I recently heard someone on YouTube proclaim “It’s too hard.”
and I just have to say, “No. No it isn’t.”

I’m about to get kicked out of the Gaming Illuminati again for revealing a big secret. Making your own fantasy roleplaying game is actually pretty easy. Making an award winning one that goes through a million dollar crowdfunding campaign might be a little harder. As a corollary, if you can make a fantasy game, really any genre is doable with more time and effort.

Think about it. Why are there so many One-Page-Rules lite games? If we’re just talking about super rules lite games, I could crank out two or three of them in one night. Would any of them be good? Maybe.

But of course, the man in question was talking about Dungeons & Dragons.

You’d think someday I’d learn to scroll to the next video when a DungeonTuber starts in on junk like this, but not today. Let’s look at the cold hard truth for a moment (get your torches and pitchforks ready.) Dungeons & Dragons, especially 5E.2024, is needlessly over bloated and too complicated for its own damn good. It is about the last game I’d want to teach to a brand new TTRPG player any more. (That, and there are probably a dozen better games at this point.

Somehow along the way someone decided that more rules gets higher page counts which results in more money. Especially if they pad the books with extra art. It’s not 100% the designers’ collective fault although this sort of thing happens when you design a game by committee, teams or whatever. It also starts to bloat when the designers decide to include their own sociopolitical world view into the fantasy game. Not to mention D&D is built off of a wargaming tradition of complicated rules that goes all the way back to Chainmail.

It’s 2025. We can do way better now.

I hypothesize that it is possible to pump out a game from concept to finished PDF in about a month. I’d need a good month to test my theory, so not November or December with holidays, swim season, basketball, etc. In this day and age, a knowledgeable designer could produce a playable, functional, entertaining set of RPG rules in one month. I might test this theory in January or March. (February being too short, of course.) It’d be like National RolePlaying Design Month or NaRoPlaDeMo. We’ll go with that as opposed to NaNoWriMo. Feel free to play along at home.

There’s going to be one major complaint about whatever I do with this game- the art. Writing is easy enough to do organically. Editing, layout, and design are simple enough to pull off given that it’s nothing new to me. Art? People are going to cry because it’s AI. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from using generative AI art in my own work, is there’s always outcry against it in our hobby.

The AI art will cast a shadow of doubt over the whole project, unfortunately.

Part of me wishes people would just grow to accept that AI is going to be part of our lives going forward until some other technology comes along to replace it. I have to remind everyone that I have no art budget. I can’t afford to hire a human artist that will undoubtedly have more than one month turnaround on a single very expensive piece of art.

Then some internet genius will pipe up, “Just use stock art.”

Hmm, how many pieces of stock art are there for superheroes? How about mecha? I mean without being attached to some royalties or major IP franchises?

I’m here to tell you if I could afford a good artist they still wouldn’t be able to keep up with my demand. Artists aren’t “getting screwed” on this deal because they can’t get paid for art that I can’t commission. Ain’t nobody working for free out there. If AI is the tool that gets the job done? Yeah. I’m gonna use it. I also can’t find stock art of a kaiju goblin hell wasp without spending hours in the photo editing program.

The other problem is always the lingering doubt that if AI was used for the art, who’s to say it didn’t get used in everything else? From the perspective of someone who has used AI in other processes, I’ll be the first one to tell you it doesn’t help as much as people claim it does. There’s a lot of editing for consistency and refinement that has to go on any time you hand things off to the machine or else the end result is inconsistent gibberish. I believe the kids are calling it “AI slop” and I see how it can happen. Sure, AI has its creative uses, but it’s not ready to produce a TTRPG on its own yet.

Putting the AI problem aside for a minute, what about all the other stuff?

This ain’t my first rodeo when it comes to designing a game. I’ve said before if you can get a handful of Game Masters together in one room long enough, we’ll come up with a coherent game amongst the handful of us with different talents. (Art, writing, editing, layout, and inevitably the business end of things.) That’s pretty much how our entire hobby/cottage industry started. It’s been like that for 50 years now.

We’re not reinventing the wheel when it comes to systems, either. D20? D6 or d10 dice pools? Percentile dice? There are a dozen systems to work with that may or may not actually require attribution depending on how they are phrased. There are any number of ways to cobble a coherent RPG together without extensive testing and playtesting.

That having been said, feedback will come from early adopters. As long as we’re dealing with digital products (PDF, EPUB, etc) we’ll be fine with having to post edits. Lots of game companies offer rewards for helping swat errors and typos. The most recent incarnation of the D6 Second Edition was recently passed along to the Kickstarter backers for us to provide feedback before going to press.

Another secret about D&D’s Unearthed Arcana playtesting: It’s hype. They’re not trying for honest, legitimate feedback about the game. Instead, Wizards of the Coast is trying to get people excited about their next big shiny project that they’ll forget about within a month of its release. Isn’t it strange that other companies do just fine without input from half the Internet? WotC knows the players and Dungeon Masters are going to pick apart everything they do and find ways to twist or abuse every single rule they produce. That’s been going on for over 50 years, too.

How many times have we seen the likes of Bob Worldbuilder, Professor Dungeon Master, or any other number of famous DungeonTubers hype or produce a game based on a d20 system? Shadowdark is effectively just barebones, stripped down D&D 5E. So are Nimble, DC20, and any number of other new fantasy TTRPGs that have come out in the last couple of years. Level Up 5E and Tales of the Valiant didn’t need days upon days of extensive playtesting because they’re built upon an engine that works.

It’s the reason why my most beloved Dragonbane as well as Mutant: Year Zero, FATE, or Powered by the Apocalypse games don’t need playtesting very much. All we’re doing is slapping a few coat of paint on the old bones of a tried and true system. The mechanical text practically writes itself to a certain extent. Add in all the new player/GM “what’s a roleplaying game” text and half the book is done before you even get out of the gate and no playtesting required. Sometimes I don’t think people give GMs enough credit for being the intelligent, creative, and talented people that they are. If something is messed up enough that the players are complaining, they’ll let us know.

That just brings us around to the business end of things.

Probably the hardest part of TTRPG design is, in my opinion, the business side of things. The easy part of being a one man show is I don’t have to worry about royalties, commissions, HR, or taxes for anyone but me. The AI never complains, and I give it credit for the stuff it does. That just brings us around to the two most dreaded facets of game design for me, at least: marketing and advertising.

Universe help us, at some point we have to try to sell this thing. We have to take to YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and the rest of social media to try to sell the thing. Just popping the game out onto DriveThruRPG or wherever isn’t going to generate as many sales as hyping the thing up will. This isn’t the good old days of the TTRPG wild west when we had a few trade magazines and word-of-mouth advertising to try to put the game over. On the upside at least I’m not printing 20 copies of the game off on a photocopier and hoping to sell enough to pay for the next print run.

As much as I get annoyed and click off of YouTube videos the minute people start yammering on about their new product, it does get the word out about whatever game it is this month or this week. Now that I know there’s a pack of weasels out there operating off the same talent agency, it’s pretty easy to predict what we’ll be hearing about all over the same platform for days. It’s why we have teams of writers busting their butts to pump out a game product so Bob or Ginny can write a paragraph or two in the book and get the name recognition put into the hype engine for the game. Trust me, Ginny and company don’t put near as much brain sweat into these supplements as they like everyone to think they are.

These days those “big names” are there for the clicks. It’s for the ooh and ah factor far more than any massive game contribution. It’s to make the average TTRPG consumer think it must be good if so-and-so contributed to it. They have a big DungeonTuber channel, so they must know game design. That’s how Kickstarters go from barely funded to $3 Million. If some of these DungeonTubers were doing their own game design, they wouldn’t have as much time to bash on the “old white guys from the Midwest flyover states.” (Do I sound bitter? Sorry.)

But the bottom line literally is the bottom line in terms of sales and advertising. The game or supplement has to be made palpable to the audience and pushed out loud and proud. Fantasy is the easiest genre to push. Cyberpunk, supers, anime, and mecha games are very niche products and only appeal to a narrow audience of which I happen to be a member. I regularly look for specific genres to be advertised on social media and in my email. It’s the advantage of being into a niche. We know where to look for announcements regarding those games specifically. Free League Publishing is especially good about letting us  know when one of their games drops.

So, that’s the challenge.

One month, 128+ pages, all the core bells and whistles done, ready to go on DriveThruRPG in PDF format. That might become my January project. I want to go back to the notion that despite what DungeonTubers want you to believe, it ain’t that stinking hard to create a coherent TTRPG in this day and age. We need to stop letting DungeonTubers try to force the corporate Kool-Aid down our throats every time they try to sell us on another freakin Kickstarter, or their next project of the week as determined by their marketing team.

I have other issues with things said in that particular video, but this one stood out as the most fun to tackle. I guess Pax Unplugged is coming up and I’m already tired of hearing about it. At least the loudest DungeonTuber kids will be talking about that for a week or two. I’m going to go back to that guy’s video because my humble blog here is much better than his comment section which for all I know I’ve been silenced on.

Yes, I have that one TTRPG in my head that I’ve been fixating on for years, actually several. It’s just a matter of finding or building a system I’m comfortable with. I’m coming to the conclusion that it might just be easier to create one. Hey, if the thing catches on I might even create a sourcebook or two. Then who knows? Maybe a Kickstarter or Print On Demand version. Mostly I just want to prove I can do the thing.

Thank you for being here with me today. I appreciate you. Keep it real, but please strive for positivity, too. Please embrace the things that bring you the most joy in your life.