I hit some huge milestones this month and have some amazing stuff to share!
Layout first pass is done!
Every bit of text I had written for the book is now laid out! For the first time, I have an approximate page count at 132 pages. I expect that number to change as I create the index, finalize the appendix, and add in the final art pieces.
As I approached the end, getting through the final section was tough. Even knowing I was approaching the finish line, it was difficult to press on because i had saved the work I was least excited about for last. When I finished the last page, I expected to know right away that I was done, but it was hard to convince myself that I hadn’t forgotten something! I went back through the book and discovered that I was, in fact done.
It feels amazing to have hit such a large milestone so far ahead of what I had anticipated. So now I’m planning out my next steps.
What’s next?
For now, I’m taking a short break. Nothing too long, just enough to refill the well. I’ve been inspired on a board game project and wanted to practice making and playtesting with paper prototypes, a skill which is very relevant for all my game design!
But for Far Lands, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Polish: My first pass was rough in places, and it’s going to need a fair amount of polish. Text and page element alignment, style consistency, spot art, copy editing, and filling in a few blanks I left. You can see a few rough spots here:
Final testing: I am planning on playtesting some variants and tweaks to streamline the rules and terminology slightly. Now that the rules are all laid out visually, it’s easier to see that some of the terms I use are clunky, or ideas that could be explained more concisely.
Sensitivity reading: In the near future, I hope to contract a sensitivity reader to look over a few specific passages as well, as I want to make sure to communicate clearly and compassionately about the real-world history of imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation of indigenous peoples by historical “explorers.”
But in addition to this polish work, I have a few exciting events to talk about!
Upcoming live stream!
In late may, I’m going to be streaming a Far Lands demo with Open the Gates Gaming on their twitch channel. I met them at Pax East late last month at an accessibility office hours event they hosted and they had a lot of amazing advice I am excited to put into practice. Expect more details as the date approaches!
First convention demo
I facilitated a game of Far Lands at Somercon over the weekend! It was my first time running a convention game, and the nerves were intense, but I could not be happier with how it went!
The players created an archipelago of islands caught in a time loop. They scaled the crystalline cliffs of the island they believed to be the source of the loop, were lured into losing time relaxing a hot spring cavern, and finally found and slew the Time Worm that was slowly devouring the world.
During the journey, the chronomancer Solomon used up the last of his time to hold the sands of time still for long enough for the team to reach the mysterious cabin where it all began. The soothsayer Athyar finally understood the lesson that Solomon had been trying to teach him- that there’s more to life than always preparing for the future. The vanguard Brigg finally forgave himself for Solomon’s death in a past iteration of the time loop, an event that Solomon had long since forgiven him for. And Brigg and the automaton he crafted, Tau, finally came to see one another as father and son.
The narrative arcs these players crafted really made me fall in love with Far Lands all over again. My goal has been to make a games that allow people to tell the kind of stories I love, and I think I’ve made something really great.
I did learn a lot about running convention games though! There are a lot of little things to tweak about how I get set up and how I facilitate the game when under a tight time constraint. But I couldn’t be more excited for next time.
There’s an adage in economics that seems obvious, but highlights something that’s critically important to understand in game design: “People respond to incentives.” I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately, and while the examples I use here are largely horror rpgs, the lessons are applicable to just about any tone of game.
I had the opportunity to play Delta Green recently, a game inspired strongly by Call of Cthulhu. It was an amazing experience, thanks to a game master dedicated to creating an immersive experience that responded to our characters. It had just enough real-world details to make it feel like something that could plausibly happen. the tension at the table was palpable at times. However, during the game, I noticed something interesting: we were all playing our characters very cautiously.
After the game, I had a chat with the game master about it, and he said he’d noticed that every time he ran the game. It’s hard to tell stories about characters who push through the fear to investigate further, or who do something that a genre-savvy player might know spells their doom. Part of this is because people get attached to their characters and don’t want to see them suffer- which is understandable, but we all knew what we signed up for.
And yet: we never went into the spooky house, we just burned it down. We never investigated the sounds from below the ground, we just collapsed the entrance. We never learned what was really going on and were happy to get out alive. It was an immensely satisfying play experience… but it was not a good story.
This isn’t a problem that veterans of this type of game have, or of any hyper-lethal old-school RPG, for that matter. But why is that adage of “drive your character like a stolen car” is much easier said than done?
There was a trade-off made in the design of Delta Green: Creating the right feeling at the table and making it easy to tell the right kind of story. And to find out why it works out the way it does, we have to look closer at the incentives the game provides to the players.
What are incentives?
An “incentive” is anything that motivates someone, for good or ill. Something that spurs someone to action. Incentives make you want something (or want to avoid something). There are broadly two types of incentives, described aphoristically by the phrase “carrot and stick.” If you want someone to do something, you can offer to reward them if you do… or punish them if they don’t.
Incentives, importantly, always provide a choice. Unlike a rule which says “you must,” incentives always propose “if you do…” (If you take the gold, you will be cursed. If you betray your friends, you will be paid). They’re more subtle than a hard-and-fast rule, however they can be very powerful yet deceptively easy to overlook when designing a game.
So what were the incentives doing in Delta Green?
Incentives create a feeling
Following in the footsteps of “cosmic horror” games before it, like Call of Cthulhu, each character has a pool of sanity points. Whenever a character encounters something frightening, mind-bending, or supernatural, they may permanently lose some amount of sanity points. And while it’s possible to gain them back one or two at a time, you lose them much faster than you could ever regain them.
This fits the concept that the cosmic horror genre has of sanity- when you know too much of the truth, your grip on reality becomes more and more tenuous, and you can never un-learn what you’ve learned, never un-see what you’ve seen. And if you run out of sanity points, your character is permanently removed from the game. Whether they flee, or die, or just become an NPC under the GM’s control, they are now no longer playable.
The largest effect of sanity points is the feeling it creates in the players. That feeling that something is being lost that can never be regained. And that feeling instills in the players some of the fear and dread that their characters experience. This is a part of what created that atmosphere of tension and dread at the table that made the moments of release when we made it out all the more cathartic.
But if it evoked the right feelings, why didn’t it create the right kind of story?
Feelings create action
It’s simple, when you think about it: The fear of losing our sanity points made us behave more cautiously. As the economist say, we responded to the incentives. Even though it was our characters in danger, not us as players, we feared losing our characters through the proxy of losing sanity points.
It might have been a more interesting narrative if we investigated further, but that wasn’t the pattern of play the game incentivized us to pursue. Doing so would be directly against not just the interests of our characters, but against our own interests. If we did decide to look further and our character witnessed something traumatizing, we as players would be punished with the threat of losing our characters!
But why is this simple thing, ticking down a number on a sheet, so powerful at creating fear in the players at the table?
The Endowment Effect and Loss Aversion
People by and large hate to lose things they have. If you give someone $5 and then take it away, they will feel like they have less than they started with. This is known as the endowment effect (or “divestiture aversion”), and it’s a well-studied phenomenon in psychology. People tend to value more highly things they already have than things they could stand to gain, and so letting go of things hurts more than it should.
Likewise, loss aversion tells us the simple truth that people just hate to lose. It feels worse to lose something that it is to gain it in the first place. Losing two sanity points feels more bad than gaining two sanity points feels good, so the outcome is net negative.
A graph of perceived value of gain and loss vs. strict numerical value of gain and loss. A loss of $0.05 is perceived as having a greater utility loss than the utility increase of a comparable gain. (From Wikipedia)
These psychological effects seem to be very consistent and powerful across numerous studies. This is incredibly useful to us as designers, because it gives us our stick from the “carrot and stick” aphorism.
It’s clear to see now what was going on in Delta Green. Our fear of losing sanity points made us feel some of the fear of our characters. This created the right feeling at the table, but caused us to act in a predictably over-cautious way.
Can you have both?
But is it possible to get both the right feel at the table and the right kind of story? Absolutely! I mentioned previously that experienced players in this genre don’t tend to have this problem. So why is that?
This is largely because experienced players have learned, after much demonstration, that losing your character is the point of this type of game. It’s inevitable. For many, it’s a lot more fun to enjoy the ride down and go out in a blaze of glory. Or, some might learn to lean into the paranoia and revel in outsmarting the horrors without succumbing to them.
But it’s generally true that newer players of any TTRPG are much more likely to become very attached to their characters, and experience a lot of painful bleed when their character suffers. By contrast, more experienced players have often learned to separate themselves from their characters more. They’ve experienced their characters suffering, and know that they, as a player, came out ok. And they tend to be more comfortable taking on an authorial role, looking for the most interesting outcome, which isn’t always success.
And so through focusing on the overall narrative, experienced players can overcome the trade-off and get both a good story and the right feeling at the table. You can feel the fear created by the threat of the stick, but push through it and do the more interesting thing anyway. But is there a way to make it easy for new players to get both?
Let’s see what happens if we invert the incentives.
Carrots (and other little treats)
Fear and Panic, by Lyme is the perfect game to contrast with my experience playing Delta Green, because it almost perfectly reverses the incentives created by the sanity points mechanic.
In Fear and Panic, when you see something that challenges your sanity, rather than losing sanity points, you gain fear points. This flips the loss aversion on its head: we’re no longer losing something, we’re gaining something, even though for our characters , the situation is the same.
And unlike in Delta Green, where running out of sanity points causes a massive punishment -losing your character forever- in Fear and Panic, fear can be spent for bonuses to rolls or to activate special actions… but only for actions that demonstrate your fear or instability like fleeing, lashing out violently, obsessing over a task, or having a prophetic vision. But gain too much fear and you might pick up scars that permanently change your character.
“A survivor can go the whole game without ever being scared, but with no fear to spend, they may not survive for long.”
Fear and Panic, p. 14
Suddenly, it’s easy to imagine as a player wanting to go investigate that sound. Being excited to go into a spooky house in the woods. Because we want those fear points to spend; they just seem fun! So our investigators are suddenly curious, risk-taking, and getting a lot more up close and personal with the horrors.
But fear points get us both coming and going: once we have the points, we want to spend them. Because we want to succeed, we want the bonuses, so we’re more likely to act in a way that will let us spend the points. And now our investigators are also erratic, self-destructive, obsessive… all the things we as an audience would want to see from a character who’s seen too much.
Another example:
The only other game I’ve seen that use points so effectively like this is Apocalypse Keys by Rae Nedjadi.
In Apocalypse Keys, each character contains a monstrous nature that threatens to overcome them. You as a player can earn points by leaning into your character’s monstrous nature- any number of points you want. And you can spend those points for bonuses to rolls. But spend too many and roll too high, you overshoot your target in a destructive way: a “catastrophic success.” And if you hold onto too many without spending them, you risk losing control to your monstrous side, with disastrous results.
So… can you have both?
It seems like using something like Fear and Panic completely fixes the problem we have- it’s now easy for players to create a story that matches the genre expectations. But there’s a critical difference in the tone of the game. Where players had been afraid to investigate too closely, now they’re excited. This source of easy tension is gone. And depending on the player, that might be ideal. In a lot of horror games, the goal is not to scare the player, but to scare the characters. But some players might want to be scared, to feel that tension, for the same reason a lot of people love horror movies.
Fear and Panic addresses this somewhat by making most high-stakes challenges more difficult. So much so that they’re unlikely to succeed without some fear to spend. That fear of failure is a handy motivator, but it’s less powerful that that ticking clock of sanity. Some other games, like Dread, us other means to build tension. (Like a physical tumbling block tower, in the case of Dread).
But most often, it simply falls to the Game Master. skilled GM can evoke a horrifying tone through skillful narration and writing. Does the ease of pushing players towards their character’s fears rather than away make up for the loss of that feeling of… loss? I don’t know yet. And I’m sure it is different from group to group, but I’m very excited to find out.
So as before, creating the right tone and the right type of story requires a degree of skill and experience… just this time more from the GM than the players. The game has focused its attention towards structuring incentives to create the right type of story, and less towards creating the right feeling in the players. It’s doing more of its work in a different place, so a different part of the game is easier to run.
Where does that leave us?
I am left trying to imagine a game that tries to do both. Would it work as well to build a game where a character loses something meaningful if they don’t go investigate further? Perhaps if you don’t go investigate that noise, you lose more than just an opportunity to find out more. You’re giving in to the way things are. Letting them be. You lose some of your passion. But maybe if you go investigate, you may keep that passion and curiosity, at the risk of physical danger. In this case, we get a game about the fear of complacency, of ennui, of giving up and becoming unimportant to the story.
For now, it’s just a thought exercise. All of the games we’ve discussed today achieve what they set out to do with flying colors by creating the right incentives. We can create tension and drama by threatening consequences. We can get players to take actions they normally wouldn’t by promising a reward. Even acting against what’s best for their own character for a more interesting story.
As designers, one of our great powers is to get people to have fun in ways they wouldn’t think to do on their own. Knowing how to create the right incentives and understanding the incentives your mechanics are creating are the key to shaping the experience of the game and the structure of the story.
Take a look at a any game you have on hand. Pick just about any mechanic and ask yourself: What does this mechanic make me want to do? What does this make seem fun? The answer may often surprise you.
I didn’t make nearly as much progress this month as I did for my previous updates (December, January and February), but that’s because I was occupied with the two things that inspired the game most: Travel and conventions. Specifically, I spent two weeks in New Zealand, and then attended Pax East!
As I write this now, I’m exhausted, but at the same time my mind is buzzing with ideas and motivation. But as I talked about last month, I have to let myself rest, too. This month has been a whirlwind, but it’s done so much to refill my creative well.
So I want to take this chance to talk a bit about the specific trip that inspired Far Lands in the first place.
Olympics National Park, 2021
Five years ago, I went to visit Olympics National Park, to the northwest of Seattle. The park is home to three very intensely varied landscapes: the rugged coastline, featuring beautiful jagged rock formations; one of the only temperate rain forests in the world; and spectacular mountainous alpine forests with meadows of wildflowers.
It was hiking up Hurricane Ridge when the idea first struck me. I was talking with my brother about diceless games.
“In a diceless game,” I remember saying, “The source of randomization for each player is the other players. You never know what they’re going to say. Like in a game of Microscope, you have to adapt to the other players ideas on the fly.”
“But I feel like you need some direction,” my brother said (Paraphrasing significantly- I don’t remember exactly who said what). “If you’re just dropped in without guidance, it can be really hard to come up with good ideas on the spot.”
(you may recognize this idea from my post about white space in game design)
“Yeah, I think that’s what random tables are good for,” I said after some thought. “One of my favorite things in worldbuilding games like Microscope and The Quiet Year is justifying stuff that seems contradictory. It’s what I love about random tables too, especially when you combine multiple elements and explain how they fit together.”
(This idea would eventually become the core of the way regions are created in Far Lands!)
The Distance
As we continued to hike, I mulled over that idea and looked out over this view:
I remember distinctly the feeling I had. I looked down into the valleys and wondered: what’s hidden by those trees? What would it be like to wander through that forest? I realized that, in theory, I could go find out. But the splendor of the view put into me that feeling of the sublime, that combination of awe and terror of the power and beauty of nature.
The snow-capped mountains across the valley seemed so large as to be unreal. They dominated the skyline, their presence a physical weight on my mind, as if their mass exerted its gravity on me across that distance. What would the world look like from their peak, I wondered. What would I see on the other side?
And for a moment I felt as if I was looking in a mirror. If I were to stand on that mountain peak and looked in just the right direction, I would see the very spot I was standing on now.
And as I imagined looking back at myself from that mountaintop, exhausted from the climb, I realized I would feel the same awe and curiosity about the land I was traveling through now. Everything around me would blend together from afar into one landscape, and the same drive I feel to climb that mountain would push me to explore here.
That thought spurred me to look closer at the landscape immediately around me, and what I saw was nothing I had expected.
The Details
This trip happened to coincide with 2021 Western North America heat wave (a horrifying and tragic extreme weather event precipitated by climate change). At the time when we were hiking up hurricane ridge, it was 80 degrees. We were hiking in shorts and t-shirts or even tank tops, and sweating profusely in the heat and sun.
And yet… there was snow on the ground.
The temperature gradient between our heads and our feet was unreal- I could feel the cold in the air up to the level of my shins. One clever hiker scooped up fistfuls of snow in a shirt, tied up the ends, and hung it around his neck to slowly melt and cool him off. It was unlike anything I have ever experienced then or since.
And with the heat wave came an unseasonably early bloom of the wildflowers on the mountain.
And we encountered a black-tailed deer quite closely!
A Discovery… and a challenge
As we hiked through the snow, our feed freezing and our heads sweating, we noticed something that made us worry:
We had heard rumors setting out that one or more mountain lions (cougars) had been spotted in the area. I would learn years later that only a few weeks after our visit, a hiker was attacked and badly injured by a hiker on that very trail. I don’t believe we were ever in any danger, traveling in a group as we were. The threat felt real in that moment, but it was also exciting to know that there was so much more going on in that place that I couldn’t see, revealed only by hints and clues.
The next day
The rest of the trip was just as incredible. I’ll gloss over the details, but the temperate rain forest felt utterly surreal and alien to me, and we encountered countless surprising moments that caused me to re-evaluate the world around me. A stray beam of sunlight illuminating a duckling. A waterfall producing a double-rainbow as it cascades into a crevasse, utterly invisible until you’re right upon it. A row of cairns built on the beach where they would be swept away by the incoming tide.
I came back from this trip with a large part of the game already formed in my head: a GMless game about building a map first by what you see in the distance, and then by what you discover when you actually set foot there. I wanted a game that let you wonder what will I find there, and then go find out. And I wanted a game where you could talk with your companions along the way and learn more about eachother as you discover the world around you. That’s what Far Lands is to me.
And as we approach the five year anniversary of starting to work on this game, it’s nearing completion- at least of the first draft of the layout!
Last month, I wrote about how I had completed more than half of the work that I expected me to take all year. As of today, I’ve I’m almost completely done with my initial layout pass! All that’s left is the long-form sample of play and the appendix. But there’s still a lot left to be done after this initial pass! Alignment, consistency, copy-editing, and accessibility are all extremely important.
This post is going to be shorter because it’s a short month, and also because I’m going getting ready for some travel. But I still want to share some of what I’ve learned this month in work on Far Lands
One of the quick-start scenarios
What I missed
Doing layout for Far Lands has forced me to reckon with every single word I wrote, and it’s been revelatory. I have noticed a lot of gaps in the manuscript I had totally missed. Tables with empty slots, TODOs I’d forgotten, paragraphs that I’d intended to re-write. I am very grateful that this process has forced me to look over every single part of the game. If I had passed it off to someone else at this point, those gaps could have presented a real problem!
I talked last month about using white space in your game design, but this space was not intentionally left blank. Oops! But it’s been exciting to re-engage with the game design part of the process
Leaving the best (worst) for last
When I started, I laid out my plan for the year, putting things in an order that I felt made sense to me. That order changed a bit as I went, but I realized at some point that I had put them in order of my confidence.This helped in some ways… and hindered me in others.
The first sections I laid out I was very confident in the text, the rules, and had a clear vision of the layout. This really helped me build my familiarity with the tools. I was able to implement my vision without worrying about having to edit the text too much. By the time I got to the more challenging sections, I already familiar with the tools and the style of the book. As a result, the work shifted from figuring out a visual identity to figuring out how to organize a challenging text.
But it’s also meant that as I go, I’m feeling more tentative about the text. I knew the narrative journal entries were going to have to be edited for length to fit on a page. I knew some of the scenarios needed content filled in. I knew some of the tables were going to be challenging to make readable. And so the work got harder to engage with. So I needed to give myself a bit more grace. Which brings me to my next point:
Don’t push too hard
I talked in my previous far lands update about weaponizing my perfectionism to make steady, incremental progress. I mentioned that I was worried I would push myself to burnout. I’ve been continuing to approach this system cautiously, and as expected, I started running into the limits. Some days, I just end up fully booked with things that are very important to me. Trying to push through to get just a little bit done will keep me up too late or pull me away from stuff I will really miss if I have to decline. And on those days, knowing that I haven’t gotten it done weighs on me all day. It prevents me from fully enjoying stuff I know I could otherwise enjoy more!
And what I realized is it’s not hard to see those days coming- from looking at my calendar, it’s not hard to know what days I’m going to struggle to fit it in time-wise. So I can designate a day when the reminder doesn’t pop up and know that’s a “rest day.” Or more realistically, otherwise occupied. Because it’s not really a rest day. And that’s kind of a problem…
Gas, Steam, and Battery
There’s a theory that I’ve seen a lot about how do deal with limited energy called spoon theory. A lot of folks may be aware of it already, but it breaks down to the metaphor that each day you have a limited amount of metaphorical spoons. Each task costs a spoon, sometimes more than one if it’s a hard task! And every day you have a different number. It’s a practical metaphor that really helps conceptualize how you’re spending your energy and how much energy different tasks take.
I have a personal distinction I like to make between three different kinds of tired: Out of gas, out of steam, and out of battery. They map pretty well to classic TTRPG stats (and philosophy, but we’re here to talk about ttrpgs) of body, mind, and spirit,
Out of gas is physical exhaustion. You may want to keep going, but your body says no. This could be in the form of tired muscles, your natural circadian rhythm telling you it’s time to sleep, or the body shutting down when you’ve carried too much stress for too long.
Out of steam is mental exhaustion. You are out of willpower, have no more drive to continue. Whatever you’re doing isn’t fun anymore, and any effort you put in is going to be halfhearted or pull from internal reserves that borrow from tomorrow. It’s hard to make choices or take decisive action.
Out of battery is social or sensory exhaustion. You don’t have the battery left to engage with people in the way you want to. Conversations get hard to follow and it’s easy to get overwhelmed or confused. You may still want to be around people and be interested in what’s going on, but just don’t have whatever it is you need to comport yourself or keep yourself together in the moment.
Far Lands uses Health, Supplies, Morale, and Orientation as the resources. Though I’m actually in the process of playtesting a change to simplify this system down to a single track!
This system has served me well in deciding when it’s time to head home from an event- am I out of gas, out of steam, or out of battery? The way I recover from those is very different! Out of gas I can stretch, drink water, eat some food. Out of battery I can step outside and get a moment of quiet. Check in with myself, do some solitary activity until I feel centered enough to re-engage. Out of steam, though, is often the what signals the end of the night, or just means I need to shift to a new activity. Many times I’ve found myself tired and disengaged, out of steam, but found myself having a conversation with someone about one of my passions and suddenly be reinvigorated.
The only way this works is to check in with myself, to determine which I’m feeling and know how to respond. Like the spoon theory, I have a different amount of gas, steam, and battery each day, and different activities take a different amount of each, and like spoons sometimes they can be easier or harder to recharge.
Expanding the theory
I’ve been reading Structuring Life to Support Creativity, by Sandra Tayler, which has a lot of amazing advice and journaling exercises for creative folks. Some of those, I have found instantly useful. After taking some time to identify my priorities, personal values, and the core pillars of my life, one of the exercises had me list tasks and rank their cost on five categories: Willpower, decision fatigue, tracking, emotional burden/guilt, and anxiety. Another had me categorize tasks that refilled my creative energy or drained my creative energy.
It’s always the case that some days leave you feeling more drained than others in energy, focus, creative juice, and passion. And some days might be draining in different ways. A day full of stressful news might leave me emotionally exhausted. A day of meetings might leave me socially exhausted. A day of solving complex technical puzzles might drain my creative energy.
This system struck me as really similar to my Gas, Steam, and Battery theory, but it has a few more categories. I don’t have clever metaphors for those resources though. I’m going to have to keep thinking about how to poetically categorize the different types of mental energy that those represent!
Refilling the well with intentional rest
Putting the pieces above together, moving forward I want to build in for myself periods of intentional rest. I mentioned above that it was hard to enjoy things because I felt like I was falling behind on my goal. But in the same way, it was hard to rest and refill my creative well, my spoons, my battery, my steam, because I felt a degree ofguilt and/or shame that I was leaving some work un-done.
So instead, I’m making an alternate “win condition” for my daily goal. Either make progress, or intentionally rest. And some days are going to be set aside for one or the other, based on what I feel I need. One day I might decide to do more because I’m energized to work, but one day I might designate as a rest day because I’m feeling burned out.
But what is intentional rest?
Intentional rest is distinguished from unintentional rest. Which is to say, not accidental, and with a set intention. It’s different from just taking a break, because while that can give a needed respite from an intense or boring activity, it can often lead you to activities that don’t really recharge you. And often these breaks can feel like a failure, like something shameful. But with intentional rest, you are setting yourself up for success, because it has a goal.
Imagine dedicating yourself fully to rest. Lower the lights. Put on comfy clothes. Get warm. Make your favorite tea. Settle down with a book or a show. Whatever you do may be mindful or mindless- whatever works best for you to refill. But the important thing is to acknowledge that this will help you achieve your other goals. This rest isn’t an embarrassing failure, it isn’t something you’re forced into by running yourself ragged, and it isn’t a shameful indulgence. It is strategic and necessary (to quote Everything Everywhere All at Once).
Self care, as I have been trying to internalize for quite some time, isn’t selfish when it helps prepare you to care for others and fulfill your other responsibilities.
Customize your rest
Eating well, sleeping well, chatting with friends, whatever mindfulness practice you care to implement, different activities recharge different types of energy. And you can build your rest time with that in mind. Consider for yourself which activities cost you the most of your different types of energy, and which activities replenish different types of energy.
A lot of activities will have a cost in one type of energy but replenish a different type! Hanging out with friends costs me social energy, but replenishes my creative energy, but writing is the opposite! I run low on creative energy… but get excited to talk about what I’m writing, so those activities complement one another perfectly!
As a result, your personal intentional rest may not look like rest to an outside observer. For example, I find intense puzzle games very restful, despite requiring a lot of mental energy and focus. But because the stakes are low, it recharges me emotionally to deal with anxiety and difficult decisions. Running costs me physical energy but recharges my focus. Doing chores diffuses anxious jitters but costs me some willpower to get started.
What does your rest look like? How do you recharge different types of energy?
Next month, I hope to report back with the approximate final page count of Far Lands, but currently it’s just over 100! That’s about half the length of Masks: A New Generation. I’m interested to see how much that changes as I go through the next stages!
This is part 2 of my series about making mechanics easier for players to engage with. For the previous part, check out part 1: Cognitive Load
A few years ago, I sat down with to run Masks: A New Generation with a new group for the first time. After introducing the players to the basic mechanics and making characters, we got started. As things kept rolling along, the hero team confronted a giant robot terrorizing a city park, and I noticed one of the players, a veteran of Dungeons and Dragons, had barely spoken up in the fight. Shifting the spotlight, I asked them directly what they wanted to do to try to stop the robot. They looked at their sheet, at the list of, moves, and back at me, and said:
“I don’t know. What can I do?”
This is a difficult spot as both a GM and a player. If you have ever asked your players “what do you do next?” only to get blank stares, you know how this feels. “Anything you want,” is not a helpful answer. In a Dungeons and Dragons style of game, players might have an explicit list of skills and abilities.
But in a Powered by the Apocalypse game like Masks, your choices are left totally open. Instead, the moves are written to trigger based on the narrative situation within the game. You can’t simply choose from a list, you have to invent a course of action, and then see what move, if any, is most relevant. And to a player used to a more constrained set of options, this wide-open decision space was paralyzing!
I’ve grown a lot as a game master since then, and in hindsight, I could have done a better job presenting courses of action (the robot is about to stomp on an ice-cream truck! A building nearby is in danger of collapsing!) But this experience is what lead me to recognize a critical difference in design philosophy that has shaped how I design and run games ever since.
What is white space?
This space was left blank on purpose
White space in design is, quite simply, where there is nothing written. Not just blank space on the page (though this may be the case), but also where there are gaps in the rules or setting. You can see this most clearly in any well-written setting book or adventure module. If the designer knows what they’re doing, they’ll intentionally leave gaps for the players (the GM is also a player) to make it their own at the table.
But in designing rules and systems, it can be a bit harder to notice.
Out-of-scope whitespace
There are a few places you can spot white space in a design. The most obvious is around the edges, outside the scope of what the game is about. Because a game or an adventure is finite, there will always be things left out. Deciding what to leave unwritten can be easy: You don’t need sailing rules in a game set in a desert. You don’t need to explain what’s on a continent across the sea in a module set in a single city.
Sometimes, though, a designer will leave a gap in the design that is surrounded by content. A space where something should be, but there is nothing. And those decisions can be much more difficult, and much harder to use effectively.
So why do we do it? And why is it so important?
Why leave it blank on purpose?
We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable
Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell, chapter 11
The high-minded philosophical reason
When designing a game, it’s easy to take on the view that the rules are the game. That the players at the table will execute on the rules, and in so doing, experience the game as intended. But there’s something fundamental missing from that perspective.
I mentioned previously that white space lets players tune a setting or a game to their individual group and preferences. But that’s something of an understatement: White space is what is unique about tabletop role-playing games. Without it, you have not created a tabletop role-playing game; You’ve created a board game. It may have random elements, or choices to make, but every option would be proscribed.
Rules in TTRPGs are different from rules in a board game. Rules are generally clear and rigid, but TTRPGs are flexible and open to interpretation by design. It’s not the rules that are the game, it’s what happens in-between the rules. It’s the conversation.
The rules in a TTRPG are not a merely set of steps to execute, they are sturdy skeleton that supports the wobbly organic bits in-between. They are a vessel that shapes and contains the fluid conversation that pours out of the players.
The blank space you leave within your game is what defines the shape of the game. The part of the game that is not written in the book is the part that is played. And discovering what fills that empty space is a large part of why we play.
Your job as a designer is to structure the conversation so that engaging with it will create the experience that you’re inspired to share
Nathan D. Paoletta, RPG Design Zine
Example: Character sheets
For a concrete example, think of the spaces that are blank on a character sheet:
Look how much of this sheet is just lined paper
The name, stats, abilities, these are all degrees of freedom in the design of a character because they are left blank on the sheet. But even there, there are rules for how those are to be filled in. But look closer on many sheets and you will see something that doesn’t have rules associated with it: a box with lines for notes, character details, backstory, personality, and so on. Things that go beyond and between the rules to explain why and how this character is the way they are.
Even on sheets that don’t have this feature, (Powered by the Apocalypse games are frequently guilty of this), I’ll see players adding notes into margins, the back of the sheet, or even a separate page that explain the details of their character that aren’t enforced or even supported by any game system.
This blank space is what lets a player feel they own and inhabit a character. Even games have characters already defined for you, like Yazeeba’s Bed and Breakfast, have blank space to fill in as you explore the characters through play.
The Practical Reasons
Well-crafted white space is in ttrpg design has very practical benefits:
White space allows for customization. While choosing from a list is quick and easy, there’s nothing that provides more freedom in a design than allowing a player to make up whatever they want (within reason & the bounds of the game) to fill a space. Like with character sheets and settings as described above, when something is left unwritten by the designer, it falls to the players to write it. And the players at the table can often (but not always) come up with an answer that is better for their specific table than a designer trying to make an answer that works for every table could.
White space gets buy-in. When you’ve had the chance to create part of a character, the world, or part of the game system, you naturally feel a sense of ownership over it. You’re intimately familiar with that part of the game because you had a hand in creating it. You feel authority to make decisions about that part of the game. You feel invested in seeing what happens to it next. This is why collaborative worldbuilding at the start of an RPG is so powerful, but it can work the same magic in so many other places.
White space gets you thinking. There’s something compelling about the space on the map that just says “here there be monsters.” The thrill of curiosity and discovery is a huge part of what drives people to play TTRPGs. Just like I mentioned about customization above, the blank space naturally prompts players to imagine what could fill that space. What could possibly explain everything surrounding that gap? To use Blades in the Dark as an example, Lord Scurlock is presented as a mysterious, seemingly-immortal figure whose personal influence is so powerful that he is on an even playing field with some of the most powerful factions in the city. But exactly what he is or what he wants is left totally ambiguous. As a result, the players almost always want to find out, and the GM gets to have fun crafting his sinister plot. As a result, everyone at the table is engaged.
Putting it all together
There’s a rule in horror that the moment you show a monster to the audience, it instantly loses its emotional power over them. When you can’t see it, you’re forced to imagine what it could be. And what each individual imagines is going to be more powerful than anything a writer could come up with or an artist could create.
As long as the space is left blank, the audience/player is compelled to engage, to imagine what could be there. Everyone has their own monster, and the monster can be different every time. That’s the magic of white space.
The Catch
Unfortunately, there’s a big problem with white space. It turns out, can sometimes be really hard to think of an idea on the spot that’s as cool and interesting as you’d like. Sometimes, it feels like breathing. There’s an obvious answer, or, even better, one that violates expectations in an exciting way. But sometimes it feels like being thrust into the spotlight on stage without knowing any of the lines. Like sitting down for test without studying.
Experience helps, but the experience is still highly variable even for the most skilled improvisers. So why is it sometimes so stressful, but sometimes it feels so natural?
Planting seeds: How make white space green
The secret to making white space work is planting seeds. Prompting players so that by the time they’re asked a question, they already have ideas for the answer. Immersing them in the vibes of the game. Showing them the shape of the gap in the puzzle so they know how to craft the missing piece.
This is green space. Rather than a barren field, the blank space is crafted into fertile soil for ideas to grow. What might look like an empty field actually has seeds of ideas already planted under the surface.
Example: For the Queen
The best example of this I’ve ever seen is For the Queen, by Alex Roberts. For the Queen takes the form of a set of cards, each of which has a simple prompt. It begins with the players being told “The queen has chosen you for this mission because she knows you love her.” Players take turns going around the table drawing a card and answering the prompt on it. At the end of the game, everyone responds to the prompt: “The queen is under attack. Do you defend her?”
I was deeply skeptical of this game when I first heard that premise. Surely, I thought, if the cards are the same, even in a different order, the game would play out largely the same way every time! But I could not have been more wrong. Even though the seeds planted by the designer are the same every time the players sit down to play, they will grow differently every game.
I had overlooked an important part of the game. I hadn’t noticed what was missing: For the Queen has zero character creation. The characters are completely blank at the start of the game. Even the eponymous Queen, though you may have a piece of art to inspire you, is a totally blank slate. As I said in a earlier, the part of the game that is unwritten is what part that is played. The characters are left blank, so the game is about discovering who they characters are.
But how does this work? How could you create a character from a completely blank slate with no rules to guide you? When designing the prompts, Alex Roberts had the mantra: “Tell them something they don’t know, then ask them a question about it.” That simple mantra is an incredibly powerful tool for game design, and it’s the secret to making white space into green space.
A sample card from For the Queen
For example, the prompt on this card might look totally open-ended at first, but it actually tells you a great deal: You have a special relationship with the queen, it is known to others, and those others are envious of that relationship, so it must be worthy of envy. But it doesn’t tell you anything about what that relationship is.
The card above brilliantly hides the prompt within a question. It buries the seed, making the hand of the designer invisible while constraining the space of answers to the question. The player no longer has to decide if the relationship is good or bad, or if it’s secret or public. The prompt feels completely open. But when the player starts to answer that question, their answer will naturally fall within the constraints created by the premise of the question. The result will feel as though it is completely their idea.
And yet the player is never alone in crafting their answer to the prompt. They’re guided by the prompt, by the previous answers they’ve given, and by the very premise of the game (the Queen chose you because she knows you love her, after all).
Consider the alternative cases:
What is your relationship with the queen?
Some others at the royal court are jealous of your relationship with the queen.
In the first case, the question feels absolutely impossible to answer, especially if it’s the first card you draw! It’s so wide open, there’s nothing to latch on to. There’s no seed crystal to grow your idea off of.
But in the second case, a player would likely feel they’re being dictated to. This is the way it is- no room for debate! Simply accept the premise and move on.
But when both are put together, the magic happens.
The takeaway: Ask leading questions
The secret is leading questions. I was first introduced to the power of this idea at a seminar at GenCon, and it’s totally changed the way I GM. Whenever you have the chance to ask an open-ended question, you can gently constrain the answers to prompt the other players with ideas for how to answer. If you practice this skill, it will make your a better designer and a better game master.
This instantly fixes the “what do you do next?” problem. To steal an example from that GenCon seminar, instead of asking “what do you do next” until the plot advances, decide on something that would advance the plot, and ask the players a question about that.
Instead of “what do you do before the party,” ask “How long do you wait before arriving at the party? How do you get there?” Is this railroading? No. Because players love to be contrarian, and just as easily as it might prompt the players to answer the question you asked, it might prompt them to say “what if we don’t show up at all?” But that answer still moves the narrative forward.
In the Masks example I gave right at the start, I might have said: “The robot is barreling out of control towards a group of civilians. What do you do to stop it?” The player might choose to prioritize something else, but by doing so they are making a major decision about the direction of the narrative.
No matter the situation, tell them something they don’t know, then ask them a question about it.
Expert mode: Begging the question
A leading question doesn’t necessarily have to be a literal question. In fact, the most challenging but rewarding way to make this happen is to get the players to ask the question themselves. To make this work, you have to beg the question.
To make this work, you need two things:
Craft a compelling hook. Present the players with something so compelling and mysterious that they simply must engage with it. Enough details that they can easily imagine what might go there. This is the seed that the players’ ideas will grow from
Then, resist the urge to explain. It’s so challenging as a designer to leave those spaces blank because we get pulled by our curiosity to fill it in just as strongly as the players, if not more. But you need to leave enough blank space to fit a wide variety of options.
For example, in Wanderhome, by Jay Dragon, one of the items the Ragamuffin could start with is “The Heavenblade, lost after slaying the Slobbering God, that you would never use to hurt another soul.” This immediately prompts questions: What is the Heavenblade? What was the Slobbering God? How did you of all people end up with it?
If you fill your game with interesting hooks, but leave them unexplained, like the horror movie monster, players will be compelled to imagine what fills that space. And whatever they come up with will be better for them in that moment than anything you could write.
This is how you plant seeds. This is what makes your white space into green space.
Late last year, I set myself the goal of finishing the first draft layout for Far Lands by the end of 2026. I have now realized that I was very,very over-cautious with my timeline!
So far, I’ve completed what I expected to be five months of work in one month. I’m almost halfway done getting all the text from the manuscript laid out and looking good on the page. And I’ve learned so much from the process! There’s a lot I could talk about when it comes to layout, writing, and game design that I’ve discovered from working in this form factor. But the biggest difference in my day-to-day life has come from what I’ve learned about overcoming perfectionism.
I won’t pretend this is will be applicable to everyone, or even anyone other than me! This is as much to keep myself accountable and to record what I’m learning for myself as it is for anything else. But if any of this resonates with anyone, I’ll consider that a wild success.
Perfectionism is the real enemy
Starting out, I had a lot of fear that I wasn’t going to be able to live up to my own expectations- that I wouldn’t be able to get it looking how I imagined in my head, that I would burn myself out trying to get it done and lose my excitement for the project, that it would prove impossible to translate onto the form factor I wanted. And this fear was stopping me from even starting, making it feel insurmountable to even think about getting started.
This is, it turns out, textbook perfectionism.
Found this with a quick image search, since blog posts with images every now and then do better apparently. source
I didn’t even realize that this was perfectionism at all. It masqueraded itself as a genuine feeling that I didn’t know how to do this. But at the same time, I couldn’t bear to not be able to get it done.
So… how did I get here?
The introduction page for the Explorers chapter of Far lands
Step Zero
Doing some research, it seemed like one of the ways to break the nasty cycle of perfectionism was to change how I set goals.
For most of my life I held a great degree of skepticism for goal-setting. It seemed so easy to set a goal and so impossible to follow through. Goals seemed to just be a guaranteed source of shame and guilt looking back later. Everything I wanted to accomplish just seemed impossible. How would I even begin? What do I do when I get stuck?
So I’d given up on setting goals and would just… wing it. And a lot of the time that worked! But over time this method required more and more external support and I just kept getting stuck and burned out not knowing what to do all the time.
When I was approaching a big part of the project and didn’t know what to do, I would freeze- paralyzed because I didn’t know the next step. It turns out this comes from perfectionism. I felt like I couldn’t start until I know what I’m doing. Because I might mess it up. And thinking about this is when I unlocked the first part of the problem.
My process didn’t account forstep zero
Step zero: Figure out what step one is
This idea came from the concept of “Session Zero” in running an RPG campaign, and it’s exactly the same idea. Before starting to do any work, spend some time dedicated to figuring out what work needs to happen first. Set expectations, outline the bounds of the work, choose tools, and so on.
This is now the first thing I do for every project. It feels obvious in hindsight, but before this some part of me always expected that I’d be able to sit down and intuitively know what needed to happen without planning because… sometimes I could do that, especially in the school system growing up when the steps are often much more clearly spelled out. But that was an unreasonable expectation for myself.
But…
I started using step zero. And it worked! At first, this made it easier to get started, but I still struggled to follow through. I would sit down, try to break off a piece, and then do that piece immediately. But it was so, so hard to see how that piece contributed to the final goal. The monolith still seemed infinite and impenetrable!
One of the first spreads I laid out because I expected it would be one of the hardest
The monolith is made of bricks
So how do you go beyond just the first step?
My day job has been extolling the virtues of SMART goals for long enough that some of that sank in. I finally realized the problem: My goals were too big, and much too vague. I had no idea how to start doing layout for Far Lands, or any project of that size, because there’s no way to complete a big project in a single step. I need to break it down, and the pieces need to be small. Way smaller than I thought. And just one step at a time isn’t enough.
This dovetails with something else I learned about myself recently. Some tasks are “derailing,” others aren’t. A derailing task comes with opportunities to veer off onto something that seems more urgent… which means the original task will rarely get finished. Tasks like checking email or making a to-do list ballooned out of proportion because they came with all the spin-off tasks they spawned. And breaking down a large project was no different. This is why I only ever got as far as breaking off the first piece before I started trying to work on the project!
Me when I get an email
But if I go into a derailing task with the intention of just writing down all the little tasks, rather than jumping in to doing them right away, it suddenly becomes possible to complete the whole task.
So this time, I tried something different. I broke down the whole thing in one sitting instead of one piece at a time.Without any intention to actually do any of those pieces immediately.
Make a plan without trying to act on it immediately
This totally changed how I’ve been approaching my projects. When I finish a task, I know exactly what needs to happen next. Of course the plan changes over time, but there’s plenty of room for that. It’s completely different from how I’ve worked in the past and it’s unbelievably refreshing.
One of the most recent pages I laid out.
But how can you completely plan out a project without knowing what unexpected hurdles you’ll run into? Well… you can’t. But there are no consequences (in this case) for false starts and experiments. In fact, it will actually help refine the final product by allowing you to explore the space of what’s possible and learn tools and skills. Starting out with some low-stakes exploration helps refine the plan as you go.
Failure is actually part of learning. Who knew?
It feels obvious, but I feel like it’s finally sunk in for me that it’s ok for the first draft to be rough. In fact, it’s better that the first draft is rough because it’s going to need polishing anyway!
So I had my milestones, but how do I go about accomplishing them?
The bricks are made out of atoms
My secret so far has been to weaponize the same perfectionism that prevented me from getting started. Using an app for tracking habits, I made a daily task to “do a bit of layout.” My requirement is very, very small on purpose. Literally any small amount, even a single word, will let me check it off the list. But it bugs me if it’s left incomplete at the end of the day. I hate it.
And that’s something I want to be careful of. I don’t want to slip into feeling guilt or shame if I can’t keep it up every day I never want to feel like I’m falling behind some imaginary standard I set for myself. But as a weapon against avoidance, it’s worked. There must be a balance to strike, but if there is I’m still in the early stages of finding it.
Weaponize perfectionism against itself (carefully)
Activation Energy
There’s one more trick to this method. So often what stops me from doing something I want to do is just resistance to getting started. Gathering the activation energy required for task initiation. But committing to doing the minimum amount of work gets me to open the document. But often just opening the document is the biggest hurdle. Once that document is open, it’s easy to do just a bit of work.
And that’s enough. The very minimum is enough to check it off the list, and with that win comes the motivation. Once I’ve done a bit of work and had that first win, it’s easy to keep going because I remember that it’s fun. Or, when it’s not fun, I remember that it’s progress towards a long-term goal, which is at least satisfying. But it’s that tiny atom of a goal that gets the whole thing going. It primes the pump and gets the metaphorical creative juices flowing.
Prime the pump with an easy win
So what’s next?
It finally feels like this is something I can make real. And more than that, I feel capable of accomplishing that myself. And I’m way ahead of schedule! So where does that leave me?
For one thing, I’m not going to adjust the timeline. I’m going to keep checking things off the list as I get them done. Leaving myself a lot of time to work means I can account for changes in circumstances later. For one thing, I’ll be doing some travel in a few months that will affect my schedule. For another… it feels really good to be so ahead!
But the more practical consideration is that realistically speaking, none of the individual chapters of the book are actually done done. This method has helped me to leave the rough draft rough on the first pass. So once I finish putting everything on the page, that’s only the beginning.
Recently in a game I was running, I had an amazing combat planned. The players were confronting a villain from their past- a pyromancer who used to lead a gang the players had wiped out. I made some really fun stat blocks and mechanics for tracking the burning buildings as the fire spread. The combat went without a hitch. The players had fun, I had a great time running the enemy, but then at the end, one of the players looked at me and asked “so who was that?”
In that moment, I realized I had completely forgotten to sprinkle in the lines of dialog I’d written that would remind the players of who she was. We rolled back and did some flashbacks to the banter that I had wanted to happen, and it worked out ok, but I was frustrated that I’d completely forgotten an important part of the encounter that could have made it so much more impactful.
I can’t count how many times as a player I’ve looked at my sheet at the end of a session and realized I’d completely forgotten a spell or piece of gear that could have solved a problem two hours ago. It’s infuriating and disappointing and can dampen a moment that should be fun to know that it could have been better if only I’d remembered.
As a game master, I think a lot about how to help my players have fun, and as a player, I get frustrated when I’m not having as much fun with a game or system as I could. There are a lot of things that can get in the way of that. As a designer, we try to build systems that will help everyone at the table find the fun and create the type of experience we want, but the systems only work as intended if the players (and the game master is also a player) actually engage with it.
So, what can stop a player from engaging with part of a game? Well, the first step is just remembering that it exists.
This is part 1 of a series where I’ll talk about what can prevent players from using the mechanics you build, with a focus on the various solutions to each problem as deployed in the games that inspire me.
Cognitive load
What is cognitive load?
When designing or reading a game, it can be easy to hold all the systems in your head because you’re only dealing with the system at a mechanical level. However, at the table there’s a lot more going on- tracking social dynamics, spotlight management, narrative flow, role-playing, and maintaining the game state all add cognitive burdens that will cause things to slip. These all add to the cognitive load of the game.
“Cognitive load” is a term that describes how much mental effort it takes to learn something or perform a task, including memory and problem-solving. Basically, everyone has a finite amount of things they can hold in their brain at a time, and so we have to prioritize. In tabletop games, every mechanic adds to the cognitive load of a game, and if a mechanic isn’t important, frequently used, and memorable, it’s going to slip off the plate.
Cognitive load is often broken down into three categories:
Intrinsic load
How difficult is it to understand the new information?
Germane load
How difficult is it to integrate the new information into our existing knowledge?
Cognitive load has been on my mind a lot recently. There are certain things I enjoy a lot as a game master, and things that I struggle with. I have a hard time inventing NPCs to fill the world, and no amount of random tables or prepared characters seem to help. But the history, politics, and geography of the world is as easy as breathing for me, even where I’ve left blank space to fill in later. Running complex mechanics in bespoke puzzle combats is thrilling and engaging, but I get so focused on them I forget to slot in the narrative beats I’d planned to make the story tick.
It’s frustratingly easy for the parts of a game that are more challenging for me to take up the majority of my cognitive bandwidth at the table. They just take up more space. The things that are fun seem to happen automatically because they require less conscious effort, but they still demand mental resources.
When all my bandwidth is dedicated to parts of the game that are heavier on my mental scales, the fun parts start to slip away from me. Conversely, when I’m too sucked into the fun parts of the game in the moment, I’ll forget to employ important mechanics that will keep it fun long-term. I want to be able to do everything! But with a finite amount of resources, the brain prioritizes, and it doesn’t always prioritize the way I prefer.
As a game master and a designer, I want to get more of what I enjoy in a game by reducing the cognitive load of the parts I don’t.
So how can we help people remember?
Solution 1: Reference sheets.
I can’t tell you how often in a game a player knows there’s a mechanic for something but can’t remember the specifics. In a lot of games, this either means digging through the book to find the official rule, or making a ruling on the spot (and I almost always recommend the latter). With a reference sheet, though, players can look down at what’s already on the table and see it’s right there.
A prototype of the “Scenes” reference sheet from my game Far Lands
Reference sheets are important for any game. They reduce the extraneous load of the game by presenting the information you need free of surrounding clutter. The simplified language of a reference sheet can also reduce the intrinsic load.
But most importantly to me, It frees up space to remember other things. When a player knows they can look down at the sheet when they need that mechanic, they don’t have to keep it in their active memory at all times. This means players only have to remember the rule when it’s relevant and can get refreshers as-needed by checking the reference sheet.
At a practical level here are varying degrees of how close-to-hand a mechanic can be: it could be on a shorter “quick play” document, a one or two page list of mechanics like you might see in a PBTA game, or even written on the character sheet in front of every player. Many games have even taken the approach of putting character mechanics on individual cards: Daggerheart, Ironsworn, and 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons all take this approach. The cards mean players can keep only the relevant parts of their character visible and hide irrelevant cards, reducing the extraneous load even further.
The problem with reference sheets, however, is also one of cognitive load. There are diminishing returns to how useful a reference sheet is as you add more and more to it. Every item added to a reference sheet means it will take longer to search it for what you need and increases the visual clutter- adding to the extraneous load. Multiple pages of reference sheets means physical work flipping through them. So a reference sheet needs to be limited to just the systems that are used very frequently (so that players don’t have to keep it in their memory at all times), or the systems used infrequently but which are very important to the experience (to reduce lookups in the book).
For examples, look at just about any PBTA game, but let’s look at the reference sheet from Masks: A New Generation for a specific example:
The moves reference sheet from Masks: A New Generation
It presents only the most important moves, laid out in simple language with clear headings and emphasis on important text. The basic moves will be used constantly, and while veteran players may come to know them by heart, new players will have to re-read them every time because each move is quite complex and unique.
The adult moves, by contrast, are going to be used very rarely- but are very important when they are! They have a significant impact on the narrative so forgetting to use them or how to use them would be deeply unfortunate. I personally take issue with putting the adult moves first on the reference sheet, since a brand new character will not have access to any of them, however having them on the reference sheet is very important for long-form play because players may have so little interaction with those moves they would not have a point of reference for them.
Solution 2: Separation of responsibilities
Another way to reduce cognitive load is to divide it up between players. The most common way this is done is splitting up responsibilities between players and the GM. Using a traditional fantasy RPG as an example, the players don’t need to know how enemy stat blocks work. The GM doesn’t need to remember how every spell the players use works. Each player doesn’t need to know how other players’ character’s mechanics work.
But there’s a fatal flaw:
If you read through the rules of many of these games, you will see nowhere that this separation is written in stone. It’s just a best practice that tables have adopted because it is necessary to run the game at a high level. the more inexperienced the players are, the more of that cognitive load shifts onto the GM to keep the game running, and that leaves the GM with less cognitive bandwidth for tasks like storytelling, role-playing, and spotlight management. It leads to GM burnout and takes away some of the most fun parts of being a game master.
GM-ful games
However, there are games that make this explicit. Belonging Outside Belonging is an awesome example, where responsibility for certain parts of the game are divided between players. Seven Part Pact takes this to the logical extreme, giving each player a full set of unique rules that they are in charge of. These games have been called “GM-ful,” as a contrast to “GM-less,” as they give every player some part of the traditional “game master” responsibilities.
For an example, check out Masks of the Masks, a much darker superhero game inspired by Watchmen. This brilliant game breaks down the responsibilities of the game master into “pillars” that each have responsibility for running a different part of the game:
The four pillars of Masks of the Masks
I love superhero games, but I have always struggled to run them. I have tried to run Masks: a New Generation many times, but I inevitably have burned myself out trying to manage everything I want to do in the game. It’s a goal of mine to figure out a system that lets me run Masks: A New Generation at the level I want without pushing myself too hard. But Masks of the Masks takes a GMful approach. One player runs the day-to-day people of the city. One person runs the government and the law. One person runs the mystery. And one person runs the inevitably-approaching Doom. Each player is game master for the other players, but nobody has to take on the role alone.
Even in a GM’d game, responsibilities can be delegated to players from an overwhelmed GM. Too busy setting up stat blocks to draw interesting terrain? Ask the players to draw the map! Forgetting to track health totals? Give each player some enemies to track health for. In fact, giving players authorship of some parts of the game and the world can help develop buy-in and engagement (I’ll talk about this more in a later post!) and give players something to do in games with strict spotlight management when it’s not their turn (I will also talk about spotlight management in a later post!)
Solution 3: Simplify
This is the hardest but most important as a designer. If players hare having a hard time remembering a mechanic, maybe you have too many. Maybe the systems are too unique and should be combined. If you see players in playtests struggling to remember a mechanic or forgetting to use it, consider if you need it at all.
This is really the core of the problem. The only guaranteed way to reduce cognitive load is to reduce the amount of information. Rules that are too complex increase intrinsic load. Rules that are too unique increase germane load. Rules that are optional or unnecessary increase extraneous load.
Reducing intrinsic load
Make your rules less complex! After your early drafts of the game, make a box that you have to fit your rule into. Then make the box smaller and re-write the rule in that box (without changing the text formatting). Then do it again. This forces you to strip out the least necessary parts of the rule- the exceptions, the qualifiers, the redundancy. Compress it into its most compact form. I promise, the rule will still work.
Reducing germane load
This one requires reading.
One thing you need to make sure your game has is consistency. Create a language for your game and stick to it. Go read other games and pay close attention to the language people use when writing game rules. What games have the most memorable rules? How do they template things?
Magic: the Gathering is an amazing example of this- it uses a lot of phrases like “at the beginning of each upkeep” or “whenever a player draws a card” that are very well standardized (at least, in modern cards). This sort of language has been refined over decades to make it as easy as possible for players to fit a new card into a system they already understand. Compare to Yu-Gi-Oh, where each card uses much more natural language. There may be less work to learn the basic rules (lower intrinsic complexity), but each unique card is much more difficult to understand because they’re so unique (high germane complexity).
Draw Steel is another phenomenal example for this. The game is extremely complex, with a lot of terms to learn like in Magic: the Gathering, but once you learn the language, everything is so well standardized, it becomes very easy to read a new ability and understand what it means, and the language they use is designed to be similar to other games which it follows in the footsteps of.
An example of an ability from Draw Steel
But also: steal. Find other games in the genre of game you’re trying to make and see what they do. Chances are, other people have tried to solve the same problems you have, and come to different solutions. This isn’t to say you should steal ideas from other games (though you absolutely should), but rather that the more similar your game is to other games people have played before, the easier it will be to remember the parts that are different. If there’s part of the game that isn’t important to the theme but is required to make it function, you should see if you can get away with cutting it altogether, but if you can’t, make it similar to what people who have played other games will be familiar with.
If the puzzle-piece edges of your game match up what’s already in the players’ brain, it will fit in without a problem.
Reducing extraneous load
Extraneous load comes in two forms: visual clutter, and mechanical clutter. The first is a design problem that you can approach in a similar way to reducing intrinsic load: Just fit the game into a smaller space. But you can also help by formatting the rules cleanly.
Reducing mechanical clutter is another beast entirely. As a designer, it can be really hard to kill your darlings. We can develop blind spots for things that have been in the game from the beginning but don’t serve it anymore. Remember that none of those ideas are gone forever. Start an ideas document you where you catalog the mechanics that don’t make the cut. Those things may have been necessary scaffolding to get the game to where it is now, but are no longer holding anything up, and you can pack them up to deploy them elsewhere.
To reduce your mechanical clutter, perform an “ablation test.” Pick one mechanic and see what happens to the game if you remove it completely. Repeat this for every mechanic, even the ones you think are critical. If you have to, replace them with the most bare-bones patch you can think of that will let the rest of the game function. Sometimes you’ll be surprised how well the game still works without something you thought was critical.
The bottom line
Every system is going to have a very different shape, and every person has a different shape of brain for all the pieces to fit into. Where some systems might heavily mechanize combat, some might have mechanics for social interactions, for exploration, for puzzle-solving, for crafting narrative arcs. The parts that come naturally to one person will be very different from another. Where one player might struggle to remember tactical options in combat, another player might struggle to remember how to engage an NPC in witty banter.
This comes down to the match between the kinds of fun a player prefers vs what the game provides, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different players (I will definitely write more about this in the future). At a psychological level, it has to do with the points of reference a player has. The more a person has encountered similar things in the past, the more work they’ve already done to make space for that type of thing in their brain, because it can be put together with things they already remember (“XYZ is like YZ, but with the addition of X”). This is at the heart of germane load.
As designers, we know our games by heart, so it can be hard to see what other folks will struggle with. We build the games we want to play, the games that fit well into our own uniquely-shaped memory. So don’t build just for yourself, but for the player who wants to engage with your system but just can’t remember the parts that you know by heart.
Now I just need to remember to apply all this advice myself.
For more on cognitive load, check out this awesome video by Chubby Funster on youtube.
What’s next?
While it might seem like a simpler “rules-lite” game might have less cognitive load, for some players, those games are considerably more difficult because of the difficulty of knowing what to do next. The lack of direction, the blank page, can leave players less experienced with improvising feeling paralyzed. I’ll talk about this in my next post where I’ll go over the difference between and importance of “white space” and “green space” in game design.
As we’re going into the new year, I’ve been thinking about resolutions. After a while of putting it off to work on other parts, over the last month, I’ve built up a good amount of momentum on layout for Far Lands!
I was nervous about doing layout myself- it’s a part of the process I’ve never done before, but after getting some practice with Affinity via the TTRPG Bookmark Jam and getting accepted to run the game at a local convention in my area, I decided to make it my resolution for next year to get the book laid out. I have a clear idea of visual style and I’ve gathered most of the assets and art I need. Now I just need to do the work!
To make the plan loose enough to adjust to unexpected life changes, I broke the book down into sections and distributed them by month. You can see I’m already ahead, which is great, though I don’t expect to stay that way. I gave more time than I thought I’d need to a lot of sections but I expect some sections will take a lot more time than others. By keeping myself accountable to get just a rough draft done each month, I hope to keep up the momentum I’m feeling right now without burning myself out.
Timeline
December 2025 Role sheets (Done!) Sample explorers (Done!)
January2026 Party sheet (Done!) Order of Play handout (In progress) Quick reference tables
February Character creation
March The Team Getting Started
April Exploring the world: Intro Weather Prologue scene
May Exploration Scene Near table
June Discovery scene Start challenge scene
July Finish challenge scene Look Ahead Far table
August Camping Scene Memories and Connections table Epilogue scene
September Scenario template Advanced setup
October All scenarios
November Journal entries – Captain’s Log – Fort Serendipity – The Forge – Spider-goats
December Intro Sample of play Appendix
Sample pages
Check out what I’ve got so far for my sample explorers pages! This is pretty rough- I’m planning to rewrite the descriptions to fit the space better and I need to substitute in the new and improved role sheets. Featuring art by the amazing Tallulah Cunningham!
A spread of two sample explorers, Twine and Wren, featuring art. Twine is a stick-person, made of lashed together wood. Wren is a smaller man in warm clothes carrying a collapsible glider on his back with a bat companion flying over his head.
Speaking of the new-and-improved role sheets, here are a few samples of what those look like now, featuring a few assets by Alderdoodle! I still need to do a playtest with these to see how they feel in play (I almost certainly need more space to answer the character prompts) but they already feel so much nicer than the old ashcan version.
A spread of two role sheets for the Artist and the Cook, featuring their expertise and the types of discoveries they can make
I’ll try to keep posting updates as I go- at least monthly as I check off various sections
What I’ve learned
Affinity is awesome
It turns out Affinity is a fantastic tool for what I want to do. The “Master Pages” feature makes it so easy to create a template for a certain type of page (such as a character sheet) and apply changes to all of them at once! But I’ve also learned that tables in Affinity are… wonky. In some cases it may be easier to just line up the boxes manually, and the vertical / horizontal align tools are so, so useful now that I’ve actually found where those live.
Lower the stakes at the start to build momentum
But most importantly, I’ve learned a big lesson about perfectionism. I was genuinely afraid to get started on this part of the project because I worried I wasn’t going to be able to make it look as good as I imagined, but also afraid to let go of control of it and spend the money to hire someone to do it. I’ve seen time and time again the mantra “First make it exist, make it good later,” and that’s a lot easier to say than to internalize. But what really helped me was to lower the stakes.
Instead of jumping right into the deep end learning the basics of the tools with Far Lands, I joined a game jam I knew I could knock something out for relatively quickly. Something with a deadline, that I didn’t have the same huge level of emotional attachment to. That way, I could feel safe to make mistakes without feeling the emotional burden of failing to live up to my high expectations for myself. And by doing that, I and discovered it wasn’t that hard to create something that looks how I imagine. And making mistakes on the first pass turns out to not really have consequences because I can keep revising it later. All this and reminding myself of the excitement I get from taking an idea and making it real has made it so, so much easier to take the next step. And I’m so excited to see what’s next.
