What’s great about dice-pools is meaningful results, all the time. You’ll struggle to get that with a D20.

Listen…

Example 1: Good Chances

The party ranger wants to navigate through the forest. Forests are dangerous, and he might fail, but his bonuses mean he succeeds on the roll of 3 or more.

A 90% chance of success makes the roll a little less interesting, unless the party stand a lot to lose. Even then, this roll will produce the result of ‘business as usual’ 90% of the time.

There are a limited number of ways one can write an adventure. Let’s start with the famous railroad model:

Choo Choo!

The tell-tale signs you’ll find here are sentences like ‘when the PCs reach the village’, or ‘when the PCs find the item’. Basically, anything beginning with ‘when the PCs…’, because that’s making an assumption about the players’ decisions, and that assumption will push the GM into making sure the PCs follow through with the suggestion.

A lot of the motivation for writing BIND was because A,D&D never seemed to live up to its promises. The newer editions were a clear improvement, but never seemed to release the original game’s shackles.

An image of burly men, bursting through a door, ready to destroy anything in their path covers the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. This was a clear example of antagonistic NPCs, out for blood; but couldn’t it just have easily been a barbaric adventuring party? The clear answer was unfortunately ’no’. The group clearly contained no magic-user, nor priest.

Last year, I got excited about the idea of tracking realworld time over downtime. Shortly after I implemented it in my campaign, and it served the entire table, very well.

The Perspective Flip

Real-time RPGs look strange if you look at them from the wrong end. Let me turn it around for you:

1. The players are just anyone who turns up on the day. This could be 3 or 6 players - we don’t know who’s free.
2. As a result, we’ll have to wrap each adventure up on the night, because someone might not make the next session.
3. Time can become inconsistent over the course of sessions - different PCs arriving in different areas at different times threatens to make some deeply inconsistent and warped narratives.
4. We can fix this by making time pass at a rate which keeps everything consistent.

Using ‘real-world time’ comes as a result of an open table. And the open table has some great benefits.

Minimalism rocks.

Looking at these minimalist systems like Cairne and Mörk Borg, I felt they were onto something. 3-pages of rules, and ‘on with the game!’.

I’ve yet to play one, but the more I read these systems, the more I feel something’s simply missing. Specifically, ’everything except combat'.

In the old D&D games, everything outside combat was dealt with GM-fiat. Trying to sell magical items? Trying to disarm a trap? Want to blow out a candle and duck before someone hits you? Need to fix a bow? Without any rules, everything goes to GM fiat.

It cannot be long before anyone familiar with abusive software models, and RPGs, notices undeniable parallels.

The free and openly available systems function well in a technocratic sense, but lack advertising. On-boarding new people feels easy when dealing with an enthusiast, but your standard user struggles with the new system’s inattention to graphics.

The new D&D system comes littered with references to their own products. Users may not be forced to buy them, but the ecosystem has been arranged with other Wizards of the Coasts products in mind, so getting a book for the Pathfinder setting, or buying books with the history of Drizz’t, now form a natural, frictionless path.

This chronological rundown of how I approach RPG design will go over the most universal principles I’ve learned or copied from others.

Attitude

All rules are bad, but some rules are worth it.

The rest of the ideas here will talk about technical implementation, but the core thought, riding alongside every notion, is that every rule slows down the game, makes demands on people’s time, and creates a barrier to crafting a narrative. Therefore, every rule must justify its existence, and the more difficult the rule, the more it has to improve the game in order to be allowed in.

I was once attacked by a horde of kobolds, and it taught me a lesson. These attacks weren’t uncommon, when playing the old Baldur’s Gate computer game. I threw a poison cloud spell at the kobolds, and they started randomly falling over, getting up and walking a few steps, then falling over again. As the dozen little sprites did this falling-over dance, my archers picked them off one by one, which gave me lots of time to think. And this is what I thought:

A ‘fair’ RPG game immediately cuts the believability from a game. It slays engagement far more than a golden dragon, or a mushroom-man. A ‘fair’ game takes the fear out of the players, which robs RPGs of one of their unique abilities among games - death.

Let me tell you about the ‘unfair’ things my world did to my players. I say ‘my world’, because I don’t consider myself responsible.

RPGs should avoid asking people to roll dice more than once for any result.

Aesthetically, multiple rolls don’t feel right. Rolling dice should feel like casting rune-inscribed bones across a table.

Multiple Rolls Guarantee Success

The door is locked, but can be picked with a roll of 18 or higher.

This sounds like a tough lock to pick! …unless we have 5 people pick it, in which case it will almost definitely open, because with enough players rolling dice, someone’s going to roll 18 or higher. This means all doors open, but only on the condition that people sit around a table, rolling Maths-rocks repeatedly, until someone gets a high number.