creep. Give me five minutes unattended and I will have added sixteen new parameters to a project and have ideas for years worth of content, only to get burnt out on the first task because I expended so much of my creative energy daydreaming.
So for me, the guiding star isn't just a useful tool, it's an absolute necessity. It keeps me focused, on-task, and helps me to make sure I am designing the product I initially set out to.
How To Write Your Guiding Star
While your specific process might look different, or change project to project, here's a breakdown of how I write my guiding star.
- Establish the Fantasy
- Distill the Fantasy Into Keywords
- Test The Design Against the Keywords
Establish The Fantasy
I like to begin all my projects by “establishing the fantasy”. What fantasy do I want this text to fulfill? If I am designing a monster, that might be creating a specific mood with an encounter, or eliciting a certain kind of feeling from the players. If I am designing a whole system, I am thinking about what kind of fantasy I want players of the system to be able to live out through the ruleset.
A game where the fantasy is playing as street level vigilantes protecting their neighborhood and improving the lives of the people in their community one roundhouse kick at a time is going to look and play very differently to a game where the fantasy is to play as immortal warrior knights fighting aliens among the stars.
When I began working on Project Cobalt, my in-progress sci fi game, the fantasy I wanted to evoke was one of space operas; larger than life stories among the stars where the science and physics of reality matter less than the drama of the narrative.
Distill the Fantasy Into Keywords
Once you've got a sense of the fantasy you want to evoke through your text, it's time to lock in your guiding star.
As I said, depending on your project this can be as simple as a single sentence, or as complicated as a page of “rules” for what your system mechanics must and must not be. An approach I have always found to be incredibly useful in establishing my guiding star is to try and distill it into a handful of keywords which can be referenced against in all future design.
For Project Cobalt, those key words ended up being Narrative Pulp Action Sci-Fi.
Narrative
I knew that I wanted Project Cobalt to be a narrative-forward game, meaning the players would be describing their actions within the narrative first, and then they and the GM would work together to determine the mechanical resolution for those actions depending on the circumstances.
Games like Blades in the Dark, a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse systems, and things like Vampire The Masquerade are more narrative-first systems.
Contrast that to games like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder Second Edition where there is more often than not a pre-defined way to resolve an outcome via the mechanics that the game assumes you will follow.
Pulp
This one is really important, because it contains a lot of context.
To me, pulp sci fi stories are fast-paced, not overly concerned with the “realism” of how the science and physics of a situation work, and are focused on big, bombastic moments.
I very intentionally want combat in Project Cobalt to move at a clip and be over very quickly. I want players to be capable of getting through half a dozen combats in a night's play no problem, and this guiding star informs so much of the rest of the system design, from the action economy, to the amount of damage weapons do, to enemy health – its all designed with fast paced, pulp combat in mind.
Action
This means my primary focus is always on options that help the game and the players feel like they are playing out an 80s action movie. I want exciting mechanical options, big set piece events, and a focus on combat.
If I one day decide to mess around with a botany system, I have to ask myself “does that serve the action? Does it meet our other guiding star criteria?”. That doesn't mean that the game is only about action, or that the only stories you can tell using the system will be ones of violence, but it does mean that “combat” will be a core pillar of the game and need to be exciting, fun, and well supported.
Sci Fi
The easiest keyword to measure against is ‘sci fi’. When I’m thinking of a new idea I ask “is this sci fi?” and if the answer is yes, then we're good. If the answer is no, things get a bit more complicated.
Evolving The Guiding Star
Your guiding star is a tool to help you, and not a set of chains keeping you locked to one direction. You can, and sometimes should go against your guiding star for the sake of a more interesting game.
For example, a question that came up fairly early on in development of Project Cobalt was “is there magic in this world” and I did what I always do, checked against my guiding star. But I ran into a problem, because I don't think magic is inherently sci fi. To me, it is much more a hallmark of fantasy, which means if we include magic in our space game, do we risk shifting the genre away from what we want?
There's no empirically right or wrong answer here, it's down to you as an individual designer, but for me, I decided that I wanted the core Project Cobalt experience to feel more classically sci-fi than space fantasy.
That's not to say I don't have plenty of ideas for how and why there may be ‘magic’ in the world of Project Cobalt, because I've got lots of ideas (see the above warning on scope creep…).
When working on a project where you've established a guiding star, deviating from that can lead to interesting and exciting results, but by keeping your guiding star in mind you are sure to always be prioritizing design decisions that fit the core themes of the game the best.
Using the Guiding Star in Homebrew
But the guiding star principle isn't just useful for completely new design work, it can be an invaluable tool for homebrew creation as well.
When I begin working on a new 5e monster, for example, I will always start the process by establishing what fantasy I am looking to express through the monster's rules and mechanics.
Perhaps I'm looking for a shape changing predator that can fit into the cultural superstitions of skinwalkers that the people of my game world might have.
From there, I choose two of the three monster pillars; fast, strong, or tough. In this case, I choose fast and strong.
With that information I am able to make a number of choices very quickly when it comes to the design of a monster.
A fast and strong shapechanger that has deep connections to superstition makes it really easy to make some of the mechanical choices for monster design, such as giving the monster access to some kind of change shape ability.
But when we consider the cultural superstition, having the monster be able to mimic creatures suddenly adds a different, more sinister, dimension to the monster's lore.
You can see this entire process in action in near real-time in a members-only video I released last year. Channel members also get exclusive access to other design videos, campaign diaries, story time videos, and more!
Trying It Out
The next time you sit down to do some design, be it a monster or a whole system, give the guiding star approach a try. What fantasy are you chasing? What three words define it? You’ll be amazed how much easier the rest of the design becomes.
I'd love to hear how the approach has changed the way you design down in the comments below!
But until next time
Happy Gaming
