Hi I want to make a series cositing of 7 thing you should avoit when desining a TTRPG. this is inspired in 7 dealy sins of TCG desing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR2tVSC-sng&list=PLphu8NE8GQc4ldfNEEFX3dOPv_ihxADvs) please be speficic. I want things that can be applied only in TTRPG. and also it dont have to be realate to the 7 dealy sins of cristianity. I only have 4

1. constant changes never finalizing a mechanic/rule

2. Trying to make an existing game with little to no changes of your own (clones)

3. Rules bloat, over complicating things just for complexity sake. Or over writing when a rules lite approach would be better for that specific system/rule/mechanic

4. making erotics games.

5. Making furry erotics game

6. Making self insert NPC in furry erotics game

7. Including your contact information in the npc stat block in furry erotics game.

1) Not playtesting.
  a) Not playtesting outside your immediate circle (if you want to market it).

2) Ignoring playtest feedback when you actually get it.

3) Not testing again each time you've made significant changes to the system.

4) Not having a clear vision of what you're trying to accompli before you start.
  a) "I want to make another D&D retroclone but with this one change" is NOT a clear vision.
  b) "I want to make a post-apocalyptic science fantasy game based on 80's cartoon elements" is a clear vision.

5) Not including obvious things for the PCs to do in your setting. ex. the kingdom is at peace, there are no threats, and powerful heroes already guard against danger... great, so what are the PCs supposed to do?

6) Not balancing PC complexity/creation time to system lethality/campaign length. An offender example - Battletech: A Time of War. Character creation involved gaining XP to various abilities over the course of a lifepath, then totalling the XP to determine the level of each of many stats, skills, advantages, and flaws. This often took more than an hour. You can die for any single random shot at any time. This literally happened during to a PC during the first round of combat. A related flaw was the damage to Mechs generally exceeds PCs' capacity to repair it because they pull it straight from the attritional based wargame campaign rules.

7) Not balancing task resolution time to the importance/interestingness of the action. The more trivial the action, the less table time it should take.

Quote from: David Johansen on February 14, 2025, 08:20:54 AM5. Making furry erotics game

6. Making self insert NPC in furry erotics game

7. Including your contact information in the npc stat block in furry erotics game.

I have to see the relacion beetwen furry erotics games and bad games.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 08:28:31 AM1) Not playtesting.
  a) Not playtesting outside your immediate circle (if you want to market it).

2) Ignoring playtest feedback when you actually get it.

3) Not testing again each time you've made significant changes to the system.

4) Not having a clear vision of what you're trying to accompli before you start.
  a) "I want to make another D&D retroclone but with this one change" is NOT a clear vision.
  b) "I want to make a post-apocalyptic science fantasy game based on 80's cartoon elements" is a clear vision.

5) Not including obvious things for the PCs to do in your setting. ex. the kingdom is at peace, there are no threats, and powerful heroes already guard against danger... great, so what are the PCs supposed to do?

6) Not balancing PC complexity/creation time to system lethality/campaign length. An offender example - Battletech: A Time of War. Character creation involved gaining XP to various abilities over the course of a lifepath, then totalling the XP to determine the level of each of many stats, skills, advantages, and flaws. This often took more than an hour. You can die for any single random shot at any time. This literally happened during to a PC during the first round of combat. A related flaw was the damage to Mechs generally exceeds PCs' capacity to repair it because they pull it straight from the attritional based wargame campaign rules.

7) Not balancing task resolution time to the importance/interestingness of the action. The more trivial the action, the less table time it should take.

I think 4,5 maybe, 6 and 7 are valit

Quote from: antonioGUAK on February 14, 2025, 08:32:17 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 08:28:31 AM1) Not playtesting.
  a) Not playtesting outside your immediate circle (if you want to market it).

2) Ignoring playtest feedback when you actually get it.

3) Not testing again each time you've made significant changes to the system.

4) Not having a clear vision of what you're trying to accompli before you start.
  a) "I want to make another D&D retroclone but with this one change" is NOT a clear vision.
  b) "I want to make a post-apocalyptic science fantasy game based on 80's cartoon elements" is a clear vision.

5) Not including obvious things for the PCs to do in your setting. ex. the kingdom is at peace, there are no threats, and powerful heroes already guard against danger... great, so what are the PCs supposed to do?

6) Not balancing PC complexity/creation time to system lethality/campaign length. An offender example - Battletech: A Time of War. Character creation involved gaining XP to various abilities over the course of a lifepath, then totalling the XP to determine the level of each of many stats, skills, advantages, and flaws. This often took more than an hour. You can die for any single random shot at any time. This literally happened during to a PC during the first round of combat. A related flaw was the damage to Mechs generally exceeds PCs' capacity to repair it because they pull it straight from the attritional based wargame campaign rules.

7) Not balancing task resolution time to the importance/interestingness of the action. The more trivial the action, the less table time it should take.

I think 4,5 maybe, 6 and 7 are valit

In my experience, 1, 2, and 3 are the difference between something that works and abject failure. Playtesting is the RPG equivalent of having a good editor. You'll never catch all the errors on your own (because many fall into experiential blind spots), so you playtest so other people can help you catch them.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 08:44:07 AM

Quote from: antonioGUAK on February 14, 2025, 08:32:17 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 08:28:31 AM1) Not playtesting.
  a) Not playtesting outside your immediate circle (if you want to market it).

2) Ignoring playtest feedback when you actually get it.

3) Not testing again each time you've made significant changes to the system.

4) Not having a clear vision of what you're trying to accompli before you start.
  a) "I want to make another D&D retroclone but with this one change" is NOT a clear vision.
  b) "I want to make a post-apocalyptic science fantasy game based on 80's cartoon elements" is a clear vision.

5) Not including obvious things for the PCs to do in your setting. ex. the kingdom is at peace, there are no threats, and powerful heroes already guard against danger... great, so what are the PCs supposed to do?

6) Not balancing PC complexity/creation time to system lethality/campaign length. An offender example - Battletech: A Time of War. Character creation involved gaining XP to various abilities over the course of a lifepath, then totalling the XP to determine the level of each of many stats, skills, advantages, and flaws. This often took more than an hour. You can die for any single random shot at any time. This literally happened during to a PC during the first round of combat. A related flaw was the damage to Mechs generally exceeds PCs' capacity to repair it because they pull it straight from the attritional based wargame campaign rules.

7) Not balancing task resolution time to the importance/interestingness of the action. The more trivial the action, the less table time it should take.

I think 4,5 maybe, 6 and 7 are valit

In my experience, 1, 2, and 3 are the difference between something that works and abject failure. Playtesting is the RPG equivalent of having a good editor. You'll never catch all the errors on your own (because many fall into experiential blind spots), so you playtest so other people can help you catch them.

you are right but is not exclusive with TTRPG.

Quote from: antonioGUAK on February 14, 2025, 09:06:56 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 08:44:07 AM

Quote from: antonioGUAK on February 14, 2025, 08:32:17 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 08:28:31 AM1) Not playtesting.
  a) Not playtesting outside your immediate circle (if you want to market it).

2) Ignoring playtest feedback when you actually get it.

3) Not testing again each time you've made significant changes to the system.

4) Not having a clear vision of what you're trying to accompli before you start.
  a) "I want to make another D&D retroclone but with this one change" is NOT a clear vision.
  b) "I want to make a post-apocalyptic science fantasy game based on 80's cartoon elements" is a clear vision.

5) Not including obvious things for the PCs to do in your setting. ex. the kingdom is at peace, there are no threats, and powerful heroes already guard against danger... great, so what are the PCs supposed to do?

6) Not balancing PC complexity/creation time to system lethality/campaign length. An offender example - Battletech: A Time of War. Character creation involved gaining XP to various abilities over the course of a lifepath, then totalling the XP to determine the level of each of many stats, skills, advantages, and flaws. This often took more than an hour. You can die for any single random shot at any time. This literally happened during to a PC during the first round of combat. A related flaw was the damage to Mechs generally exceeds PCs' capacity to repair it because they pull it straight from the attritional based wargame campaign rules.

7) Not balancing task resolution time to the importance/interestingness of the action. The more trivial the action, the less table time it should take.

I think 4,5 maybe, 6 and 7 are valit

In my experience, 1, 2, and 3 are the difference between something that works and abject failure. Playtesting is the RPG equivalent of having a good editor. You'll never catch all the errors on your own (because many fall into experiential blind spots), so you playtest so other people can help you catch them.

you are right but is not exclusive with TTRPG.

Murder being a sin/crime isn't exclusive to Christianity. Doesn't make it not a deadly sin worth being discussed in series about Christian sins.

If you're doing a series on deadly design sins, failure to iteratively test is one of the biggest and, honestly, in seeing attempts by others at TTRPGs is one of the most common sins committed by designers (even by the bigger game companies who only do it as PR then ignore actual feedback).

Often it's because a designer thinks they know exactly how it's going to work in their head; so why does it need testing? Then it runs headlong into someone with a different set of base assumptions and just like that it plays for them like a janky broken mess because you didn't actually write out something that seemed so obvious to you it didn't need to be written down, but is actually critical to the game functioning (I've run into this regularly in early iterations of my systems when I start testing... usually when what I think would be an edge case a GM might occasionally need to adjudicate turns out to happen often enough it needs a codified mechanic).

It's the reason I basically broke it up into 1, 2, and 3 on my list for emphasis. It realistically would be just one item on the list, but I'd say it's among the most critical sins to avoid.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 10:38:48 AM

Quote from: antonioGUAK on February 14, 2025, 09:06:56 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 08:44:07 AM

Quote from: antonioGUAK on February 14, 2025, 08:32:17 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 08:28:31 AM1) Not playtesting.
  a) Not playtesting outside your immediate circle (if you want to market it).

2) Ignoring playtest feedback when you actually get it.

3) Not testing again each time you've made significant changes to the system.

4) Not having a clear vision of what you're trying to accompli before you start.
  a) "I want to make another D&D retroclone but with this one change" is NOT a clear vision.
  b) "I want to make a post-apocalyptic science fantasy game based on 80's cartoon elements" is a clear vision.

5) Not including obvious things for the PCs to do in your setting. ex. the kingdom is at peace, there are no threats, and powerful heroes already guard against danger... great, so what are the PCs supposed to do?

6) Not balancing PC complexity/creation time to system lethality/campaign length. An offender example - Battletech: A Time of War. Character creation involved gaining XP to various abilities over the course of a lifepath, then totalling the XP to determine the level of each of many stats, skills, advantages, and flaws. This often took more than an hour. You can die for any single random shot at any time. This literally happened during to a PC during the first round of combat. A related flaw was the damage to Mechs generally exceeds PCs' capacity to repair it because they pull it straight from the attritional based wargame campaign rules.

7) Not balancing task resolution time to the importance/interestingness of the action. The more trivial the action, the less table time it should take.

I think 4,5 maybe, 6 and 7 are valit

In my experience, 1, 2, and 3 are the difference between something that works and abject failure. Playtesting is the RPG equivalent of having a good editor. You'll never catch all the errors on your own (because many fall into experiential blind spots), so you playtest so other people can help you catch them.

you are right but is not exclusive with TTRPG.

Murder being a sin/crime isn't exclusive to Christianity. Doesn't make it not a deadly sin worth being discussed in series about Christian sins.

If you're doing a series on deadly design sins, failure to iteratively test is one of the biggest and, honestly, in seeing attempts by others at TTRPGs is one of the most common sins committed by designers (even by the bigger game companies who only do it as PR then ignore actual feedback).

Often it's because a designer thinks they know exactly how it's going to work in their head; so why does it need testing? Then it runs headlong into someone with a different set of base assumptions and just like that it plays for them like a janky broken mess because you didn't actually write out something that seemed so obvious to you it didn't need to be written down, but is actually critical to the game functioning (I've run into this regularly in early iterations of my systems when I start testing... usually when what I think would be an edge case a GM might occasionally need to adjudicate turns out to happen often enough it needs a codified mechanic).

It's the reason I basically broke it up into 1, 2, and 3 on my list for emphasis. It realistically would be just one item on the list, but I'd say it's among the most critical sins to avoid.

ok I will include dont do playtest in the list.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 08:28:31 AM1) Not playtesting.
  a) Not playtesting outside your immediate circle (if you want to market it).

2) Ignoring playtest feedback when you actually get it.

3) Not testing again each time you've made significant changes to the system.

Ah, so you've heard of the FFG game lines...

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 08:28:31 AM1) Not playtesting.
  a) Not playtesting outside your immediate circle (if you want to market it).

2) Ignoring playtest feedback when you actually get it.

3) Not testing again each time you've made significant changes to the system.

4) Not having a clear vision of what you're trying to accompli before you start.
  a) "I want to make another D&D retroclone but with this one change" is NOT a clear vision.
  b) "I want to make a post-apocalyptic science fantasy game based on 80's cartoon elements" is a clear vision.

5) Not including obvious things for the PCs to do in your setting. ex. the kingdom is at peace, there are no threats, and powerful heroes already guard against danger... great, so what are the PCs supposed to do?

6) Not balancing PC complexity/creation time to system lethality/campaign length. An offender example - Battletech: A Time of War. Character creation involved gaining XP to various abilities over the course of a lifepath, then totalling the XP to determine the level of each of many stats, skills, advantages, and flaws. This often took more than an hour. You can die for any single random shot at any time. This literally happened during to a PC during the first round of combat. A related flaw was the damage to Mechs generally exceeds PCs' capacity to repair it because they pull it straight from the attritional based wargame campaign rules.

7) Not balancing task resolution time to the importance/interestingness of the action. The more trivial the action, the less table time it should take.

ditto your list, with the one reservation on clones / retroclones, which to me have been and will likely to continue to be successful, just from historical trend.

I guess a follow up question, can a game make an infraction on this list or even multiple and still be successful? I could probably name a number of RPGs that do/did.

Quote from: Socratic-DM on February 14, 2025, 12:19:20 PMditto your list, with the one reservation on clones / retroclones, which to me have been and will likely to continue to be successful, just from historical trend.

I guess a follow up question, can a game make an infraction on this list or even multiple and still be successful? I could probably name a number of RPGs that do/did.

Regarding retro-clones; that was just part of an example that really needed to be paired with the opposite example for context. The vision is what's going to get people to look at your game.

A lot of the early retro-clones pulled it off because their vision was clear and good; "what if new players had access to these old rules?" because, at the time, if you didn't own the old books, the TSR-era editions may as well not have existed for you.

These days that's not really a problem for most systems. So you need a different type of vision to offer your target audience something they can't already find.

An important note here is that, this isn't to say your vision won't end up using retroclone mechanics to express the vision. Just that a workable vision is not going to have using those mechanics as the core of its being.

This was actually an important lesson I learned in my own game development as, my biggest project got its start as essentially trying to be a fairly generic retroclone/spiritual successor to D&D 4E because me and mine loved the hell out of it in a way no other edition of D&D could satisfy.

As the project developed though I realized it was less the specific mechanics that were what was really appealing (particularly as playtest feedback moved it ever further away from a retroclone and firmly into spiritual successor and then not even that but its own thing) and more the sort of campaigns we'd run with it; big over-the-top heroes akin to Thundarr/Masters of the Universe/Thundercats/The Herculoids, etc.

So my vision morphed to the other one I'd mentioned "Big Damned Heroes in a Post-Apocalyptic Science Fantasy" complete with all the wildness you'd expect of androids, beast-men, mutants, giant robots, lostech as magic, and some real magic in the mix while you're at it, etc.

And I'd like to say I was the one who had the vision of that from the beginning, but actually fully committing to real Science Fantasy instead of just having bits of it implied was probably the last bit of playtest feedback I fully embraced despite all the times I dipped heavier into the "this is really a lost advanced science not magic" being the things I got the most positive player feedback on.

Ultimately, I think it would be safe to say that the bulk of the list I created is just me recounting most of the sins I committed and had to 'repent' from in the process of developing my own game system. Basically, a "learn from my mistakes kids" list.

I'm not sure how to boil this down to a bullet point.  Maybe it's just part of not playtesting outside of your group.  Some designers seem to forget that people will have to run the game using just what is in the book.  I can't think of a specific example right now but it's stuff like incomplete or vague rules that I am sure are clear to the writer but are not so clear to me the reader.   

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 03:41:31 PMThis was actually an important lesson I learned in my own game development as, my biggest project got its start as essentially trying to be a fairly generic retroclone/spiritual successor to D&D 4E because me and mine loved the hell out of it in a way no other edition of D&D could satisfy.

Interesting, I know later you go on to explain that this had less to do with 4th edition from a mechanical aspect and much more to do with the sort of games you ran in it being what you were designing around.

Never played it but I do think it get's a lot of crap from people it doesn't quite deserve, and it had some interesting concepts in it, lore wise especially

QuoteAnd I'd like to say I was the one who had the vision of that from the beginning, but actually fully committing to real Science Fantasy instead of just having bits of it implied was probably the last bit of playtest feedback I fully embraced despite all the times I dipped heavier into the "this is really a lost advanced science not magic" being the things I got the most positive player feedback on.

Okay that's pretty cool though, I typically see it more done in a Jack Vance sort of way where it's left a bit more subtle and in the background, but yeah I think D&D and 80s saturday morning cartoons naturally kind of go together given the overlap in time they had.

A couple years ago I had a short lived game which was set on Mars, and was a mix of John Carter of Mars and Darksun with a splash of Dune. everyone's weapons were made of obsidian and bone, armor was tanned hides and bone, and metal weapons and technology were the magic of the setting.

Quote from: Socratic-DM on February 14, 2025, 05:55:39 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 14, 2025, 03:41:31 PMThis was actually an important lesson I learned in my own game development as, my biggest project got its start as essentially trying to be a fairly generic retroclone/spiritual successor to D&D 4E because me and mine loved the hell out of it in a way no other edition of D&D could satisfy.

Interesting, I know later you go on to explain that this had less to do with 4th edition from a mechanical aspect and much more to do with the sort of games you ran in it being what you were designing around.

Never played it but I do think it get's a lot of crap from people it doesn't quite deserve, and it had some interesting concepts in it, lore wise especially

Oh, I'm not going to pretend 4E's influences are entirely, or even partly, excised. It was by far my favorite edition, but I'm not going to pretend it did no wrong.

The main things that fell away as my own system evolved were the exclusive focus on combat, the overuse of fiddly conditional bonuses (+1 if you're attacking a shadow creature, +2 if the target is bloodied, etc.), the inundation of "powers" you needed to keep track of (2 at-will, 4-5 encounter, 4 daily, 7+ utility powers, plus magic item and racial powers), using narrative durations ("until the end of the encounter" "once per encounter"... I much prefer real durations), and rigid wealth/magic reward math.

The things that stuck around were that every PC should have tactical choices to make when combat happens, players should have a choice to make about their character every time they level up, monsters should have interesting abilities, and the setting needs to build the concept of adventurers into it from the ground up.

In the case of 4E for the latter it was that during their Titanomacy (the Dawn War) the gods teamed up to take on the much more individually powerful primordials... so the modern adventuring party echoes the foundational myth of the setting... heroes team up to fight monsters.

For my setting it was the legend of The First Adventurers; a mythic group of heroes who defeated the Demon Empire that had enslaved the word at the dawn of history and which kept resonating down through subsequent ages such that, wherever there is strife or threat, the people naturally look for a group of adventurers to appear to face the challenge.

The present post-apocalyptic age is rife with dangers beyond the capabilities of the few remaining strongholds of civilization (who can just barely hold their strongholds) and so must rely on brave adventurers to bring an end to the dangers of the monster-haunted ruind in the wilds and allow civilization to reclaim what had been lost to the Cataclysm.

Completely orthogonal to 4E was a decision to split the class concept into an equally weighted and siloed background (all non-combat traits) and class (all combat traits) to remove the pressure to only pick combat options (due to the importance of surviving combat to keep adventuring) and a decision to extremely flatten the curve of combat bonuses* so that a mass combat system could be implemented in a way where no conversions were needed for PCs to participate directly in the outcome.

Those flattened bonuses (only hp and damage scale instead of to-hit and defenses also scaling) meant that both the weakest and significantly stronger opponents could be used across the entire campaign (you just needed more of the weaker ones at higher levels, but in the double to quadruple range instead of tens to hundreds of times as many you'd need in 4E to use a critter as a threat without completely re-statting it or a higher level threat just one-shotting you party).

The end result can play a lot like 4E at the table, but has a lot more codified non-combat systems, a lot fewer fiddly things to track, and a more linear rather than quadratic scaling (it takes until level 6 to roughly double your initial combat capabilities, and at the end game of level 15 you're about four times stronger than you were at the start).

* 4E scaled up all four of to-hit, AC, hit points, and damage with every level... resulting in a quadratic increase in performance and a narrow band in which various opponents could even be a threat to the PCs without either being trivial (indeed, one high level module for 4E included a veritable sea of ghouls... thousands of them... as being merely DIFFICULT TERRAIN for the encounter) or completely overwhelming (at +3 levels to you, your ability to drop a monster was roughly halved relative an even level one, while the monsters ability to drop a PC was roughly doubled... in a thirty level game that means maybe 10% of the existing monsters can even be used and none can really be placed randomly).