Grading Against Gremlin Game Design

I am a game designer! The great thing about TTRPGs is that anyone who has ever had to adjudicate something or make a ruling is essentially a game designer, even to a small degree. I have run games, hacked games, and even made some stuff that people I don’t personally know have used in their own games. Indeed, I think many people become game designers long before they name what they’re doing in that way.

So it was with interest that I read the Gremlin Game Designer's Creed, via the Indie RPG Newsletter featuring it. I found the 10 rules thought-provoking, so I went through each one in turn.

Rules are toys, and the process of rules-mediated play consists of smashing their faces together like little girls making their Barbies make out. Unless a rules module is explicitly intended to be enacted solo, it should present a generous surface area for other rules to bite into. The most elegantly self-contained piece of rules design is, collaboratively speaking, also the most useless.

This sounds sensible to me, but I would need to see a positive and negative example to really judge the worth of this rule.

The principal function of "player characters" as discrete collections of mechanical traits is to furnish each player with an assemblage of shiny things to show off to other players. Mechanical abstraction is well and good, but if you abstract away the act of curating one's collection of shinies, player engagement will suffer.

I’m less sure of this one. My rules-light brain gets suspicious whenever mechanical traits are in the spotlight, rather than the interactions they facilitate. At minimum, this obviously would not apply to solo games. Even in multiplayer GM-player-interaction games, I question how much to center something like this – what if others simply fail to notice or appreciate someone’s “shinies”? Is that a gameplay fail? 

All that said, I do agree that excessive abstraction is something to watch out for.

The GM, if present, is a fellow player. Ensure that they have their own toys and shinies to play with. The failure of a game to provide these is often a major contributor to why nobody wants to run it!

Seems fair, with the same caveat that we shouldn’t lose the forest for the trees.

The most effective way of encouraging players to do what you want is to make a number go up. This applies to both to rewards and to misfortunes; a number counting up to disaster a much more visceral motivator than a number counting down to zero.

This is the first one that really conflicts with my own experience. I have always favored countdowns, particularly for misfortunes. It’s so much easier to say “when it hits zero something bad happens” rather than having some moving target of a top number, different for each situation, even if I prominently display that number for players.

Crunch is good. The defining feature of tabletop roleplaying is that rules produce stories. The act of interpreting the outputs of the rules and the act of telling the game's story are the same activity. Be mindful of what kinds of stories your rules want to tell; you may find that their opinion on the matter differs from your own!

This again immediately raises questions. This would not be true of FKR games or matrix games. Are these less capable of “producing stories” than games with more crunch? And certainly I’ve played games where the amount of crunch was an obstacle to the telling of stories. 

Beyond that it seems fine – I agree that a lot of failed games seem to boil down to the GM and the players trying to tell a story that doesn’t fit with the ruleset employed.

Actually assembling your game's rules is as much a process of discovery as it is of invention. In the course of designing and playtesting, you may find that your own game has rules that you didn't know about. Where did they come from? It is a mystery.

This seems uncontroversial and correct. 

Randomised outcomes should be made mandatory with care and restraint; randomised outcomes should be made available with delirious abandon. As far as is practicable, players should always have the option of asking the dice what unhinged bullshit should happen next. Corollary: lookup tables are your friend.

This seems right and basically in keeping with an old-school approach, where dice might not be rolled for an entire session’s worth of traps and social negotiations, but will certainly come into play when the party drinks from the magic fountain. A lot of this comes down to maximum transparency about which courses of action will require a roll of the dice, and which ones won’t. The games I played didn’t state this specifically, but once I figure it out myself, I was struck by how many other issues it helped resolve.

Players don't need your permission to depart from the rules as written; granting it is arrogant. By the same token, however, it should never be unclear to players whether they're departing from the rules as written. Let the thought process behind what you're writing hang out for all the world to see; folks will be rummaging in the game's guts anyway, so give them easy access.

This seems fine as well, with the corollary that everyone should try to run every game as close to rules-as-written at least once, before departing from those rules. In other words, don’t start hacking a game before you’ve even played it (something I’ve been guilty of doing, oops).

If your game has a default setting, explain it as little as possible, but always let the rules and presentation reflect it. Seeing an entry for "poorly made dwarf" in a table of player character backgrounds will fire a group's imagination more strongly in three words than a chapter stuffed with worldbuilding lore could in ten thousand.

This is right, and I don’t think it’s an accident that they use the poorly made dwarf from Troika as an example. Troika lacks any kind of section explaining the world and the lore; it’s all implied through indirect references in various parts of the rules. The experience I first had reading the rules was just like what’s described above.

You don't need to be good at naming things as long as you're good at puns. Wordplay, alliteration and rhyme may also serve in this capacity, as, in a pinch, may a well placed dick joke.

I am one of those terrible people who professes to hate pun-based humor, then hypocritically uses it myself. My games are loaded with alliterative NPCs (Timothy Tyranny) and dumb homonyms (like an NPC who identified themself as “the trader/traitor,” intentionally pronouncing it ambiguously between the two words). I even put a Combination Pita Hutch and Tonic Well in the last one-shot I ran. A player’s offhand description of a giant parade float rat as “Icky Mouse” inspired an entire theme park parody arc. I am ashamed of this kind of thing but will probably never stop.