On Process

I've always enjoyed learning from the other greats of game design craft.

Social media loves pretty. We all do. My process is not pretty. I suspect most of us feel this way. No matter how good you get it will always be something you made. For some of us it's more true than others.

I started playing and thefore writing my first adventures at 7. My process has always started in pen and on lined paper. Don't ask me why, it seemed right to do it all in pen playing 2e from the players handbook found in a library. Every turn and it's damage was hard record.

It's in my unsteady chicken scratch born of a termor I've always had in my dominant hand, but this isn't about that. It's about the process.

If you hang around creatives you will always hear make it first. Set you goals lower. The best game designers I've learned from? They taught me that the sooner you get something you can play the better.

That goal? Not low enough for a first step. A lot of designers I have made respect for have recently been talking about how hard it can be and so I thought I would just share what my first little step on a game looks like.

I wanted to do a one page RPG for nothing but the fun of it and so I started with nothing but the fact that I like to manipulate probability of chance to create ups and downs in play narrative tension.

And so I started with the simple 3d6 and tried to play with it. These are my notes. The initial stirrings of a project in rawest form.