Welcome to Neither Dungeons Nor Dragons

When I was in the fifth grade, I went to Barnes & Noble with my mother, and after ditching her to look for some of Prima’s Official Strategy Guides for games I had never heard of (nor, it turned out, would ever play) I came across an aisle that I had never really explored before. It had a lot of big books that didn’t really resemble any of the kinds of books I was used to seeing, but there was one that stood out very distinctly to me: proudly sitting on a display shelf, cover facing outwards, was a copy of the Player’s Handbook, for Dungeons & Dragons, third edition. It was love at first sight. I had never heard of D&D before, or of tabletop roleplaying games, but I took one look at that, and said “I think I want that,” and after tracking down my mother and doing some light pleading, I took possession of my first piece of D&D material.

That was a bit over twenty years ago. In the intervening decades between then and now, two relevant subplots unfolded. The first is that I kept collecting more D&D books. I had a starter set, a pound of dice, and eventually a full milk crate of books, some of which I brought to school, read in class, and showed to my friends, though I’m not sure they ever quite realized just how cool they were. I survived the transition to 3.5e, even though I didn’t really understand what it meant, and then didn’t survive the transition to 4e, fully not understanding why the monster stats didn’t make sense to me anymore. Eventually I jumped ship to Pathfinder, and that sort of opened the floodgates to a whole world of other systems, a search that has yet to end, and hopefully, never will.

The second is that I got into game design. I really liked video games, and I had an uncle that worked in software. He sent me a link to a little tool for making games on your computer, and I went from there. I ended up teaching myself the basics of programming, made a hobby out of it, and eventually a career. I work in enterprise software now, but there’s a nice handful of games out there with my name on them, and though none of them are huge AAA titles, I’m proud of each of them.

So, to marry these subplots back together- it turns out tabletop roleplaying games are also designed! It should come as no shock, but the ‘system’ part of an RPG system shares a lot of the same principles and concerns as basically any other kind of game. And crucially, this is true not only of making the games themselves, but also of preparing and running them.

I consider running, and even to a lesser extent playing, TTRPGs to be my craft. Not to say that I think I’m really good at it, but that I really want to be really good at it. There are a lot of people out there, with a lot of thoughts on how you should run your games, and I’m one of them. But I want to focus on a lens that I don’t think gets featured too much: the lens of the game designer. This isn’t meant to replace any other ideas or lessons, only to supplement them.

A lot of the ideas described here will be relevant to people running Dungeons & Dragons, especially fifth edition, because that’s what’s being played, but this blog is called Neither Dungeons Nor Dragons for a reason- the field of game design is so much bigger than one game can encompass, and the better understand it, the better we can be at making and running the games that we want to.