Designing with a Strong D (And Also the Return of Crafting)

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February 27, 2020

The only thing harder than starting a new project is restarting a project that you haven’t touched in over a year. Especially one that you stopped touching because it got hard. And that’s precisely what I found myself doing last weekend: touching something hard that I hadn’t touched in a while. See, I stupidly made a public promise to bring some of my dead half-finished projects back life. Especially my D&D 5E crafting system.

The thing is, I had a really solid idea for how to handle crafting and I had worked out most of the kinks. I knew, more or less, how the whole system was going to work. In my head. And while I was taking my time explaining all of my logic to you via this website, I was also slowly working through the design in the background. Except that the design hit a point where it involved a bunch of work. Gruntwork. Like, say, analyzing and classifying every magic item in the DMG. What a f$&%ing ordeal. Especially because it involved trying to impose an ordered system on something that looked like it had been designed at random by a bunch of monkeys who got distracted while trying to come up with a sequel script for Hamlet and made a role-playing game instead.

Meanwhile, I’d had a bunch of discussions with people who were trying to get projects of their own off the ground. Some simple – like designing a custom monster or three – and some complex – like trying to design an entire subsystem to lay over the D&D combat engine to add variety to the gameplay. And I ended up in a few discussions about the importance of starting with ‘the play experience’ and focusing on ‘game feel.’ Which I was discovering was something that a lot of people just don’t do. Or have never heard of. Which is a shame because it actually makes it easier to design s$&%. And because it makes it more likely your designs will actually do what you want them to do.

I have an opportunity here to kill several birds with one shotgun shell. I can teach all you amateur, budding designers about how to design from the standpoint of game feel and the play experience while, at the same time, applying my excellent advice to my own situation to get myself back into this crafting project bulls$&% by using it as an example of how to isolate the game feel by analyzing the assumed play experience. And if it goes well, then next week, I’ll have a lovely spreadsheet analyzing and classifying all of the magic items in the DMG.

So let’s get started.

How to Start

Whether you’re working on a new game design project or getting back into a project you haven’t touched in over a year, it can be really f$&%ing hard to get started. And that’s because every project is conceived and implanted in the womb of the designer’s brain in a different way. Project embryos might start out as bits of flavorful inspiration like my most recent dungeon adventure that started with ‘evil Shaolin monastery rocking back and forth between the Mortal Realm and the Shadow Plane.’ Unborn project babies might also arise from a mechanical idea, like the idea of using a visible pool of dice to manage tension at the table. Or a project’s inception might come from a vague mechanical need or want like the idea that D&D really needs some way to craft items in it.

Point is every project starts with a single idea or need. No two are alike. But the end results are the same. After a lot of growth and nurturing, the idea emerges screaming and naked from the designer’s brain as a fully formed game design thing. But because every project starts in a different place and needs different details filled in – and I’m going to dispense with the unborn baby metaphor here because human reproductive anatomy is disgusting – there’s no simple, systematic way to get from one to the other. Mostly, designers just keep flinging ideas at the design until the thing seems mostly done and then they just fill in the blanks and tweak the thing.

But that’s really hard. It’s hard to just generate piles of ideas and fire them off like a machine gun at your game design womb hoping some of the bullets will get lodged in there. More importantly, though, it tends to lead to designs that have a disjointed feel to them. Designs that feel like piles of random ideas that have been spackled together. And that’s if the design actually gets finished. Because the random-flinging-of-ideas approach is also really frustrating.

But there’s an easier way. There’s a step you can insert between planting the initial seed and actually designing the game thing. It involves designing around something called game feel.

All About the Feels

Game feel is hard to define in a nice, clear objective way that makes gamer nerds happy. Which is why most gamer nerds dismiss it. Gamer nerds hate anything subjective. Which is weird considering that tabletop RPGs are entertainment products and the play experience is entirely subjective. But then, gamers also have terrible social skills and all of these games are team-based, social activities. So, f$&%ed if I know why these games attract so many nerds

Game feel describes how the game feels. Mind-blowing, right? It’s that sort of revelation that only I – genius that I am – can possibly provide. But that’s really all it is. Game feel refers to the fact that whatever it is you’ve designed; it couldn’t possibly be mistaken for anything else. Even if you take off all the fluff and flavor and flair.

Suppose I need some undead ninjas to unlive in my cursed monastery. I design them and put them in my game. But while I’m running the game, I never describe the undead ninjas as undead ninjas. I don’t put them in tattered ninja clothes, I don’t give them ninja swords, and I never call them undead. I just call them “humanoid monsters.” No fluff. No flavor. No flair.

At the end of the game, I ask the players to give the monsters a name based on how the fights with them felt. Or to describe the monsters in some way. If the players call them “undead ninjas” or “zombie assassins” or “kung-fu vampires” or “Bruce Lee back from the dead” then I nailed the game feel. But if I get a bunch of shrugs and awkward pauses and “umms” and “ahhs,” then the game feel just isn’t there.

Now, game feel is hard to work with it. Because it’s subjective, there’s no numbers to tweak or rules or systems to follow. It’s just about hippy-dippy bulls$&% feelings. Which, honestly, is where most of the artistry and genius of game design really comes out. And where most game design screwups happen.

For example, all of the people who complained that every class was a spellcaster in the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons were actually complaining about the game feel. Obviously, every character wasn’t a spellcaster. Fighters didn’t cast spells. They used special moves they learned through intense training which they could use a limited number of times per day. And which weren’t called spells at all.

That’s game feel right there. You can put any name or description on anything that you want. But, if that thing doesn’t feel like what you say it is, it isn’t that thing. And no one will be convinced otherwise. This is why reskinning is to game design what toasting a Pop-Tart is to actual cooking. And also why generic game systems like GURPS will never be as popular as game systems built for specific settings.

Because game feel is subjective, it also varies from person to person. If you actually do that undead ninja experiment I described above, rarely will you actually get anyone to say, “fighting that monster was like if Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was set to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.” Every player brings their own experiences to the table. And that shapes each player’s perspective. But if you say, “what if I told you that was an undead ninja,” the players should say, “oh yeah, that totally makes sense.” And if they later fight a similar-but-more-powerful beastie, they should say, “well, this must be the undead sensei.” Fluff, lore, and description can’t override game feel and it can’t establish a game feel that isn’t there. But if it resonates with the game feel, it helps to keep everyone’s experience on the same page.

And that resonance, that unification of experience all depends on having a nice, big D.

Remember MDA?

A long, LONG time ago, I wrote a couple of articles about a now twenty-year-old but still relevant and respected model of game design called the MDA model.

The idea behind the MDA model is that game designers and players approach games from two different directions. Players enjoy games because they satisfy particular entertainment needs that vary from player to player. Some players like to overcome challenges and win. Others like to play ‘let’s pretend’ in an imaginary world. Others still like to shut off their brains and hack away at something for a few hours and watch their points climb. Those entertainment needs are called aesthetics and they determine whether a player has a satisfying game experience.

Of course, the aesthetics of play are highly subjective and the relative importance of each aesthetic varies from player to player. Because they are based on each player’s individual desires and experiences.

The designer’s goal is to provide a satisfying play experience. And the easiest way to provide a fun experience is to hook electrodes up to each player’s brain in just the right spots so that, when they turn on the juice, the player will experience whatever aesthetics they are looking for. But that’s illegal. And until cybernetic neuroscience advances a bit and the equipment prices come down, it’s also impractical and dangerous. So that’s out. All a designer can do is hope that the game they design will actually produce the right responses in most players’ brains.

But the only tool that the game designer really has at his disposal is the game’s mechanics. The term ‘mechanics’ refers to all of the rules and systems and elements that make up the game. And that isn’t limited to just rules and statistics. It includes all the different systems that make up a game. Things like turn order and the existence of the GM.

So, the designer designs mechanics. When all of the mechanics interact with each other and with the players, they produce a particular game dynamic, a play experience. And hopefully, the play experience causes the players to experience the right aesthetics and everyone is happy and the designer gets rich and famous and he crushes the competition and puts all the WotC designers to work in his Siberian dice mines and then he rules the world.

Hypothetically.

The Missing D

A lot of amateur designers – and even a lot of professional designers – forget the ‘D’ between the ‘M’ and the ‘A’. D&D 4E was a great example of designers forgetting the D. Oh sure, most designers realize they are trying to design mechanics that produce certain feelings in their players’ brains. Certain aesthetics. And, that done, they just start making rules. They jump from aesthetics to mechanics.

For instance, people are always talking to me about building a mechanic that increases the feeling of exploration in the game. Having said that, they start inventing all these rules about what die rolls to make during wilderness travel based on accumulating enough ‘travel points’ to discover your location and get there safely. Or they might want to make some undead ninja for their game. So they just start filling out a stat block.

A lot of times, this leads to a disjointed mess of a design that, while mechanically really solid and balanced, just doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do at the table for reasons no one can really articulate. And that problem doesn’t show up until you actually play with it at the table.

Mechanics do not create aesthetics. Mechanics and aesthetics interact through the game’s dynamics. They interact through the experience of play. And that’s the missing step in the game design process that will take you from embryonic game design seed to actually starting a real design.

Or kick some new life into a design project that’s been lying fallow for too long.

The Missing Step

You always want to plow into your design projects with a nice, big, strong D. And that means that, as early as possible in the design process, you want to define the play experience you’re going for and how that play experience is supposed to feel. You want to figure out what it will be like to actually play with your finished design.

How do you that? Grab a blank piece of paper or open a blank document in your favorite program and write out – in prose – how you see your game or system or monster or whatever actually playing at the table. If you could watch people play with your D, what would it look like? And what would it feel like?

You want to be detailed. You want to describe as completely as possible exactly what people will be doing when they play your game. Or fight your monster. Or explore your dungeon. And you don’t want to describe it in terms of the game’s fiction but in terms of what the players will actually be doing at the table. Will they be rolling dice? Will they be making choices? What choices? How will they make those choices? And how will they feel about them?

Now, you absolutely cannot do that in one pass. So, don’t try. Instead, rewrite it a few times, expanding the details each time until you have something you can actually design. Something you can put actual mechanics too. Often, with each pass through the play description, more and more mechanical ideas will start to emerge.

Every time you finish a pass through your play description, walk away from it for a little while. Then come back and reread it. And as you reread it, ask yourself questions about it. Look for gaps. Look for problems. Look for hang-ups. And ask yourself what happens at the table when something goes wrong with your design. And only when you feel like you have a solid understanding of what it would like for a group of players to play your design should you start actually designing anything.

If you do this right, not only will it help you focus on the play experience and design mechanics to fit the game feel you’re after, it’ll also give you a roadmap. It’ll tell you all the things you need to figure out, all the mechanics you need to design, to get your thing into a finished state. And it will help you head off some – but not all – of the problems that might arise with the finished thing.

Example by Admission

Click the Goblin’s Jar to Leave a Tip

All my above advice is really good. Which is why it’s such a shame that I rarely take it. While I’m proud of the fact that I do focus a lot of my attention on game feel and the play experience because I know the value of a big, strong D, I don’t normally take the step of writing and rewriting a description of the play experience I’m going for. Not on paper. I do it in my head.

And I’m wrong and that’s bad. Writing stuff down is important. Thoughts are mercurial. They are always changing. And not for the better. Thoughts change based on stupid things like your mood and the movie you happen to be watching at the moment and what you ate for breakfast. And you often don’t notice the gradual change in your thoughts over time. When you write something down, though, you commit to it. You can still change it, of course. But you have to change it deliberately and you have to have a good reason to change it.

Thoughts also get forgotten. Even if you’re a supergenius with an amazing memory like me, you forget s$&%. So, if you go away from a project for a month or six months or a year, and you kept all this stuff in your head, you’ll lose a lot of it. And design ideas for games about pretend elves are a lot more important than things like phone numbers and birthdays and your kids’ names. You can’t risk losing them.

So, I’m going to offer an example of this process right now. An example of a play experience I never wrote up. One I kept in my head. And one that has since started to fall out of my head. Which is a problem because large numbers of people are starting to gather up their torches and pitchforks because I never finished a particular project that they really, really want. And I’m going to use that play experience writeup as a road map to finish the damned project. That project is my magic item crafting system for D&D 5E.

I sat down for several hours and made several attempts to describe what it would be like at the table to actually use the crafting system I’ve envisioned. . And then I wrote down some questions that the description raised and how I would answer them. Normally, I’d incorporate the answers to those questions into a later pass of the play description, but I think it’s more useful if I show you the questions themselves. So, what you’re seeing is the very first pass description, a very late pass description – I think it was the fourth pass – and the questions that arose and how I answered them. I’m sharing this stuff pretty raw. It’ll be proofread, but not really polished. It’s as close to my private notes as I can get it.

First Pass

During the course of their adventures, the players find various materials. Between adventures, the players can use those materials to craft equipment including mundane equipment and magical items. Basically, they just trade in particular combinations of materials for the items they want.

Late Pass

There are several ways to find materials during adventures. First, the GM can place materials like treasure in the adventure. Second, the players can salvage materials from the monsters they kill. Third, the players can salvage materials from visible sources that the GM places in the adventure. Fourth, the party can forage for materials during their wilderness travels. By connecting resource acquisition to treasure, the killing of monsters, the discovery of specific locations, and wilderness travel, it keys the gathering of resources to common adventuring tasks.

Because gathering materials happens during the course of adventures, it can involve dice rolls and action resolution. Thus, to salvage materials from monsters and resource nodes, ability checks using skill or tool proficiencies are required. In addition to providing a use for existing tool proficiencies, which are woefully underused in the base game despite the number of character backgrounds that begin play with tool proficiencies, this also makes item crafting feel like a specialized skill or ability that defines a character. It also provides a bit of niche protection, which character customizers definitely appreciate. And it further reinforces the idea that gathering materials is something that is a part of adventuring. That said, the number of proficiencies used for gathering materials should be relatively small as players start the game with only a small number of proficiencies and it is difficult to acquire new proficiencies. It should not be difficult for an average-sized party to have the prerequisites needed to gather many of the different types of materials. And the materials found as part of placed treasure should make up the shortfall easily.

Materials have three descriptors. Materials have a rarity that mirrors the rarities of magic items already in the game. Materials have a form that describes what the material is actually composed of in the world. And some materials have special attributes that describe particular types of magic or effects they are imbued with. It is not necessary to name or keep track of specific materials. Materials can be tracked as a number of units of materials with particular descriptors. For example, three units of very rare, fiery mineral. However, the GM can provide specific names, particularly for items that also work as treasure or trade goods. Very rare, fiery mineral might be ruby. This approach allows GMs who want to add the detail to get specific about their materials while allowing less engaged GMs to still supply materials that feel like real objects that might be discovered to the players. Too much abstraction and the crafting system feels like a matter of just earning enough points to buy the magic item you want. Too much specificity and it becomes a burden on the GM to maintain.

The material descriptors also connect directly to the game’s existing mechanics. The rarity descriptor mirrors the magic item rarities to create a parallel language between the two systems and help connect the materials directly to the crafting of magical items. Because magic item rarities are also connected to the levels at which such items should be available, this also keys the materials to specific adventure and challenge levels, thus helping GMs determine what materials should be available in specific adventures. The form descriptors also describe the general way in which the item should be obtainable. Materials such as hide and bone would be salvaged from monsters. Plant materials would be salvaged from plant-based monsters or by foraging in the wilderness. Minerals and metals would be available from specific mining nodes. Finally, the quality descriptors should connect the materials to specific magical effects, creature types, and other pieces of the game’s mechanics and lore to provide guidance for the GM in placing the items and to provide an easy way for players to assess what a material might be useful for. Fiery materials would be found in the volcanic lairs of red dragons, for example, and would be useful for crafting flaming swords, necklaces of fireballs, and potions of fire breathing.

Every mundane and magical item has a formula that describes the materials required to craft it. The formula describes the number of units of materials with specific descriptors. For example, a flametongue sword might require at least 5 units of rare metal and at least 5 units of fiery material. Thus, the formulas involve some resource management and optimization on the part of the craftsman. For example, if a player’s only source of fiery material is also a very rare material, they may not want to use it to craft a rare magic item. This adds a minor mix-and-match element to the crafting system to emulate the idea of tinkering with materials to find optimal combinations and to also let players make reasonable substitutions. To further enhance this feeling and to make it a workable problem instead of simply a matter of spending resource points, each formula will also specify some materials that cannot be used in the creation of that item. For example, a magic sword could be made with metal, but it might not be able to incorporate any plant matter. Fire items couldn’t use ice materials. Such constraints add an extra dimension to the resource management and optimization game and make it feel more like crafting is working out a puzzle.

To make the crafting system more intuitive and systematic – and to simplify the design work and streamline the end result – the actual recipes and constraints should primarily be based on the type of magic item being constructed. All scrolls, for example, all wands, all potions, and so on would have some common rules for their formulae. This is a particularly good place for constraints on materials that can’t be used for certain objects. In the case of weapons and armor, it might be necessary to have several different sets of requirements and constraints based on general classes of items. For example, all swords might have one set of requirements, all axes another, and all bows might have another. Armor could be divided by weight or divided between metal and nonmetal armors or some combination of both. This also makes it easier for GMs to invent recipes for new magical items they create.

The actual crafting of items should be as simple as a player spending the required materials and then adding the item to their character sheet. This is done not just to expedite the crafting process, but also to emphasize the idea that crafting an item is something that one character goes off to a laboratory to do alone. Off-camera. That also allows players who enjoy the crafting puzzle to spend as much time planning their crafting activities as they want without fear of holding up the game or inconveniencing the GM.

Tool and skill proficiencies serve as a prerequisite for crafting specific types of items, but no roll is required. This again emphasizes the fact that crafting is a specialized skill that not anyone can do and makes the crafting system an opt-in activity at the player level. It also provides niche protection for players. The number of proficiencies that can be used to craft equipment should be relatively small for the same reasons noted above and should have substantial – but not complete – overlap with the proficiencies required to gather materials. Because crafting should be a major feature of a character concept, this requires players who want to go all-in on crafting to invest some character-building choices on it. And because the game is a team-based game and because everyone in the party can benefit from a craftsman in the group, that means that a party could work as a group to make sure they have the relevant proficiencies. Such as one player choosing to be proficient in miners’ tools to gather minerals and metals for another player who’s proficient with smiths’ tools.

Issue: What If the Players Need or Want A Specific Material?

There’s a problem in that the availability of materials is entirely controlled by the GM whereas its’ the players who actually determine what materials they need or want based on the items they want to make. This is already a problem in the existing system wherein magic items are only available as treasure placed by the GM. Because the GM is effectively deciding what materials are available while away from the table and the players are deciding what materials they want away from the table, communication can be difficult. While the GM should ensure a good mix of useful materials turn up in the game as treasure, other methods are needed as well.

First, it should be possible for players to buy materials. So, materials need a cost. This should be useful for getting small amounts of materials needed to complete items that the party has almost all of the materials for, but the cost should be set such that it does not become a substitute for searching for materials during play and therefore detract from the idea that materials are one of the fruits of adventures.

Second, players should be given the explicit option to communicate the need for a specific material to the GM so the GM can create a situation wherein they can acquire the material. An explicit downtime activity, action, or option should exist for researching materials. So, the player can say, “I need to research where I can find some rare metal or fiery materials.” This prompts the GM to create an encounter, side quest, or adventure based around acquiring that resource so the players can complete their item. This provides an increased sense of player agency and gives players a way to ask for a specific material without actually asking for it. It also trains players to communicate with their GM about what adventures and goals they’d like to pursue in a more general way and could improve the player-GM relationship.

Issue: What Will the Players Do with Useless Materials?

Because the GM will now be placing materials in the adventure for use with the crafting system, there is the possibility that the players will end up with undesired materials that simply take up space in their bags. Materials must, therefore, be salable. Thus, through the action of selling useless materials and buying desired materials, players can effectively convert materials from one type to another with the value of the material serving as a conversion factor. This adds another dimension to the crafting puzzle minigame.

Because the materials are effectively another form of treasure, like gems, art objects, and trade goods, this means the GM can place materials freely in treasure hordes based on their value and assume that players that are uninterested in crafting will liquidate their materials along with the gems and statuettes they discover. So, for groups that don’t opt-in – or don’t opt fully into the crafting system – this system simply becomes an alternative treasure system.

In addition, because monster corpses are sources of materials, this means that monsters that traditionally don’t carry treasure can actually have treasure in the form of pelts, ivory, and valuable reagents. While these treasures are gated behind the need for particular proficiencies, it does mean there’s a tangible, material reward for having a tool proficiency. Whereas previously, proficiency with mining tools was likely never used even once during a game, now those proficiencies provide opportunities for the party to earn more treasure.

The selling of materials should thus be an efficient use of those materials, offering the full base value of the materials. Buying materials, however, should not be efficient so as to add a cost to the conversion of materials. If players can freely convert materials, then the differences between materials are meaningless and the idea of constraints and formulae are also meaningless.

Issue: How Do the Players Know What They Can Make?

To craft an item, a player has to know that it exists and what the required materials are to craft it. In D&D 5E, most players don’t have access to the list of magic items available in the game. The magic item list is hidden away in the DMG. That means that a player-facing list of craftable items has to exist. While it’s easy enough to provide such a list, there are several problems with doing so. First, it interferes with the ability of the GM to control magic item distribution in the game. An ability that many GMs appreciate as it allows them to avoid adding items to the game that they find difficult to deal with. These items include game-changing items like wish-granting items or flight-granting items to name a few. There are also items that require substantial extra work and change the nature of a campaign, such as items that allow players to travel to alternate planes. And finally, there are items that some playgroups simply find uncomfortable, such as love potions, mind-control items, soul-imprisoning items, and items that rob players of their agency.

Second, magic items feel fantastic and wonderful partly because they are hidden away from prying player eyes. Putting a list of all magic items in front of the players will rob them of their mystique and fantasy by making them simple commodities. Relatedly, if players have access to a list of everything they can craft, it may dilute the feeling of crafting as a way for players to create things they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. By putting all the items on a list so that literally anyone in the world with the right skills and material could craft them, there’s no sense of crafting something unique. Something no one else could make.

But the nature of crafting requires either a list or a heavy degree of adjudication. And adjudication needs to be avoided both because it puts a strain on the GM and because it takes away that feeling of a wizard or smith working away alone in their lab and creating something wonderful that they then get to show the world. And further, keeping the GM out of the crafting lab also emphasizes that it is something that the players can do to enhance, equip, and customize their characters without any oversight. A compromise is needed.

First, assume that, for every magical item, there is a formula or recipe that describes how that item is made. Something a craftsman could learn or record. These don’t have to be tangible items. Just something that is assumed to exist in the world. A character must know how to craft a specific magic item in order to craft it.

Next, assume that many magic item formulae are commonly known by any trained and competent craftsman, just as there are dishes that pretty much every chef knows how to make and there are only minor variations between those items. Now, classify each magical item as either one whose formula is commonly known or one whose formula is unknown. The commonly known formulae can be put on a player-facing list with the GM getting a master list of all the items in the game.

This raises the question of how players might learn how to craft items that aren’t on the player facing list.

First, the GM can simply modify the player-facing list to make more or fewer items available or provide the players the master list at their discretion. Second, the GM could place formulae as tangible in-game rewards just like other treasures. Notes about the creation of a particular magical item could be buried in some ancient library or discovered in the notes of the necromancer the party just killed.

Third, explicit options should exist that allow players to attempt to extend their magic item lists. If the players know of a specific item or they have specific criteria for an item they’d like to create, they could conduct in-game research as part of an adventure or as a downtime activity to discover a formula. For example, they could seek the recipe for a flametongue greatsword. Or they could, as part of preparing for an adventure to slay a white dragon, conduct research into magical items that do fire damage and the GM could award them with an appropriate formula.

Fourth, it should be possible to discover a new formula through experimentation. Such experimentation could be a downtime activity similar to research. Experimentation could take two forms. First, if the player has a magic item in their possession, they could analyze it to determine the formula for making it. Experimentation should be fairly cheap and easy in that case since the item itself is already available in the game and the player merely wants to copy it. Perhaps the identify spell would allow for the distilling of a magic formula.

A more complicated form of experimentation would allow a craftsman to experiment with a particular material or set of materials in an attempt to discover the basis for a new formula. Because this will require GM adjudication, it should be costly and time-consuming, perhaps destroying the materials in question. The end result would be the granting of a new formula that could be created with the materials in question if such an item exists. If the player presents the GM with multiple materials and their experiment is a success, the GM would give a formula that could be made with that specific combination of materials and with the player’s proficiencies. That approach would award attentive players who understand the system. For example, if a player wanted to specifically discover a new fire-based weapon and recognized that weapons use certain materials like metal and wood – for a hafted weapon – and occasionally minerals, but never, say plants or hide, they could present a combination of materials that was very likely to lead to a weapon and that had the fire quality. Thus, the player gets the fun of experimentation to discover new combinations, but instead of random guesswork, can use deduction and system knowledge to influence the outcomes.

All of this stuff does increase the amount of GM involvement on the crafting side, so the rules of formula and the idea of common-knowledge items as opposed to secret items should be presented as an optional variant to the base system. But it is important enough to deserve a place as part of the core system itself.

Issue: What If the Players Don’t Want to Craft? What If They Change Their Minds?

Reframing this system as an alternate treasure system makes it something that GMs may want to implement even if the players do not want to craft magic items. In that case, as noted, the system simply becomes an addition to the treasure system already in place and the players will just end up selling rare pelts and fiery minerals along with the statuettes and necklaces and pearls they already find in their adventures. However, it is probable that players may find the lure of crafting too great once their packs are full of materials, even if all they want to do is create some healing potions or extra spell scrolls or enhance their weapons. By not taking the requisite proficiencies at character generation, they won’t be able to opt-in later. And D&D makes it costly and difficult to acquire new proficiencies. Likewise, players may want to engage with the crafting system without having to commit their character to it. So, it should be possible to pay to have an item crafted from the materials you have. Players should be able to commission specific magic items and pay a specific cost to have the item made from their materials. Because players can buy the materials needed to craft items, this effectively means this is also an alternative system for buying magic items. Thus, every magic item’s cost is the sum of the cost of the materials required to make it plus the cost of the labor.

Issue: Can Players Sell Unwanted Items? Can They Salvage Materials from Items?

The idea of commissioning and buying magic items and of swapping materials around naturally leads to the question of whether magic items can be sold or whether players can salvage materials from magic items they don’t want. Obviously, both options are entirely in keeping with the system, but neither one should be optimal. In fact, neither should be particularly efficient. They should involve tradeoffs in order to ensure the crafting system itself remains meaningful. Just as the free conversion of materials from one type to another at no cost or the free purchase of materials dilutes the constraints that make the system feel like a crafting system and not merely a different way of buying magic items with arbitrary material points, so would the free and efficient salvaging of materials. Salvaging materials from magical items should result in a loss of value akin to selling the item. And as it stands, once you get through the optional rules and the random dice rolls, the DMG system for selling magical items leads to an expected sale price of half the value of the item. Which is in keeping with the PHB rules for selling equipment.

This leads to the idea of salvaging useful materials from mundane items. D&D is pretty down on gathering the equipment from fallen foes and selling it, probably because D&D wants to avoid asking the players or the GM to do any sort of bookkeeping at all. That said, the idea of salvaging materials from mundane equipment – say, melting down a hobgoblin’s armor into common metal – actually works well in the system if we consider the fact that such materials would be the equivalent for humanoids of dragonhide and ooze fluid. This is especially helpful because it gives an easy way around the very uncomfortable idea that the party might flay the flesh from a sentient humanoid or gather its blood to make some magical trinket by providing a different way of salvaging materials from humanoids. It also expands the number of material types that could be salvaged from monsters, particularly metal.

Issue: Are There Other Uses for Materials? Can This System Do Anything Else?

With the reframing of this system as an alternative treasure system with a crafting system hanging off of it and the idea that a GM might use the system even if the players aren’t interested in crafting, it’s worth asking if materials might be useful for anything else. With materials being tied into various magical effects and keywords in the system, the obvious possibility is to allow spellcasters to use these materials as reagents that give an extra boost to their spells. For example, if you cast a fireball spell and use up a fiery material, perhaps you could reroll any 1s you roll on the damage dice. That would require an easy way to translate specific material keywords to specific spells. Not just spells that do particularly energy types of damage. For example, certain materials might be keyed to specific schools of magic and the rarity of different materials could be used to determine the levels of spells that could be enhanced.

I can also imagine a system for temporarily imbuing items with particular qualities or jury-rigged, slapdash magic items. Which leads naturally to the idea of a class keyed specifically to the crafting subsystem. Something like an alchemist or an artificer. At the very least, it would make for an interesting feat option. Perhaps a feat specifically keyed to item crafting would make it easier for someone to get the proficiencies they need to become a crafter and provide other bonuses besides. While these options could definitely enhance the system for specific types of players, they are beyond the scope of the basic system. Except maybe the reagent system for spellcasters which I quite like.


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35 thoughts on “Designing with a Strong D (And Also the Return of Crafting)

  1. Just a quick thought that I would like to throw out there:
    I think “User Stories” from software development could be used in a similar manner. They’re usually written down in the form of “As a [Role], I want to [action] so I can [motivation]”
    (example “As a guest on this page I want to be able to register so i get a username and password that I can use to login”)
    All of the following details are then based on this one sentence. I think it’s a great starting point for design/analysis to take place, because you can always come back to this one sentence and make sure everything fits together once the User Story is added to the system.
    I’d have to rethink however on how the User Story Tool would have to change in order to fit into RPG design.

  2. Very interesting article, details well how the system will plays out (or the How of the system).

    However, I feel like there is a step before that that was undertaken here but that was not outlined. The objectives of the system should be formally defined (the why). Usually in design you start by outlining what you want the system to do (or in this case, feel). You then develop game concepts and mechanics to fullfill these requirements, and then come back to the requirement to ensure that they are all fullfilled and that nothing was forgotten, and then re-iterate the whole process until satisfaction. Maybe something like this :

    – The system should encourage adventuring;
    – The system should encourage players to use their background information such as tool proficiency;
    – The system should be opt-in;
    – The system should minimize the amount of GM adjucation required;
    – Etc.

    Also, on a sidenote, it might be interesting to had a way for characters to bypass the proficiency gating by hiring experts. This could also make interesting rewards. For example, if the party rescue some dwarves, they could owe them one, which could be called upon to gather some mineral the group encounter in a cave that they don’t have the proficiency to extract.

    • Except, nope. This is why you need to be reading instead of talking. Design goals come after the dynamics of play. Because the play experience IS the design goal. You’re still thinking mechanics first. I didn’t sit down and say “the system should encourage adventuring,” because I sat down and looked at what the players would be doing at the table. And what they would be doing was discovering materials during their adventures. Because that’s what playing an RPG with a crafting system looks like. You’re distilling those goals OUT OF the play experience, not the other way around.

      • I feel like I’m at work. On the one hand we have the old school Systems Engineer trained on traditional Structured Analysis who wants to start by writing requirements– “The system shall (do this) (this well) in accordance with (this standard/document/reference.)” On the other hand, we have the modern practitioner of Design Thinking who wants to start by creating empathy with the user and then rapidly evolving through a series of prototypes.

        If anyone understands what I’m saying and is nodding is along then let’s go get a beer.

        • Agreed. The buzzword attached to this in my work is ‘Agile Development’: iterative prototyping from the client requirement.

          The client here being – I guess – the players + the GM together.

        • That’s a valid point and I take it well, but also remember that there is a lot of difference between most engineering products and most entertainment products. RPGs are entertainment products and that means that they will be judged entirely on subjective and emotional grounds and all of the reasons for that judgment will be rationalizations. I’ve talked about this before and it’s a known issue in game design and playtesting that people are very good at deciding what they like and don’t like, very bad at understand why they feel that way, and almost incapable of know what they will like before they have it. It has to do with how the brain judges such experiences. What I have found among amateur game designers – like myself – is that we tend to treat games as systems that can be judged objectively and that we assume the end user is judging based on rational criteria. Humans don’t do that with their entertainment products though. Game designers need to focus on the human experience first because that is the rubber-meets-the-road test of any game. You can have the best, most balanced game mechanics in the world, but if people don’t actually find your game charming, rewarding, and fun, it won’t matter. And the charm, the satisfaction, and the fun are holistic and emergent qualities. They come from the interaction of all the gameplay elements and the interactions of the players themselves. If you focus on systems, you are missing the human side. Which is fine for things that get judged more on if they work than if they make people feel good, but not for things whose sole purpose is to make people feel good. We have no shortage of elitist creators in every medium insisting that their brilliant opus wasn’t the problem the audience was. The audience doesn’t know what good is. If you ever find yourself saying that about an entertainment product, YOU failed as a creator because you forgot what entertainment was all about.

  3. Could I get more details on the ‘evil Shaolin monastery rocking back and forth between the Mortal Realm and the Shadow Plane’?

    It sounds perfect for what I’m working on, since I’m already quite committed to a far east theme, and am about to drop a phase spider boss who phases into the shadow plane instead of the etherial plane.

    • I’m imagining a cabal of evil Monks with a symbiotic relation with phase spiders. They phase into the back of their host monk, using the tattoo all these Monks wear.

      With the aid of their human allies, these Phase Spiders seek to invade our world.

      Perhaps they summon themselves into our world through blue prism-crystals that grant mental powers.

      (And as my final homage to the classic Dr Who episode, Monks + Spiders alike serve “The Great Spider” who is the EolB for the game)

  4. Yeah, I gotta say this is pretty awesome stuff. Great design work. I’m looking forward to things progressing from here. Also nice to see you getting back on the horse for some of these projects. I know it can be rough, as I myself am going through it, but here’s to 2020 being a great year for us to get back on track!

  5. Angy I am so, so excited to see this and can’t wait for the follow-up next week.

    I’m wondering about the assumption that all crafting ingredients become permanent parts of the crafted item itself – there could easily be *consumed* ingredients while crafting, similar to spell components. As an exception to the rule that fire-type pokemon I mean items might never use plant ingredients, you might, say, need to burn rare ‘Ember Blossoms’ (or what have you) and hold your sword in the fire to grant its magical fire, consuming the ingredient in the process. Would that make the end item more valuable because it permanently uses up a rare or expensive ingredient, or less valuable because you can’t salvage all the original materials?

    I’m here for an Angry-approved alchemist class, not to mention making herbalism kits and poisoner’s kits not completely useless. Thanks as usual Scott!

    • The concept of having to use special, magical ingredients to heat, quench, or otherwise fuel a magical item’s creation sounds like an awesome addition to your setting! Definitely something you’d want to add to your Campaign Bible, and something that will probably excite any players that enjoy exploring the intricacies of the setting they’re playing or that enjoy tinkering with systematic mechanics like crafting. I’m certain Angry’s system will take cool stuff like that into account!

      As for value, note that there are lots of magic items in the DMG that already require the consumption of spell components during their creation but are still valued essentially equally with other items in their tier. Scrolls, potions, wands, and staves are just a few examples of item types that could require multiple costly spell components to be consumed in their creation (Scrolls of Identify cost a 100gp pearl for each scroll you make, for example).

      Based on the earlier articles in this crafting system series I think you can only ever manage to salvage a single unit of raw material from an item so I guess that means every other raw material used in crafting the item in the first place is essentially consumed and destroyed in the process, mechanically speaking. Basically, you’ll never be able to deconstruct an item and receive 100% of the materials back, so the value of the item (both in GP terms and in the feel of the system) will be the same whether the Ember Blossoms are burned in the forge or used to decorate the hilt.

      Also, Angry has already written a couple of articles on hacking the herbalism kit, check out the “Crafting Herbcraft (Part 1): Conceptual Herbology” and “Crafting Herbcraft (Part 2): Practical Herbology” articles under the “Hacking New Rules” section of the “Hack Your F$&%ing Game” menu. You can then take those rules and hack together a poisoner’s kit version using the exact same framework.

      • Thanks for the reply. I’ve read the herbalism articles, but since Angry’s brought up healing potions a few times in these crafting articles, I’m guessing – maybe incorrectly – that he’ll be convering potionmaking. I’m interested in what sort of recipes they would have, plus what kind of ingredients and how to allocate the resources in game. The herbalism hack is pretty cool – I can’t say more as I haven’t tested it – but I’d like something with a touch more table presence.

        Besides, I’m wondering if it will be herbalism and poisoner’s kits which will be the necessary proficiencies to harvest plant crafting resources.

  6. As part of figuring out how to hand out loot at a reasonable rate I’ve created a spreadsheet with all the magic items in the dmg, broken out by table, rarity, and type (weapon, armor, consumable, item). I’m happy to share if it would give you a headstart on your next article.

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  8. As unwanted as they are to Angry’s Goal, I can actually see a sensible place and reason to use the traditional Crafting check in the System as written out right now: When experimenting to discover a new Formula, to Determine how much of the materials delivered in excess are used up before the correct formula is found. If a large failure is there, it can be used to determine how much was discovered. Like “You find you need three common Wood for the Shaft, but you need more Metal than Wood for the Blade”. Of course, like anything, this is up to the discretion of the GM to use.

    • Well, the experimentation aspect mentioned above already requires the GM’s adjudication anyway, so adding a single tool proficiency check isn’t going to disrupt the game very much more than asking the GM to look over this stuff in the first place, you know?

      • Except one thing is probably pretty rare – and is an optional component the GM can choose to allow or not – and the other thing has to happen every time anyone wants to craft anything.

  9. Aw-w, you’ve promised a process of moving from M to A, but you still only show the resulting steps. That’s not exactly fair, Angry.

    Here’s flow that works for me. You might find it useful, because it’s specifically structred to not let you dive to deep with nitty-gritty details until you answer big important questions. But then you are bound to use these big answers to proceed further, so your design is less likely to veer off or become unfocused.

    1. List design problems that you want to solve.
    “Player want iconic gaming stuff in their game. Crafing is iconic. There’s no rules for crafting yet”

    2. Come up with high-level idea of what you are trying to do.
    “Players will be able to combine stuff they find using underlying quialities of the items”

    3. Expand the idea into concept by answering questions
    – What players do
    – How they do it
    – Why it’s cool
    “Players obtain items with certain qualities and recipes that tell how these qualities can be used. This is cool, because rather than being arbitrary recipe list, alchemy will have underlying principles that players can discover and master”

    4. Pick core mechanic for your feature.
    “Combining the qualities, obv.”
    Don’t sweat auxiliary mechanics for now.

    5. Pick dynamics for your fetaure.
    “I want players to find one ingredient per encounter.
    I want players to buy about one ingredient per adventuring day.
    I want players to craft about three consumable items per adventuring day.
    I want players to use the same amount of consumable items they craft.
    I want players to construct three non-consumable permanent magic items per level.”

    6. Something that you might want to add to your process.
    Draw these dynamics as arcs. Literally, on a piece of paper. You can use different colors on a single chart.
    It’s far easier to analyse dynamics when it’s shown rather than told.

    7. Now it will be far easier to see which auxiliary mechanics you need and how to tune them the way you want, and also spot edge cases.

    8. After this you can probably write a lot of additional stuff if you want. You can do it later, but I sure wouldn’t do it sooner.

    9. A useful thing to do would be to make a list of potential issues that might stem from your design (abstraction turning resource gathering in accumulation of points, in you example).
    These lists make handy checklists to regularly check your results against.

    • I think you need to go back and reread if you think you need a way to get from M to A. Because you – the designer – need to end up at M. Because that’s the thing you actually do. That’s why you start by focusing on what it feels like to play the game. What the play experience is like. And that is the design goal. Your flow is back-a$&-wards because you’re focusing on mechanic design problems first instead of last. You can’t assign goals or identify problems BEFORE you know what you’re actually trying to produce at the table. That’s exactly what leads to designs that are piles of mechanics and “monstrous humanoids.”

      This is backwards. You’re still working from the wrong direction. And I recommend that everyone follow my advice, not yours.

      • > You can’t assign goals or identify problems BEFORE you know what you’re actually trying to produce at the table.

        I agree. But aesthetics are just a subset of goals you might have.
        For example, you don’t like having a specific rule and unqiue table for resolving each and every action, is you’re replacing them with a single universal action resolution mechanic. This is identifying a problem and solving a goal without having an aesthtic in mind.

        Other design issues you might want to tackle are management of pacing, tension, spotlight, narrtive rights, player cognitive load and challenge types, amount of GM preparation, even dealing with people not showing up regularly or GMs having to lug around too much dice.

        If you’re hacking an existing system, you’re accepting the solutions provided by the designer that came before you. In most such cases aesthetic-forward approach would be enough. But if you’re designing a system from ground up, the questions you’ve got to tackle include but are not limited by aesthetic questions.

        • Aesthetics aren’t goals. You can’t make aesthetics.

          Look, do things however you want. And literally everything you listed is part of the play experience. Though a lot of the things you mentioned are guiding design principles. Things you use to evaluate and improve all designs and things you keep in the back of your head while you design. Or acts of polish. Of cleanup. Like elegance in design.

          But I feel like all you’re doing is reading half of what I wrote, ignoring the literature on the design approach I drew on, and just sticking stubbornly to how you already do things because that’s how things are done. This isn’t listening, it’s rationalizing.

          It’s pretty funny considering what you’re saying is exactly the sort of thing I said most people do that leads to a longer, more convoluted process. Have you TRIED doing it the way I described instead before telling me how it’s the wrong way? Or are you just that unwilling to see if another way actually works better.

    • I want to add a more general comment here to the comments I’ve made. Consider this advice for you and everyone else here.

      If you’re at all interested in self-improvement, if you believe you should always look for better ways to do something and that there is always a way you can improve, you’re always looking for the next new way to do something. You’re learning from others, you’re trying things, you never think you have the best way or the only way. That’s what I do. And what my blog is about. Articles like this are me learning from others, trying new things, and seeing what works and what doesn’t and then giving people the chance to do the same. “Want to try a new, better way? Here it is.”

      There’s always someone who is going to argue that the old, familiar way – their way – is better and that that’s self evident. They will always find fault with any new one of doing things. But what those people aren’t doing is that they aren’t getting better. They aren’t looking to improve. Because they think they already have all the answers.

      Congratulations to you and all the others like you who already have all the answers and who never have to deviate from what they KNOW to be right. I don’t know what you’re doing here on my site because there’s nothing here for you. You’re already the best.

  10. I very much like the idea that this system has the potential to become a driving force in a campaign. As you stated, a good way for the players to communicate the goal of their adventuring, and a good way for the GM to deliver on that goal. An entire campaign can be based around the search for rarer and rarer materials.

    • And that could be a very fun campaign, even if none of the players want to craft! They could be a mercenary group that takes whatever odd jobs come their way, and they set up shop in a city that is run by a powerful Merchant’s Guild. One adventure they’re off to collect materials for the guild’s blacksmiths, the next they’re off to fill an order for manticore hide so the tailor’s can outfit a new platoon of guild’s private military. Or collect a legendary silver crystal that the heiress of one of the guild’s councilmen wants for her wedding dress.

      That is, even if nobody at your table wants to opt-in to the crafting system, this is being built off of a hack to the treasure system and can be used perfectly well in a completely crafter-less party!

  11. Such depth!

    I’ve been knee-deep in a bottles/vials-involved ‘soul’ material gathering concept as a way to offer more diverse & utilitarian treasure and magical piecemeal components… and I’ve been spending a fair amount of time trying to tie this mechanic into my own custom ‘soul genus’ system, and my half-formulated piecemeal crafting rules…

    While I’m still excited at the prospect of allowing players to scoop up some cold-element and necrotic-aligned energy in a bottle after defeating a winter wight, this article was exactly what I needed going forward – to stop focusing on mechanics, and try to create a clear vision of how I want the system to actually PLAY before worrying about what type of soul energy every friggin monster in the game could have.

    Thanks for that.

    And if you’d go ahead and finish the rest of that crafting system too, t h a t ‘ d b e g r e a t.

  12. I’ve been wanting to design a long form adventure that starts with stranding the players on an island and ends when they escape. I was fairly confident on my start and end but had big holes in the middle that this article started to fill. Specifically, implementing some kind of crafting system could go a long way to fulfilling my “players will develop an intimate understanding of the environment and be able to use it to their advantage” goal. I was also drawn to the idea that you can seed adventure ideas from the players using the system. Doing this using a crafting system is cool, but it seems like that’s not the only way to do so? I guess what I’m getting at is if you could write the “How to take the random shit your players say at the table and turn it into a mind-blowing adventure!” article, I would eat that up.

  13. I’ve been toying with a couple of ideas ever since you proposed this crafting system. The first is are you planning to differentiate between ingredients that can create consumable items versus permanent items? I know that if I were a player and I had a choice between creating a Potion of Flying or saving up my ingredients until I could create Winged Boots, or a Wand of Fireballs instead of a Necklace of Fireballs, I would always choose the permanent items. You could use the types of ingredients to limit what they can be used in, for example a Fiery Liquid (Salamander Blood) could be used to make magic ink for a Scroll of Fireball, but not used in the creation of a Flametongue Sword…but I can think of ways that a magic liquid could be used in the quenching process of blacksmithing and I think the system should be logically intuitive. Or maybe that is just me and other players would enjoy making potions and scrolls.

    I didn’t love using the schools of magic as qualities for the ingredients, the schools are pretty unintuitive in 5E, especially for players who don’t pay much attention to which spell is in which school. My modification is to use the classic elements of Fire, Earth, Water, Air, Shadow (in place of Void) and adding in Spirit. I’m sure that another couple of elements could be thought of if some magical effects don’t fit under those six.

    I was also thinking of allowing Alchemists to transmute ingredients. My first thought was that they could extract the essence of an ingredient to add it to another ingredient, so if a player wanted to make a Flametongue Sword but only had Wind Metal they could extract the Fire essence from Ember Blossoms to add it to the metal. They might also be able to transmute an ingredient material into a new material.

  14. How can I run a war campaign. There are so many monsters and things to keep track of that it feels impossible. What would you do?

  15. In my soon to end campaign I started after just completing another play through of Balder’s Gate, I decided to incorporate the crafting system in that computer game. Angry, your ideas have a parallel path to that system; acquiring items during adventuring (metals, flora/fauna, recovered monster parts, etc) which are converted to specific types called “Essences” (fire/water/air/force/ground) and then applied to a formula to create magic items, which includes a specific gem (which is the limiting factor for creating higher level items). I can tell you that this method worked very well with my players, motivating them to search out ways to get more potent ingredients and giving me adventure hooks to build upon. When it was time for them to start obtaining slightly higher level magic and I started doling out greater worth gems, their excitement as players was very satisfying.

    In addition, since we had no spell casters in the group (sigh…) it gave me the opportunity to create an off-kilter, doddering old ex-wizard NPC who provided a TON of role-playing as the group tried to get him to focus on helping them.

    I’m looking forward to your more detailed take on my rather slap-dash system….

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