The 10 Commandments of Game Design (as told by Warren Spector)
If you’re a game master, it’s a pretty safe bet that you want to run as good of a game as you can. If you’re anything like me, you probably stress about making sure people are having fun, that you aren’t screwing things up, and that people are excited to come back next week to slay treasure and find monsters.
Because of that, I like learning about game design, how it drives decisions, how to ensure ‘fun’, and how to make sure that a game or story even makes sense. This leads me to Warren Spector’s 10 Commandments of Game Designs, and while these are more focused on video games (since they were developed for the 2000 Deus Ex video game), I think they are very applicable to tabletop role-playing games. And this makes sense, Warren Spector got his start in role-playing games as an editor for Steve Jackson Games and TSR.
So let’s look at Warren Spector’s 10 commandments, and how we can apply them to tabletop role-playing games.
1) Always Show the Goal
In video games, it’s pretty easy to figure this out. The players might see something in a room they can’t yet reach what they are trying to gain. Or perhaps they learn about powerful magic, but just are given a taste and told to start learning more to get stronger. Or they are given a literal objective in a quest that tells them what the goal is.
In tabletops, this can be harder to do, but at the very least, the players should always KNOW what the goal is. If someone asks them to go to a cave, well, why would they follow that quest line? If someone, instead, asks them to go clear out a cave of kobolds who have been attacking villagers and taking all their treasure, well now the players know what the goal is and how to attain it.
I strive to give my players as much information as possible, even when it might spoil a bit of a mystery or give a bit too much, and I like to remind them of what their goal and objective is when we begin play. Players live busy lives and I’m just happy to have people come every week and play games with me, I don’t need them trying to memorize a thesaurus of my homebrew world, write a lengthy novel of notes for a mystery, or keep a compendium of cliff notes of the big bad evil guys they must face.
2) Problems not Puzzles
I remember reading a reddit post about a player asking if their entire table was just stupid, or if their GM had made a bad puzzle. I don’t remember the exact details, but basically, they entered a small room with a few puzzle pieces. They spent a literal hour trying to solve the puzzle, made checks for hints, and still couldn’t figure it out. The solution? They had to tell the GM specifically that they looked over the door they had entered to read a quote that would allow them to solve the puzzle.
What this commandment means isn’t that you can’t include puzzles, but that you can’t include interactions that only have a single, specific action the player must take. When you create a puzzle, don’t bind it to a single solution, rather, create a puzzle that can be solved in a variety of ways (or don’t even come up with a solution yourself, just allow whatever seems like a cool and creative idea to succeed).
It is your goal to create problems that your players have to overcome, not force them to read your mind for a single answer that may not be as obvious as you think. Give them a chance to tackle problems in their own way, to let their creativity shine. Don’t punish their clever solutions because they don’t think exactly like you.
3) Multiple Solutions
Taking a note from the previous commandment, don’t have a single solution that the party has to follow. This can be puzzles, progressing the story, entering a castle, or fighting the boss.
If you find yourself prepping for your game by saying “This is where the party will do…” then you are prepping wrong. You want the players to have a say in how they do things, and so your goal is to simply build the environment and let the players decide how they want to interact with it.
And that’s the main selling points of tabletop games! If we wanted only a single option to take in a game, we’d play a video game that runs on rails. But we don’t. We want a game where only your creativity is the limiter on possibilities.
4) No Forced Failure
Failure isn’t a bad thing. It’s a great teachable moment, and you can create stories that you wouldn’t ordinarily interact with. But when failure is bad, is when you force it on to your players. If you basically cut-scene-kill a character because you think it’d be great for the story for Kaylee to have her character die, well that isn’t fun, interesting, or exciting. That’s just mean.
But I’m not saying you can’t have failure in your game. If you want your players to be imprisoned, start your adventure with the players imprisoned and have to make their way out. Don’t force them to spend sessions trying to not be imprisoned, and then still force them to get arrested through GM fiat. Have that ‘forced failure’ be the start of your game.
In addition, don’t take away the ability for your players to react. This isn’t even tied to forced failures, but it can be. If you find yourself telling the players how their characters are behaving, it better be because the player failed a dominate person spell and not because you think it’d be better for the story that they did or didn’t do a specific thing that you want them to do.
5) It’s the Characters, Stupid
The point of any game is to interact with different elements in various ways. You don’t play a game where nothing happens. Even pong, one of the first video games released in 1972, is focused on interaction. You are trying to bounce a ball with your paddle and score against your opponent. (I can’t believe I just described what pong is…)
That interaction is key to making a game, but you can have all the interaction you want in a game, but that doesn’t make it a good game unless the players want to interact with those systems, with the game, and with the elements you created. In a tabletop game, you can create all the cool terrain crafts, get the fanciest dice, the nicest digital character sheets, the best pencils and paper to write on, and the coolest miniatures on the market… but if you don’t let the players interact with the game how they want to, they are not going to have fun, they are not going to enjoy the game, and they are probably not going to be spending precious hours of their week with your game.
Now, this isn’t to say that you have to always listen to the players and only do what they want—despite what some people may think, Game Masters are still players too, you just interact differently with the game than the other players. Instead, don’t force your players to take interactions or to play the game in a certain way. Let them explore the mechanics, let them come up with ideas. But also, don’t be afraid to use my favorite phrase “No, but…”.
Just remember, a game is only a fun game when the players want to interact with things, not when they are being forced to. No one talks about how fun it was that one time in Call of Duty where they got to “Press F to show respect”. People mock that forced interaction in the game because that is the game demanding how to play it.
6) Players Do; NPCs Watch
To put this simply, players should be the ones having the fun in a game, not the game having fun with itself. When cool moments in the game come up, that should be the players doing those cool moments - not the NPCs doing them.
For example, if there is a dragon guarding a super valuable sword that acts as a McGuffin for your campaign… well, who are you going to call? That’s right, the ghostbusters player characters will get to go on that adventure. You aren’t sending a bunch of NPCs to go and do that awesome adventure while the player characters are left behind peeling potatoes. It is the players that get to do the fun things, not the ones who sit around and watch as non-player characters do all the cool, fun things instead of them.
And this extends to epic moments in a fight, if you can, avoid NPCs getting the boss-kill, or coming up with the best plans (subconsciously players go with it because they know that the GM will let it happen and they don’t have to worry about failure). The focus should be on the players doing things, not watching other people (especially NPCs) doing those things. Interactions should be in the player’s hands, not the NPCs.
7) Games Get Harder, Players Get Smarter
A game shouldn’t remain the same level of difficulty as when the players first began their career. This one is pretty easy to mostly figure out how it works. Everyone knows that players start out fighting rats, then goblins, orcs, trolls, dragons, and finally super powerful, world-ending bosses. No one plays out a campaign where all the players do is fight rats, rats, rats, and rats.
That wouldn’t be interesting, that wouldn’t be the game getting harder, but rather so much easier as the players got better at the game. Instead, when the players level up, the monsters they fight are going to be stronger, harder to defeat, and more. In addition, you can start throwing more deadly fights at them during their adventuring day, slowly ramping up the difficulty because the players have experience, they’ve learned new tactics, they’ve learned to work better as a team, and more.
In addition, Warren Spector also says that player rewards should make players more powerful as the game goes on and the game becomes more difficult. While we will take more about rewards in the next commandment, it is also an important part here. The rewards that players are getting should be getting stronger, as players get stronger. No one wants a +1 dagger at level 20, but I’m sure plenty of those players would backstab each other for a +5 vorpal flaming annihilating dagger of inferno pain.
8) Pat Your Player on the Back
We all like treasure. I’ve had more than one player who would set an orphanage on fire if it meant they got a few extra copper pieces. These rewards that players get drive them forward, and are often the prime motivator for adventuring parties - especially when just starting out. We’re all poor in real life, it’s nice to imagine what it’d be like to have more gold than a dragon.
But these rewards shouldn’t just be at set intervals, as that gets old and boring. Instead, these rewards should happen unpredictably and as bonuses for doing what you (the GM) want the players to do. If you want players to explore structures completely, make sure to hide a few rewards in random rooms that they’d only find if they go off the beaten trail. If you want them to kill lots of creatures, put magic items and lots of gold on your goblins.
In addition, make sure to give your players rewards just to give them a hit of dopamine. People play games for a huge number of reasons that span a whole spectrum of emotions and motivations. Chief among them is to feel good, to relax, to enjoy themselves, and to have fun. By giving your players rewards on a frequent basis, you are bringing in hits of dopamine that make them feel good… but if you make it predictable when they get rewards, they don’t get that dopamine rush. It needs to be frequent but random.
And don’t be stingy with these rewards. As the players get stronger, so to do the rewards. I already said this before, but a +1 dagger might make a great reward for a level 2 adventurer, it does not make a good reward for a level 15 adventurer. Your rewards should be appropriate for how strong the player is.
9) Think 3D
Maybe the biggest sin of adventures out there. How many times do you head into a cave, and never think about what is over your head? Or under your feet? How many times do you go into single-story buildings? Or multi-story buildings, but the adventure or elements don’t take advantage of the fact that there are rooms above and below you?
When designing encounters, whether those are combat, mystery, social, or exploration encounters, think about how you can use the space. Maybe a large chandelier hangs above an important combat encounter, and so players could cut the rope, causing the chandelier to crash to the ground (and hitting a few baddies on the way down). Or you have shadows reach up from below the players, attacking them from the safety of another room the players can’t reach yet. There are so many things you can play around with, once you stop thinking of a room as a 2D space.
10) Think Interconnected
Going along with the previous commandment, it’s time to think about how all of those spaces fit together. If the only thing going on in your cavern is that there is a long tunnel, interspersed with a few rooms, then all you have made is a boring, non-interesting cave to explore. It’s just a large hallway with boring rooms.
Instead, create multiple entrances and exits, create tunnels that criss-cross, create paths that might make the cave faster to explore, but then the players lose out on cool items hidden away elsewhere. Don’t force players down only one path, that they can only use the front door, that there is only one way in-and-out to your dungeon. These multiple paths should create interesting decisions for the players, as they have to decide where they want to go, and how they want to go about actually getting there.
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