18 March 2026 On the Design Struggle Bus

     I admit: writing TTRPG stuff is hard. I don't love it. So far, I have written three scenarios--The Slime Lord, Old Gnaw, and the Spring Tower. They are fine. They need to be play tested and refined. I started to write a module for Castles&Crusades, The Runes, but I got in over my head really quickly. The reality is, I am not really enjoying the process. I love playing games, and running games. Writing them is less fun. I haven't been able to GM since October because things at home are challenging right now (and have been for almost two years). I just don't have the bandwidth.

    I wonder if I am casting my net too widely. I am thinking about working backwards, i.e. starting with an encounter or two, like as gourmet as I can make it, then building outward. I have been kicking around the idea of populating a small city and seeing how that feels (vs. a region with various encounter points--random, set, etc.) 

    I like Matt Colville. He is the main guy behind MCDM, a small gaming company that punches very much above its weight (it's only 12 full-time employees, but makes remarkable things). His Running the Game series on Youtube has been a delight over the past five or six years as he is a guy who thinks deeply and well about TTRPGs: how they work, how to think about them, and how to design them. He is an open book about game design, and as he (and his team) developed their own game, Draw Steel, he produced design journals on Patreon so that people could watch, almost in real-time, how their game was being built. Fascinating stuff. One of the things I've learned from him over the years is to question assumptions. Why do we use dungeons? What is a dungeon? Why do we use the six stats, generally speaking? How do we do monsters, and why? These kinds of inquiries get to the root of game design. 

    So I'm wondering if I am going to large at the outset. The reality is, I haven't ever done this before. I've played and run games for 45 years. I've never written actual material for someone else to play. I think I'm going to try narrowing my lens; making the aperture smaller, and see how that goes. Let's see how a five room dungeon goes. That's the most basic unit of ttrpg writing.