Caution:
These things are developed mostly by dungeon masters running tabletop rpgs. While game design and DMing are very similar activities, you can improvise and adapt in a physical medium in a way you can’t in a digital one. So these tools may not be immediately helpful without some adaptation; however they are rigorously used and they are helpful to many people. So, like all game design advice, you’ll be glad you got the half of it that is useful.
5x5 campaign method
5x5 campaign method
How do people even design campaigns anyway? With interweaving plots and multiple characters it can be hard to keep everything straight and related. The 5x5 is a systems that helps to keep things organized.
The method isn’t terribly complicated, it's basically a grid or a tree, each column represents a significant story threads or questlines and each row is how far they are into completion. Ideally the completion of one of cell in the grid will feed into or relate to other questlines (like a data tree). So instead of players working each questline to completion they jump between them as they progress. This is also a good way to keep things related and influencing each other (instead of just a hub with quests).
There is a lot of work an interest on this and most people modify it to their own end. When I’ve attempted to lay things out I tend to find things converge at the end into a single climactic event. Your mileage may vary, but it will get you going.
5 room dungeon
For game designers this is basically a mix of ‘differences in kind’ with an ‘engagement curve’. I think it's a mistake to take this literally as a dungeon with 5 rooms, but I think it's better to look at it as a bunch of encounters every session/adventure should have.
As with all formulas, add things, repeat things, drop things. A 5 room dungeon is fine but be willing to change things up. It's already pretty great because most of these ‘rooms’ or encounters are either or type affairs (puzzle or roleplay encounter) kinda things. I think it's a really solid formula and definitely something game designers should be taking with them into their own games.
10 m/f names
The basic gist of this is to write down 10 male and 10 female names. If players ever want to figure out someones name or what’s going on with them; you can just pull one off the list and roll with it (sorry for the pun). But what this creates is the idea that this is a real and believable world, suddenly, everyone has a name and a tiny back-story. The world comes alive!
This is more abstract (and as a knee-jerk reaction, it's impossible) thing to in digital games. But I think it's one of those things where you never know who players might attach to and find important. If you can find a way to let your players elevate the importance or seek deeper interactions with *any* character they come across it will go a lot farther in creating a believable world.
7 sentence NPC
Originally from TSRs Dragon magazine, this is a simple framework for building NPCs. Now these are customized for a tabletop seeing but depending on the game your making things like “physical description” and “Distinguishing Features” might be handled by whatever system is used to generate character art. If you are trying to create a system where any player can interact with any NPC its a good place to start.
And if you do have to make NPCs for your team; well they should all get the 7 sentence treatment. The upside to this is that it compresses information to basically a paragraph anyone has time to read. Starting with a blank slate is hard, but getting those seven sentences out give you a place to go.
Secrets and Mysteries
Secrets and details are great for world building and helping things come alive. Having a bank of little things players can learn is a great way to reward interactions of the players. Interaction is a core advantage that games have over other mediums. Having a list of secrets is a great way to reward players who like to dig into the world and read every little description.
When players need to investigate or uncover a crime, well we know that a significant number of players just won't get it. So even if they have all the secrets in front of them or the details seem to all point to one direction, sometimes you have to keep nudging. Basically, it's better to let players shoot the arrow and then paint the target around it. If players keep looking in the wrong spot, just put the clue in the next place they look.
Encounter Building
HA! I worked a youtube video into this! So even if you are too lazy to read, you can’t say this post wasn't useful!
I’m going to break this video down a little bit because Projared isn’t really articulating exactly what he is doing. But basically, each encounter has a variety of monsters and it has environmental components. I don't want to get too deep into encounter design (that should be its own post), but I do want to explain the very basics of what he does.
When it comes to monster variety, it doesn't have to be complicated. Even just varying the equipment (up-armoring a guy, or changing a weapons) can create a much more interesting scenario. The important thing to do is to avoid fighting ‘6 goblins’ because then the players just ‘attack the one that took the most damage’.
The other thing to do is to see what you can do to make the environment more interesting. An encounter without an environmental gimmick is like toast without butter. Its missing something. Now sometimes giving your enemies some high ground is basically just an advantage to them, but you can use gimmicks to help players engage with the space. What's important to consider is that potentially both Players and Enemies could use these gimmicks too.
Conclusion:
These 6 things are by no means comprehensive of everything you can take from d&d and every trick and tactic you can learn from. But this is a good example of the popular stuff, and a great batch of tools to take with you. If you think this was super useful, I would suggest taking a look at Matt Colville on youtube. He’s a videogame designer and Writer for Turtle Rock Studios as well as DM extraordinaire. So you can tumble down that rabbit hole if you want more.
Disclaimer:
I didn’t really vet anyone I’m linking to. I mostly pulled these explanations from google searches. So while I'm endorsing these ideas; I won't endorse anyone's character. I actually have never met any of these people.
