Welcome to what I am calling RPGcember. This is my attempt to build a Role-Playing Game that more closely resembles what I’m looking for in a game, both as a player and as a referee. I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons for a long time – through its burgeoning popularity with 3e up to 5e, and looking at the new rules for 2024/25 – and it’s morphed from something I enjoyed into something that doesn’t really grab me. Some of that has been my own tastes growing and changing; see my news post on Burnout, which has really shifted how I feel about RPGs as a whole. Some of that, however, is the direction I see the game taking, and it’s not a direction I want to explore.
So I’m gonna spend this month looking at what I do want the RPGs I play to explore. And in the process, I’m going to examine how that informs my design philosophy and how I write RPGs to accomplish the explorations I’m interested in.
To do that, we’re going to look through the lens of a game I came up with in late October/early November, called Rank & File; I’m still building it up, but I’ve got the basic blocks down. It’s a game based on learning to fight and climbing the social ladder, usually by ruining the people on the rung above to get a leg up. You’ll make contacts, learn fighting styles, and take on contracts to protect your community and build your prestige. And along the way you’ll start to ask yourself: how many bridges am I prepared to burn to get what I want? What am I prepared to do to get ahead?
Who am I prepared to hurt?
But the main topic of discussion in this article is: what do I want from an RPG? I came into Rank & File with a number of preconceived ideas I wanted to hit, and I’ve already got some of them in the description above, so let’s go through the whole list.
What Do I Want In A TRPG?
Weapons, and interesting things to do with them
It turns out a lot of my gripes with D&D come from its weapons being kinda… bland? Even with the new masteries, there’s not much separating a scimitar from a short sword. I want a bludgeoning weapon to feel different than a duelling sword, and I want people to adjust how they use their weapons based on the terrain, the number of enemies, maybe even how light or dark it is! I want weapons that scale with practise – you’re able to do more damage with them the more you’ve used them. I also want weapon differentiations to mean something – when you swing a hammer you shouldn’t feel that it’s doing the same thing as a sword. This philosophy has gone into the weapon, armour, and combat system of Rank & File, as we’ll see in later weeks.
Player choices, but also low barriers to entry
Another issue I have with D&D is: it’s the starting RPG for a lot of people, but it’s never been particularly beginner-friendly. Character creation goes through every possible aspect of the game before you even learn the rules, and starting with a pre-made character can leave you confused whilst also giving you very little to actually do. I want onboarding to be as easy as possible, but I also want players to have choice in what they can do during combat or social interaction. This has informed the character creation and advancement processes, as well as the design of the character sheet and the way interactions work, whether physical or social.
Wealth and Health Abstraction
I am not a fan of the nebulous Hit Point. Whether it’s a measure of the hero’s luck (in which case, why not rebrand it to Luck?) or an estimation of how many hits they could take (in which case, how are you surviving six stab wounds in quick succession?!), I don’t like the reduction of a player’s health to a single number. It’s arbitrary.
Similarly, I find shopping scenes in D&D immensely difficult. The rules are vague and nebulous, and different facets of different sourcebooks tell you different ways to buy and sell, and they’re all different to the numbers given in the Player’s Handbook, which is what the players are expecting!
...So I’m a little frustrated with the lack of guidance on both of those.
I’m taking a page out of more narrative-driven RPGs for my own wounds system, which looks at the weapons being used and the armour in certain areas, and draws conclusions based off that. And instead of doing something interesting or unique for Wealth, I’m abstracting that out to a simple number – I’ll explain how that works later this month.
And that, broadly, is where I came into Rank & File from a design perspective. I should say, none of the ideas in this are tested yet – but I’ve got a fairly solid bedrock, drawing on established RPG designs, and I knew exactly what I didn’t want when I started! So I hope this’ll be an interesting series to take into Christmas, and maybe we’ll all learn something from this.