Start With the Heart

I’m getting ready to start designing a brand new game. If you’re curious, it’s the Magnus Archives Roleplaying game that we just announced. When I realized that I wanted to create a series of essays here about starting at the very beginning of the design process, I was going to call it “From the Ground Up.” But then I started thinking about Lego sets. 

I’m a big fan of Lego. I like building their sets but I like taking the bricks and making my own creations even more. Building a set, with their step-by-step instructions, is very different from building your own. Lego sets—particularly those where you build a location—are kind of weird because you start by building the ground or the floor. You place bricks that are good for foundations where the walls will be, and flat tiles where they won’t be. But that means you know precisely where the walls will be before you even build the floor. And when you build those walls, you add in special bricks with studs on their sides because they’re good for hanging pictures or shelves or whatever, but that means that you know where those are going to go ahead of time too. You’re literally building from the ground up, but you (or rather, the Lego set’s designer) knows exactly what the finished project is going to look like.

However, creating a new roleplaying game is much more like making your own Lego creation (often called MOCs, for “My Own Creation”). At its purest, when you make a MOC, you stare at a bunch of Lego bricks on the table and start clicking them together. As you tinker, you build something cool, like a staircase, and decide to build a house around it. You take what you’re happy with, and you build from there.

And so creating an RPG isn’t building from the ground up, it’s building the heart and working outward from there.

So, what’s the heart? 

That’s up to the designer, obviously, and it’s different for different games. I know I say that a lot, but I’m going to really reinforce it: IT’S DIFFERENT FOR DIFFERENT GAMES. There is no one way to do it, nor should there be. Different games have different needs. You might be building a game with a specific style of play in mind, or a different genre that needs emulating. 

But let’s look at the issue in a different way. Let’s start with a blank slate.

What is an RPG for? To ask that weird (and maybe obvious-seeming) question a different way, what do you need to play an RPG? 

You sit down at a table with your friends. Because we’re talking about traditional RPGs here, one person is the GM, and the rest are players with characters.

Oh, so right off the bat, we know we need characters. Do we start with the characters then? Well, let’s assume we do, and from this blank slate we have nothing, so before we can start talking about stats or anything, we have to know—who are these people? What makes them interesting enough that you want to know about their exploits that will take place in the game?

Uh… wait. How can we decide what makes them interesting without any context? I mean, are these Wild West heroes or navy fighter pilots or space wizards? Even if we go very basic, like, “this is a strong character and this is a smart one,” we’ve only distinguished them from each other. Is the strong character strong like a weightlifter or strong like the Incredible Hulk? We don’t have anything to compare them to (and more importantly, anything to distinguish them from).

Maybe characters aren’t where we start, because we need to know something about the setting, the world, or the general context before we can decide what you need to know to make an interesting character. So, we decide it’s a sci-fi game. Now we’ve got a genre for context. But is genre enough? Star Trek was sci-fi, but so was Back to the Future. No, genre isn’t enough. We have to go deeper to find the heart. 

Genre and setting might be about where the characters are and who they meet, but what we need to know is what do the characters do? We’ll call that the “heart” of the game. (You could also call it the core, the spark, the initial idea, the essence, or the theme—although “theme” can mean a lot of different things—but for our purposes, we’ll call it the heart.)

Let me pause a moment to make something very clear: this isn’t about the presentation of the game. You don’t necessarily start your rulebook this way (although in some cases, maybe you do). Sometimes the best way to explain an RPG is through character creation. Sometimes, it’s best to describe the setting. That’s a topic for another day. We’re talking about where the designer starts, not the rulebook.

So what the characters do is the heart of the game. It’s kind of what the game is about. It doesn’t answer all the questions, but it answers the most basic one, and that’s where we’ll start.

The heart might be fighting monsters. It might be exploration. It might be discovery, or making money, or becoming powerful, or protecting innocents, or survival in a harsh place. It could be anything. But if you can’t answer the question of “what do the characters do?” you don’t have the heart of your game.

So let’s go back to our blank slate. We’re sitting at the table with our friends, one is the GM, and the players have characters. Those characters are defined in some way by how they go about dealing with the heart. The heart of our example game is exploration, so there’s a character who’s very perceptive, one that’s good at getting past obstacles, one that’s good at talking to intelligent creatures they meet, and so on. Everyone’s got their “thing.” And that might ultimately be expressed through stats, special abilities, skills, or whatever, but we’re not there yet. The point is, each has a reason that they’re interesting when they deal with the heart, and they’re interesting because each is at least somewhat differentiated from the others.

The GM sets the stage, because they’ve got some kind of setting/genre information. Worldbuilding a setting that matches the heart of a game is a huge and fun topic, and I hope to get to that, but first I want to skip ahead to the point after which the GM has set the stage, because I think it’s the next big thing you need to play an RPG.

The GM turns to the players and says, “What do you do?” Given that this is a traditional RPG, there aren’t limitations on the answer. The selling point of RPGs from day one has been that this is a game where you can do anything. So that means the players say what they want to do, and as a group, everyone involved needs to determine if they succeed at what they set out to accomplish.

“Ah ha!” your’re probably saying. “I see where this is going. I’ll get my dice.”

Well, hang on a minute. There’s more to it than rolling some dice. And we’ll cover that in part 2.