DIE RPG: Designer Notes

These originally occurred in the DIE Arcana beta. I’ve tweaked them a little to give any perspective born of bringing the game to completion.

The early drafts of DIE RPG were mostly written in a mode which Grant described as Uncle Kieron leaning over to you in the pub and ranting enthusiastically. Some of that remains in the final book, as one can’t purge that level of avuncular horror that easily.

However, one thing I don’t talk about explicitly is what I was trying to actually do. And so this is basically me answering the question “Hey, Kieron, wtf you doing here, man?”

My primary aims were to:

  1. Support the themes of the comic in a different medium.
  2. Be as accessible as possible.

These broke down in a few areas.

ACTUALLY DO “DIE: THE RPG”

Back when I was a games journalist, I had a theory. Namely, that the most interesting licensed videogames weren’t ones which tried to simulate the specific experience of whatever they were licensing, but were the ones which simulated the general experience.

The example I always used, despite having virtually no experience with it, was the old 1980s Spectrum version of Alien. It’s a strategy/horror game where you have your crew aboard ship, and are trying to identify and terminate the eponymous alien. Except it does things like randomise who is infected by the alien at the start and so on – which really pushes it a little closer to making a game of The Thing, but I digress. Point being, it’s less acting out the specific experience of Ripley and friends, and more taking the scenario’s elements and then making it your own.

Designing DIE, that’s what I wanted to do. Not to make an RPG of the DIE setting specifically, but make an RPG about creating a group of messy real-world people and dropping them into a fantasy world that’s been shaped by their lacks and obsessions and then see whether they want to stay or not.  A set situation – the rules remain constant in terms of whether to go home, but god knows how many outcomes. The big variables were the nature of the people you dropped in, and how their nature and damage shook down.

Honestly, this is the stuff that I’m most pleased with in terms of how it turned out. The structure basically operates as I wanted it to. Phew.

PRETENSIONS TO OBJECTIVITY

There’s a popular movement in RPG game design towards player-facing game. Generally speaking, I’m into it.

One of the key things is that the Gamesmaster (if there’s one) never rolls any dice. So the actions of your antagonists are determined by the rolls of your players – to be coarse, if you fail to hit someone, they hit you. The GM describes an attack coming at you, and you roll to dodge it rather than the GM rolling to hit. People like this for various reasons, but the two main ones are that it puts the feeling of power into the players’ hands (as they get to make all the rolls) and it’s more efficient (as it often cuts down on the number of dice-rolls in total). And they’re right – I love most of the games that do this, which fall into two sorts. One sort is the narrative-led games (generally) derived (or inspired) from Powered By The Apocalypse, and the others are those trying to streamline a classical D&D Experience. The former are trying to simulate how a narrative feels and the latter are trying to make a game run more efficiently.

That I avoided this speaks to the game’s themes. It’s a game where “is this real?” is embedded in it. If you make the players “real” in the mechanics in a way that everyone they meet isn’t, you already have your answer. In DIE RPG the only difference between the players’ paragons and everyone they meet are in-world abilities, gifted by their dice. There’s nothing special about players, as otherwise the story would break. Yes, there’s an irony – I was led to a more simulationist mechanic by narrativist urges.

There’re a few advantages to it – “When something tries to do something, they roll something” is a mechanism that’s easy to explain, but I was aware that by doing this, I had to streamline everything else. Hence…

THE ABSOLUTE MINIMUM OF MATH

There’re various bits of games theory I’m aware of, in terms of how people process information. Manipulation of abstract numbers is more difficult for more people than manipulation of physical objects. DIE is constructed on a belief that where I can cut math I will cut math. Instead, we lean on objects, and the manipulation of objects. There’s a lot of games which are generally thought of as simple which involve adding one statistic to another statistic to get a number, to either get a target number to roll or the number of dice you need. Even that level of math is alienating to some players, especially as the game gets later and later (or the players get drunker and drunker).

Instead, I run off a dice pool which is based on a single stat. You then add single dice to it for various advantages. You don’t count anything on the dice – you symbol recognise (”If this dice is higher than 4, then it’s a success”). When you count the number of successes you have, you just can use the dice. How many of these objects do I have with matching symbols? Everything is physical.

I have the belief that the longer a pause in the action where the mechanics influence the game, the more the mood of a game breaks. I try to minimise that as much as I can.

SOME MORE GENERAL STREAMLINING

As said, I knew I was in danger of the game running clunkily. I wanted DIE to be the the closest I could make to a trad game and still bear to run. I don’t feel like that now – I have a kind of lust for a little more crunch – but back when writing DIE RPG I wanted to have a game which does what a classic Gygax/Arneson does with enough streamlining and modern tech to be bearable to me to run. Because, in reality, the game isn’t hugely interested in that, just the appearance of that – and more on that later.

So, I did things like have the single dice pool to determine everything in an attack. That halves the dice roll from most trad games. I lifted from PBTA tech I liked shamelessly, as long as it didn’t undermine the goals. The DIE character sheets are explicitly Playbook-esque, with everything you need to play the game on them. Specifically, all the core rules fit into a small one-inch square area. The basic game is really tight, which was important as there was something else I was up to…

RE-MYSTIFICATION

Wth all the other special rules for all the classes, streamlining the core mechanic is likely a good idea too. Each class has entirely bespoke mechanics. That’s a lot. This game is a monstrous cognitive load on the GM, due to this design goal.

The aim with the archetypes was to make them unique, and somewhat unknown to the other players. You may know broadly how the other classes work, but you won’t necessarily know specifically. Everyone has their custom mechanics; everyone interacts with their dice in a different way and so on. “I am special in a way in which no one else is” is a fairly common goal in game design, but I wanted to really push it. The Fool really likely has no idea how the Dictator is doing what they’re doing. It’s magic.

FETISHISM OF DICE & D&D

This is kinda obvious, right? Let’s try and take all those bits of the classical RPG and just play with it. This includes things the hobby was demonised for. Structurally, in many ways, DIE is playing “Maybe they were right to be scared?”. Gaming won, so we get to play with this now. The touching and ownership of different models of dice were right in it.

SIMILAR TO CORE ARNESON/GYGAX MODEL GAME

There’s lots of excellent indie RPGs which basically have (rightfully) understood you can throw a bunch of stuff out, and that nothing needed to be there in the first place. If you’re starting from a group who actively knows nothing about RPGs, these are easy to teach mechanically (though often hard to play well for players – players’ ability to improvise is a skill, one that asks a lot from players).

However, if you’re dealing with a group of players who have a cultural idea of how D&D works, that’s a pre-existing thing you have to work around. There’s enough D&D stuff in the world now that a complete lack of knowledge is relatively rare. They’ve seen piss-takes.  They’ve maybe watched Critical Role. They have pre-existing expectations of what a game operates like.

DIE uses those expectations as the core. This is a fairly classical D&D-esque game with a bunch of weird stuff added to it. The core dynamic is the core dynamic, and DIE’s core system basically does work like a traditional game. It’s got weird stuff, but the in-world-DIE stuff is still an Arneson/Gygax game.

Also, this is my little tribute:  did you know the first Braunstein proto-D&D games had players all playing characters sucked into a D&D world? This is kind of a tribute to that. We’ve always been doing that.

AN EXPLICIT DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE TRADITIONS

You go into the world of DIE and it’s a semi-traditional RPG. In the persona generation, it’s pure freeform. However, as the principles say, Persona Gen Never Ends. There’s a conversation between those two forms, but kept slightly at a distance. There’s a Cartesian thing in DIE, between the persona and the character, which I think is the heart of the game. The players have total power to define whatever happened in the real world without rules. The GM has power to determine the reality of DIE itself, and the players act like atomic agents within it. The two feed into each other.

The choice to not have any classical mechanics in the real world was a part of that dualism. The real world is just narrative (thought) – and DIE is primarily mechanics (physical reality). There’s one rule where the persona side interacts directly with the DIE side – the flashback rule, where you gain an advantage for flashing back to a relevant part of your backstory. Which bugged me, but this is really just a formalising of the rules for advantages/disadvantages.”I really hate bullies!” “That’s worth an advantage” is already something is there. Plus it also has the bonus of encouraging players always coming back to the real world – the place where DIE most goes awry is when the real world of the persona is forgotten, and every tool we can to centre that is key.

But broadly speaking, there’s something that’s easily missed when reading the manual (but really clear in play). The persona rules are really small, because they can be – but is by far the most important part of DIE. The in-world-DIE stuff has a lot of various options, and fills a lot of space, as to make the meta aspect work it needs to at least look like a classic RPG. However, it’s really more of a Potempkin village. The closer you look, you realise it’s just a structure constructed to resemble the real thing.

OBJECTIVE REALITY WARPED BY SUBJECTIVITY

Almost all the games I play involve some manner of shared world-building, with all players chipping in with key bits of the worldbuilding. That’s in DIE, at the persona level – but when in DIE itself, explicitly it’s out the players control. There is an external reality. The GM says what’s out there… however primarily they’re born off what the other players did in the Persona stage. Games which get buy-in and player involvement from shared creativity and directed questions. With DIE RPG, I was trying to get a kind of mediated buy-in, so players care because it’s all stuff that came from them… but it’s also been removed from their direct control, has a frisson of reality to it. Because that’s how we experience the world, right? We’re never sure what is going to happen. That uncertainty is right at the heart of what DIE RPG is trying to do, as it walks you into a personalised haunted house.

I sometimes think of this as a bit of asking someone to cook something for you. A player, with the persona questions, is requesting things. The GM’s job in DIE is to serve them back to them in a warped, personalised fashion.

SOME WEIRD BITS WHICH JUST MUG ME AS I’M NOT A PROFESSIONAL

Up until a week or so before the release of the first Beta, I had something called Hit Dice. There were two types of Hit Dice, one called Guard Dice and one called Wound Dice. They operated identically to Guard and Health in the current system, but you manually used dice as the tokens. It’s a joke about one of the core bits of D&D terminology – Hit Dice literally being dice that measure how many hits you have.

In practice, it made the game almost impossible to play online, required far more D6 than are in a usual home plus the players always kept on picking them up and rolling them and forgetting what their guard was.

But I persisted with it, long after I admitted it was a darling I just didn’t want to kill. A last-minute rewrite removed it to the system that almost all the playtesters were using anyway.

Now, this sounds like I learned a lesson, but that I’m still using Guard and Health as separate concepts shows that I’m still on my shit. DIE isn’t a combat game. It’s just that I’ve always hated systems which have a single hit point score, and thought I could take an influence over from Halo and try it out. There’s an upside, of course – it’s a system that keeps combats both tense, and always quickly resolved – but it’s not what DIE 100% demands.

But I kept Guard and Health anyway. It’s a bit where the limits of my Potemkin Village RPG description are shown – I did some stuff as I wanted to design a game this way, and this may be my only chance. That’s Fantasy Heartbreaker shit. If I had more rigour, I’d have cut it.

However. this is the work of an enthusiastic amateur, and sometimes I have to roll with that.

“FAILING” GRACEFULLY

I use the word failing with reluctance.

I played a lot of games when preparing for DIE. There’s a lot of influences in here – there’s a reading list at the back of the manual book of direct influences, and others called out in the side bar. There’s a bunch more I was playing to explore. I learned so much from them.

However, the single biggest influence of everything I played was looking at how I felt when a game went badly when running it. Even when the players liked what happened, I found myself utterly distraught that the aesthetic effect wasn’t what was clearly intended by the designer (and myself). Games of cosmic horror ending with laughter. Games of paranoid backstabbing ending in the players teaming together. Ugh.

I’ve been pretty lucky in my career. Too lucky. I’m aware that it’s been a long time since I failed for a reason that was entirely my own sorry fault, and so am out of practice with dealing with something I felt was an absolute disaster. As such, those sessions were emotionally gruelling. Everyone often enjoyed them, but I was torn up for weeks.

(When writing a first draft of this essay, I was unaware of the concept of Rejection Sensitivity Disorder and how that was co-morbid with ADHD. So yes.)

Key thing: I wanted DIE to be flexible and to impart to the GM that all results are good results, and intended. Yes, you may want one sort of story, but if the game goes another way, that’s entirely fine. The game is about listening to what a group gives you, then building. The core structure is flexible, going from entirely quiet emotional beats to loudly beating the bad guys on the head. The structure will look after you. You have a rock solid start. You have a flexible middle. You have a climax which will lead to something that feels like drama. The “fail” state is if everyone just hammers the Master and goes home. That’s still an absolutely functional story.

There’s always a lot in games about looking after the players and making sure they have fun. There’s relatively little about looking after the GM. That’s something I think is damaging and I wanted DIE to look after you. After all, you’re likely the only poor fucker who’s reading this. We heart you. We heart you hard.

THANK YOU

That’ll do. Honestly, if someone had told me the joy in seeing people take a structure you made and watching them run with it and making it their own, I’d have done this years ago. Ironically enough given DIE’s subject, this has proved to be a gateway to another world for me.

Thanks for reading and thanks for playing.

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