“Good artists create. Great artists steal” is a quote I like to use a lot because I think it is valuable advice. You may remember from a previous post, in my journey to being a great artist, I stole the quote. therefore, I can now use it whenever.
So what does this mean for us, as ttrpg developers? It means we can draw upon the collective experience of the 30+ years of tabletop development. We have examples that rose out of dark to become super successful, we have examples that show that a new edition does not mean a better edition, and even examples that are fatally flawed designs. We can learn from other designer’s mistakes and steal their successful results to make our games even better.
There are a few layers to this: taking, experiencing, and extrapolating. The easiest and first step of this is simply taking the mechanics you like from games you play and putting them in your game. This is nice because you know the mechanics are already fun and you have determined you like them already. This method struggles because your game is different, and when you quickly and simply put a mechanic in your game without necessarily understanding why it is good, you can end up with an awkwardly fitting piece in your game.
Going beyond that, you can do a bit of research. You can read and experience a bunch of games to see how their mechanics work before putting them in your game. This will broaden your horizons as a designer, and expose you to many mechanics and combinations of mechanics that you can learn from. This is exactly what I mean when I say “great artists steal”. We have a huge bank of knowledge in already existing roleplaying games that we can experience to see how different designs work. By reading and experiencing how those game play, we can better understand if each mechanic fits our particular game.
The last layer of this theft of experience, is copying the design structures of similar types of games and using the successful ones in your game. This is the least fleshed out layer because we as a ttrpg design community do not have great design sharing methods; the internet and forums have helped improve this quite a bit in recent years. The basics of this process is looking at games and understanding their core design goals and experiences. Then matching the designs that deliver on these experiences. When you do that with enough games, you will see similar designs that emerge, EVEN IF THEIR MECHANICS ARE DIFFERENT. That is where you can start to explore and understand what designs you need to create, how they feel, and what mechanics create them. From this you can steal those designs that you like, and put them in your game. It is this step where I believe that true innovation in the ttrpg space happens.
Let me know if this was useful to you and what games you want to, or don’t want to steal from. If you like what I do, you can join the discord for my system, or follow me on facebook or twitter.