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Two games, and the confusion between them | Aug '24 games role-playing

One thing I’ve come to realize with RPG design is that there are really two things to design with tabletop games, usually.

  1. Character Creation.
  2. The actual game.

For some reason, designing #1 is my favorite thing to do. I love to imagine the players’ choices when they’re faced with all these cool ideas. I think if I could just run a game where players chose their characters, I’d be in bliss.

However, it only really happens once, and then you run the game.

I wonder what the right thing is here? Should I pivot into this specialty of design and just ignore the rest of the game? Or maybe I’m focusing on the wrong things…

This isn’t just a problem I alone am facing. It’s the majority of the space! It’s a great majority of the thought which players have about the game. Is that strange, or what?