5 Examples of a TTRPG Design Approach You Can Use
A while ago I wrote a blog post about how in TTRPGs, dice aren’t what you think. If you ask a player they’ll tell you the dice represent luck, but in practice, I find players think of dice in most games as representative of character ability. I rolled poorly, my character did poorly; I rolled well, my character performed well, and so on.
I should say that most of my TTRPGs—and all of my published ones under Radio James Games so far, have been diceless. Which is a choice, to be sure. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about where else in the conceptual landscape of TTRPGs dice could roll. Exploring different ways the dice can be personified has, for me, been a truly fruitful design exercise that has sometimes produced whole games. Here’s five examples, at varying stages of development. And maybe you, if you’re a TTRPG designer too, could also be inspired in your designs by asking the question: Who are the dice?
The Psychic Danger Society
This isn’t all a shameless advertisement, but I’ll start with a game that’s coming to Kickstarter from Radio James Games early next year—The Psychic Danger Society, because it’s a good example.
The whole thing started with a thought. I challenged my design-brain: what if you rolled all the dice at the beginning of the game session, what would that look like to the play experience? Basically, it would make a diceless game out of a dice game. Choices would be measured, and careful. That’s an interesting game space. Oh but that would take all the uncertainty out of it. No, no it wouldn’t, because you wouldn’t know the target number you’re comparing the dice to, so you have effectively the same anticipation of success and failure but without the wild swing results.
Neat dice mechanics aren’t enough to make a game. I needed a game world to tie it to where that would make sense. So, a bunch of psychics making their predictions and then enacting them as the game night goes on, was a pretty perfect pairing of mechanics and setting.
Who are the dice? The dice are predictions. You rolled a 4, an 8, a 10, a 2, and a 3. You don’t know what they mean quite yet but you have those feelings. When you actually employ the numbers—the 4 helps you grab the kid by the collar that would have crossed the street and been hit by a car, the 10 allows you to throw a rock at the murderer that makes him fall of a ladder, the 8 lets you swap out the vampire’s blood reserves with iron-deficient blood, slowly starving him and ruining his mayoral campaign—why, that’s exactly as they were predicted!
If you want to know more about The Psychic Danger Society specifically, please sign up for the newsletter. The rest of these are far enough off on the publishing slate for Radio James Games that they don’t even have a preview yet, so, details are subject to change.
My Summer Vacation with Monsters
This is an unnamed game yet, but basically it’s my not-Pokemon game of being a kid and travelling the countryside accompanied by little monsters who may, at times, try to eat you. It’s a map-making game of exploration, friendship, and little monster battles. It’s also a tad bit sinister.
This game was born out of a few frustrations. Firstly, that there’s no good Not-Pokemon TTRPG out there that can give enough mechanical depth to its monsters without an outrageous amount of book-keeping. To do the concept justice it needs to be a lot more intuitive than anything done in TTRPGs yet. Also, I always thought Pokemon should be inherently a little spookier. Kids are travelling in the wilderness hundreds of miles, getting involved in dangerous battles...there’s something there.
All of this was satisfied by thinking of: who are the dice? In this case, the dice are the little monsters, and exclusively used to represent them. I owe some credit to my friend Eric, frequently credit in my games in some nebulous capacity. I really don’t know which one of us thought of this first because we game jam so often.
The exclusion is important. The idea here is that you do not roll a die that is not a little monster. When you are rolling, it’s the monster acting. The monster’s colours match the die, and the bigger the die the more complex and powerful the monster. This game affords a particular opportunity of: you’re a kid, and try to solve all your problems with a fire-breathing monster-bug you found on the sidewalk one day. There’s a lovely innocence (and delightful irresponsibility) to assuming your monster, however inappropriate to the task, will help you solve all your problems, and then a gleeful chaos to not controlling them directly. You just roll them and see what they do. Each of the numbers on the die represent different "moves" you can teach your monster (because even the Pokemon video games fail as monster-training games, as far as I’m concerned) and when you roll that result, that’s what your monster does. Sure, you train them, assigning those numbers to Moves (2 means fire breath, 3 means bop, 4 means cover your eyes, and so on) and then they do effectively what they want. Like they’re their own beings! You could want them to shoot fire at the phone book in order to intimidate the bank manager, but they rolled a 1, and what it says beside 1 on your little monster’s move chart is to run away and hide. Gee, I’ll have to train another move over that 1. (And so on.)
In playtesting, I’ve found people come to associate the dice with the monsters themselves. Suddenly you don’t just have a d6, d8, and d4 in your pocket, you have a blue seagull with a top-hat starter monster d6, a powerful mid-tier d8 purple ghost with big teeth, and a little baby monster d4 robot in the shape of a toaster. Let’s roll them and see what they do. Oh, also they might eat you. Fun.
What I’m excited about with this approach is the lack of direct control, which makes sense with the setting and will lead to delightful (and thematically appropriate) antics. Not every TTRPG is about antics, but this one is.
Department Store Pygmalion
Let’s get really indie. I desperately want to make a game based on the 1987 movie Mannequin where Kim Cattrall is a department store mannequin come to life. I think there’s something really interesting going on there when compared with the TVO children’s show of the mid 80s Today’s Special, also about a department store mannequin that comes to life. (It was Canadian...of a certain age.) They, and other similar examples, share a lot of touch points, most notably with the ancient Greek myth Pygmalion. It’s corny, it’s not exactly riddled with conflict, but I love it and I think there’s some fecund design ground there for a unique and interesting play experience.
That’s a lot of preamble, but the point is I couldn’t think of how to do it. You wouldn’t want the mannequin to be a PC, because then they’re the important one and everyone else is an adjacent character. You can’t play Department Store Pygmalion if your mannequin does not show up for game. The design breakthrough came with answering: “Who are the dice?”, or in this case: “Who is the dice?” And the answer is: the dice is the mannequin, come to life at night when the department store closes, and the PCs are the night watchman, the window dresser, the department store owner, and so on, all trying to use the magical mannequin in different ways to overcome the challenges presented to the department store as it struggles to survive against chains in the shoulder-pad driven 1980s economy.
Department Store Pygmalian isn’t into the playtesting stage yet but the design direction is clear, and I’m enjoying my time with it. Obviously this one I'm not making with an audience in mind beyond my own role-playing pleasure. Oh, the experiments I subject my home gaming group to!
An early note was why not make it so you have rival mannequins and rival department stores competing—nothing’s going to stop us now!—and call it “Murder Mannequins”? But I like my innocent pop 80s atmosphere a little better. I don’t know. It’s still early. I’d love to hear what you think.
Fomo Mutant Powerhouse
Another working title, and far off into the 2025 publishing slate, is another game I approached with the “Who are the dice?” method, Fomo Mutant Powerhouse. Fomo in this case stands for “Fomorian”.
When I was working on Pendlehaven’s Children of Eriu about old Celtic myths, I was fascinated with the Fomorians as basically the X-Men of the A.D. 500. Balor shoots a huge laser from his eye, some call lightning, some have super strength—all unique and bizarre. Okay, let’s bring those Fomorians into the modern day setting.
There are lots of superhero TTRPGs and this is not trying to be one of them, this is an X-Men-like game. I’d argue that the concerns and themes of X-Men make them not quite superheroes at all, anyway. X-Men don’t stop bank robbers and prevent McGuffins from being stolen in heists. X-Men are a secret society of folks who constantly make deals and alliances with their worst enemies to work against new enemies, all of them targeted by a humanity that is against them. I would call this unclassified superhero-adjacent setting as farther away from superheroes as the pulp setting is—all sharing the same elements to an extent. But if many people consider pulp heroes a different classification from superheroes, certainly X-Men are just as separated. So if they're not superheroes, they're their own thing—let’s do a game about that thing.
Who are the dice? The dice are your team of Fomorian mutants with their own strange powers. Roll a mitt full of them and work against a rival Fomorian clan—all with their own individually personified dice pools, as you struggle to uphold and enact your ethos against theirs. Can you get along with humanity? Do you wish to oppress them? Is it survival of the fittest for all? Let the dice decide.
Universally Haunted
What if you played classic monsters—your vampires, your Frankensteins’ monsters, your mummies? Well, in most TTRPG games that would just mean a bunch of play-as-bad-guys-being-a-jerk table behaviour, and I don’t want to facilitate that kind of play. Instead, I wanted to make a “you play the monster” game that takes place exclusively in a haunted house (a la The Old Dark House) where the SCARE is the thing—you want to scare the people who come into the house as a way of guiding the experience.
Who are the dice, in this case? The pathetic humans, obviously, who may or may not go along with your plans to be scared. You set up your traps and your frights and we’ll see what happens in response. From a design perspective, it’s like the opposite angle of conflict resolution from a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon.
This could go on forever. My tiny monster game and Fomo Mutant Powerhouse are in playtesting now, with most of their editorial written. For The Psychic Danger Society, the proofs are already back from the printers and I’m prepping its Kickstarter page as we speak. The rest? We’ll see if they work out in development—I tend to swing for the fences so not everything makes it to press. Regardless, I’d say that answering the question of “Who are the dice?” has been an exciting direction my design approach.
I hope it does wonders for you, too.
James Kerr, Radio James Games
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