Personas y dados: A guide to design role-playing games

In today's post I will talk about Personas y dados: Una guía para diseñar juegos de rol (Persons and dices: a guide to design role-playing games), a book written by Jorge Coto Bautista "Tiberio" (Twitter) which has been published recently in Spain by HT Games Publishers (Web | Twitter) and can be bought in printed as well as digital versions and which has encouraged me to prepare a series of posts where I will show you many resources that will be useful if you want to design your own game (you may consider this series as an unofficial digital companion of the book).

But before beginning I will allow the publisher and the author to present themselves:

Jorge Coto Bautista, better known as "Tiberio" is the author of games like Roma (Ludotecnia) or Exo: 2933 (HT Publishers), as well as the writter of many adventures for many games and publishers. During many years he had been the person reviewing and analyzing publishing proposals, first for Ediciones Sombra and, years later, for HT Publishers. Because of that he has read and analysed many role-playing games submissions, so he has a unique vision he tries to share with you in this book.

HT Publishers is a little and humble publisher which has been struggling for seven years in the difficult world of role-playing games and wargames publishing. It began publishing the Critico magazine and later jumped to games' publishing with El Hombre Abstracto, Savage Worlds, Frostgrave, Gaslands, Monsterhearts 2, La América de Drácula...

Personas y dados: structure and contents

This guide is structured in a series of parts or books which gradually offer us a series of steps to follow:

Introduction

In the introduction the author exposes how he get started in the world of role-playing games in a experience that, as he says, surely will be familiar to veteran referees and players that already have a certain age and that led him to consider writing his first game, a thought all fans have had at one time or another.

Book I: Creating the system of a role-playing game

In this first part a set of themes are proposed to the designer to consider when he is set out to create a completely new game system and does so beginning with a way that can at first bewilder more than one, because he advises against creating the system and use instead some created before, arguing that it will have been enough tested and very probably will be known by their potential users (in fact he offers many examples comprising a vast view of the role-playing games world).

If the reader still wants to dive into what it means to design a game system with its own set of rules Jorge details the various aspects to consider, basically the type of dice you will use and the kind of rolls, folowed by other mechanical aspects like the elements defining player characters (usually the characteristics and skills they possess), the balance between rules and setting/tone of the game and the target audience (of course you won't take the same decisions designing a children's game and a game with adventures and situations designed for adult players).

Book II: Creating the setting of a role-playing game

Once the purely mechanical aspects are considered this second part is devoted to review the most common genres and themes that are possible to find in role-playing games and that, as you surely already suspected, are the same of novels, comic books, cinema and television series, so it's logical that exist fantasy games inspired by Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and all the genre novels written afterwards, science fiction and Space Opera games (who has not heard about Star Wars and Star Trek?), terror games inspired by the works of H.P Lovecraft, superheroes games or historic games or those studying the effects of uchronia, to put a few examples (there's also many games combining two or more genres in a mix that takes advantage of the common points between them).

In addition to checking the different genres Jorge also takes care of remembering us some points that could ease the creation of the game, like for instance the wise use of cliches (something not recomended in literature but in role-playing games will allow us to quickly transmit information without having to give many explanations) and how to search for the ideal point of originality and details to obtain an atractive background and setting bearing in mind that it will be necessary those be centered in actions carried out by playing characters.

Book III: Creating an adventure for a role-playing game

When the game mechanics and the setting are already created it's time to think about the creation of adventures which will happen in the game's world, to achieve this the necessary phases to create and structure them are reviewed, wether through the classical aristotelian structure (beggining, middle and end) or the kishōtenketsu (introduction, development, twist and conclusion) as well as typical elements which form part of the adventure, like combat scenes, and the possibility of having adventures with a railroaded script (based in a linear plot) or the "sandbox" type (based in an environment where the characters move freely).

Book IV: Writing a role-playing game

It's time to review all things designed and written in the previous sections to polish the text and make sure it complies with minimal criteria in regard to style and information density (better use short and direct phrases instead of long paragraphs and avoid to include superfluous data that does not contribute anything), it's also useful to offer examples of mechanics to clarify those points which may be confusing and strive for the setting and system to be well combined, which also implies to decide in which order the contents of the game manual are to be shown.

Book V: Editing a role-playing game

Once the game has been written and reviewed some times by the author it goes to the publisher, so the text will be reviewed to search for possible spelling and typographical errors, style correction trying to respect at most the author's creation and check that it will fit with the other works of the already existing line of publications. It will be also the time to decide the physical aspect of the game (layout and illustrations) and handle matters like the ISBN and the legal deposit and prepare the physical and digital editions of the game.

Book VI: Selling a role-playing game

In this last section information is offered about dealings with publishers accepting to release the game and legal issues like contracts and retail distribution as well as new options to offer the game, like print on demand and selling through specialized webshops.

A series of epilogues about things that perhaps nobody has warned you about

Here comes the end of the book and with this three epilogues explaining the role social networks will have in criticism of the author's work (with opinions which not always would be reasoned and constructive), how the author will be affected by designing a game (from this point on, he will probably not be able to stop analyzing any other game that falls into his hands) and a sample of books and links which would be interesting for the reader to know more about the themes exposed in the book.

Conclusions

Personas y dados is the bedside guide that every person devoted to writing role-playing games, wether a beginning creator or one with many games to his credit, should read at least once in his life, because it achieves to synthesize and summarize all the process needed to get it, the rest is just a matter of effort and using your imagination to create stories and worlds worth playing.

For all these reasons Personas y dados and its author deserve my seal of distinction.

In the next installment of this series I will offer you rexources for writers and game designers, see you then.

This entry it's also available in the following languages:
Castellano Català