Humble Opinion: The First X Games You Design Will Suck

[Neurosis]

Depending on where you come from philosophically, this will either be "argument to authority fallacy" or "obvious common sense".

Informed By: On Writing by Stephen King

You want to be a game designer. You start designing games.

Buried in you, somewhere deep down, are an untold number of good games. Before you get to them, you need to shit out five or six shitty games by designing them, loving them, realizing they're shitty, and finally throwing them in the trash. Watching other people design games won't do it. Being adjacent to the game design industry won't do it. Writing content for games won't do it. Discussing game design constantly in the abstract on internet forums won't do it.

To get to the first good design for a game inside you, first you need to shit out or mine through the five or six shitty games you've got clogging up your mental pipes. You'll think those shitty games are great at first. They're not.

This is how it worked for me. I've been designing games since I was a tiny little kid in 2001. The first dozen editions of games I put out between 2001 and 2008 were trash fires. But each trash fire was a little but less than the last.

And I am now a no-bullshit professional game designer. I make my meager living from it. I have been nominated for two ENnies, one in 2013 and one this year, and while of course I didn't win either (I was up against Paizo after all), I know I wasn't nominated because of nepotism because I can't name one fucking person who nominated me. To what do I credit this (lol) "great success"? The twelve shitty games I had to shit out before I got to the good stuff.

Discuss, agree, disagree, veer off onto wild tangents, go nuts.

[Username17]

I don't actually know what the number is. Also, I'm not sure that making content for existing games doesn't count. But yeah, the games I was making as a teenager are not good. Some of them had good ideas in them, which is as much defense as I'll mount for them. But I think you could probably reach a similar level if everything you were chipping away at was increasingly large content bundles for D&D and Vampire.

-Username17

[Neurosis]

I will partially concede that point, but I would say that building content for D&D and Shadowrun and Vampire reduces the number of bad games you need to make before you can make a good one, but not to 0, if that makes any sense.

Important caveat: you don't need to publish the shitty games you make. I didn't publish any of the shitty tabletop games I made growing up and coming up. Well, I published Psionics which I worked on since I was 15, but the first edition that I published was technically the third or fourth edition total, and the first good one.

Caveat: Yes, I had David "Analbeads" "Rat Fink" Hill Jr. as a stretch goal. Yes, I know he is the asshole that made the Shadowrun adventure in WAR where you kill your way through an army of Jewish ghosts to retrieve Dr. Mengele's +4 unholy scalpel.

Yes, as a Jewish-American who's also a rabid SR fanboy, that trash fire of an adventure hit my berserk button hard.

I cynically made him a stretch goal anyway: he had a lot of cred in the storygamefag scene and I was expecting lots of my funding to come from them. In the end it was a moot point: he bailed out and fled to Japan before I could pay him to write a word for me.

Filamena "Pooped Out A Pile of Poop For Onyx Poop Path" was another human (maybe too generous) stretch goal. Same thing: bailed out, ran to Japan, never got paid to write a word for me.

IMHO, Critias (Russel Zimmerman) is a good guy and a good writer. YMMV. That's fine. He's also the only stretch goal that actually delivered any writing or got paid a cent.

The LARP I made is a different stroy, but you don't publish a LARP, you run it, and that's a different paradigm. And the LARP was the least shitty of the bunch anyway.

[Kaelik]

Yeah, you post is half duh and half stupid.

Like, the half duh is, you get better at things by doing them? I thought the best trial I ever had was the one when I graduated from law school yesterday, not my 47th or 470th! Of course people get better by doing things.

The second dumb part is where you apparently invented an arbitrary distinction between "making content for games" versus "designing games" where apparently Coming up with the brilliant idea to roll six sided dice and counts some numbers as successes, and then write a game around that, somehow going to make people better designers, whereas merely copying someone else's idea to roll 6 sided dies and count some number of successes, but then write the exact same fucking content does nothing at all to help?

Like, seriously, please define the magic line between "Game Design" and "Writing Content" because it doesn't exist. Games are made of content, writing 100% of the content is only more help than writing 90% because it's more content, not because there's a magical threshold where everything 99.9% is actualized only when you write that last word.

[Neurosis]

Kaelik my lovely: I'll assume that puts you in the 'broadly disagree' camp. : )

Like, seriously, please define the magic line between "Game Design" and "Writing Content" because it doesn't exist.

I actually think I can, but...some other thread, some other day.

[Kaelik]

I would think the essential definitions of the words you use to establish your conclusion would be part of the argument you want to make in this thread.

I mean, last I checked, if I was making a thread about how everyone who doesn't alksdjfklasjldfj is wrong about monster CRs, I'd probably take the time to define alksdjfklasjldfj in that thread.

[Neurosis]

Sorry for my failure to define alksdjfklasjldfj. I've had a alksdjfklasjldfj of a rough week. I'm mostly posting to the den for stress relief, not looking to actually start, let alone win, any arguments.

[Kaelik]

Sorry for my failure to define alksdjfklasjldfj. I've had a alksdjfklasjldfj of a rough week. I'm mostly posting to the den for stress relief, not looking to actually start, let alone win, any arguments.

Well I mean, you presented a conclusion, and what sort of parses for an argument for that conclusion... I mean argument in the technical sense of the term here.

[Chamomile]

There's a saying in writing fiction that you have to get through a million bad words before you can write your first good one. I'm pretty sure that applies to the production of all media, and wouldn't be surprised if it applies to most human endeavor.

[Neurosis]

Chamomile just gave my thread its TLDR.

[PhoneLobster]

No one starts automatically good at something complex, practice and experimentation improves your results, everything is learning, but not all of it is learning for every aspect of what you need to learn.

The only reason you might say that writing content "doesn't count" is because it might selectively prevent you from experimenting with and learning about various aspects of game design because it is a relatively narrow activity that doesn't let you mess with and come to some understanding of some of the foundations of game design.

And there is no set number of full on bad results before magical full on good results. Someone with the wrong attitude will never properly learn enough. You need to approach the whole thing with a flexible perspective ready to abandon what fails and embrace what succeeds, but also to experiment with the uncertain.

Or you could do what most of the Den does. Which... isn't that...

[JonSetanta]

I've written a lot of suck.

It started with more Psionics for AD&D, materia for AD&D, a dark paladin class, and so on, then to classless point buy variants of D&D in the 2000s.
Then Feybook.
Then Domain the d26 RPG, which actually works but has some serious balance issues with encounters.
I wonder what's next?

[Aryxbez]

I will say my naivete does fill me with the notion that reading, and participating in discussions in design will seek to give me an early start. As I really want to avoid repeating history of same mistakes many others have made already, so I spend less time being an idiot, and more actually improving. However the heart of learning skills in life is making same mistakes others have, having that time get wasted so you those lessons more hard-wired into your consciousness's understanding. Which the thought of being some shoddy designer makes me feel underwhelmed.

That said, I agree with if you want to be X, start doing tons of X, even if that may seem overwhelming to the lazy minded.

[Username17]

If you look at it in the broader sense, there are no new games. Just mods and content bundles for old ones. 1st edition Shadowrun still used the same six attributes that D&D used in 1974 (different names, but clearly recognizable). It is literally just a pile of D&D house rules. All anyone can do is to write mods for existing games, because all games are reducible to just a few core setups.

Yes, you need to write badly before you can write well. And further you need to design badly before you can design well. But there simply isn't a difference between D&D conversion rules and stand alone heartbreakers. All heartbreakers are just D&D conversion rules.

-Username17

[Blasted]

I want to put a caveat in that critique matters. Criticism from others is more important than self criticism, because we have our own paradigms we might not be able to break. But I've seen too many people be prolific without any improvement because they fail to see any improvements to be made.

[Blade]

Obviously, practice helps and having multiple iterations (either of the same product or of similar products) helps getting to a good product.

However, in many art forms (especially music and writing), early works often has a raw energy that later, more controlled and technical works don't match.

I could see that happening in game design: once you know more about game design, you might tend to gravitate towards some known "good designs" and leave behind the wacky stuff that didn't really work but that was really original and disruptive in your early works.

[RelentlessImp]

Well, I published Psionics which I worked on since I was 15, but the first edition that I published was technically the third or fourth edition total, and the first good one.

...Speaking as someone who, independently about three months ago, ran across Psionics from a fucking TVTropes page, and then researched it...

...I would seriously consider not calling it the good one.

[Neurosis]

Ouch. My feels.

FWIW, Relentless: I assure you that it's a million times better than any of the editions I had the good sense not to publish.

[codeGlaze]

As far as practice is concerned, apparently the magical number is roughly 10,000 hours.

Healthy critique and then being able to positively use that critique is also massively important.

Especially when being creative. Because there's very little within the creative process that absolutely is 100% the "right way" to do something.