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For a decade, I’ve been making tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs). But why? What drives me to create games when the player base is, as many have pointed out, relatively small?
From settings to systems
When I began crafting the world of Vanor a decade ago, my initial goal wasn’t to “create a game I wanted to play.” Honestly, I wasn’t a huge fan of most TTRPGs available. They were more games I “tolerated” than truly loved.
My starting point was to build something around the vast amount of work I’d already done on the Vanor setting. Finding the right system for that world proved harder than expected. I looked at Pathfinder, given how much of my Vanor material was built on the D&D 3.5 foundation, and even poked around Savage Worlds.
A random forum thread led me to Dungeon World. The GM chapters in particular matched exactly how I like to run games. It was the right fit: a system I actually liked paired with a setting I’d been wanting to share.
I made adjustments to Vanor to work within Dungeon World’s approach, making sure both the setting and the game were pointing in the same direction.
Masks and beyond
Something similar happened with Wonders RPG. I’m a huge fan of superhero stories, and I’d been looking for the right Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) game for the genre. When I found Magpie Games’ Masks: A New Generation, that was it.
As with Vanor, I adapted a setting I’d already written to work within Masks. What started as an effort to slot existing settings into existing systems gradually became something else: I was drawn to working with established systems and reshaping them into my own things.
Rediscovering the spark
Which brings me back to the original question: why do I make games? Not long ago, I was feeling pretty discouraged about tabletop games, citing the niche market as a real barrier. Part of what killed my enthusiasm was the realisation that very few people would end up playing the games I’d put so much into.
“Honestly, part of the reason I stopped being excited about writing TTRPGs is that I know very few people will play them. It’s not just about D&D. Every decade or so there is a major trend in the hobby, and people generally don’t switch their main game. I know I don’t! I would prefer to play any flavor of Powered by the Apocalypse game, and then learn a new system. I write this as the person who introduced new, non-D&D games to the Israeli market over the last decade (Dungeon World and Masks: a New Generation, both adapted with original content).”
Passion over pragmatism
There was something missing in all this: me.
When I work on digital games, money rarely enters my thinking early on. Part of that is because digital games reach a wider audience and have more paths to some kind of success. But more importantly, when I picture a video game, my first question is about what I actually want to play. What features excite me? What systems do I enjoy?
So why don’t I apply that same logic to TTRPGs? Making a tabletop game for my group is a lot easier than building a video game that fits exactly what I want.
In the past few weeks, while thinking through a new iteration of Vanor, I stopped and asked myself: what would I actually want from a new game? What would make me happy as a player? How, before anything else, do I make something I’d love to play, and leave the business concerns for later?
It sounds like a small shift. But it was the one I needed.