Pinnacle Design Goals: How to ALWAYS Make the RIGHT Design Choice
Your RPG Heretic returns!
Hello my friends!
I have a question for you budding game designers out there…
WHAT IF YOU COULD ALWAYS KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER EVERY TIME YOU DOUBTED A DESIGN DECISION?
You could weigh your options objectively, without needing feedback from people who don’t have the capacity to care about your new project!
You could make your designs more efficiently, erase days of overthinking, reduce over-reliance on external feedback, help build resilience against imposter syndrome, and hasten your playtesting & overall production timeline!
Well, if you’re reading these words right now, then you’re in luck, because today, we’re going to show you how to always have that right answer.
I: Pinnacle Design Goals And You
Welcome to the first installment of our Keys to the Kingdom RPG Design “Masterclass”!
Please understand that I am an amateur internet RPG heretic, a goblin who lives beneath a grimy bridge on the other side of that town you already don’t like. Regard everything I say as a babbling monkey with a typewriter who thinks they’re on a hot streak. A little worm man in a little worm house, made of little worm bricks. With internet access.
Here I only teach that which harms - the creation of illusions.
All these articles are just my house rules for game design, by the way. You can disagree with me (to your creative peril).
How to Create Design Goals That Work For You
Define the Basics: Ask yourself about the game you are trying to create. Identify your desired genre, tone, premise, etc. Brief but specific!
Go Full Otaku about Your Game: Spend an excessive amount of time gushing about all the ideas you have in as much detail as you can, writing them down in a big note. It can be as messy and raw as you like - nobody needs to see this document but you.
Mark Appendix N: Include all the media and source material that inspire you towards this project - things that echo what you’re trying to cook up. Music, movies, literature, a lived experience, a series, anime, etc.
Emphasize the Core: Read through what you wrote down, bolding the words that stand out to you as being the MOST important.
Draft the List: Take each of those individual notes and turn them into a list of bullet points, listed in descending order of importance.
First Pass Edits: Edit this list over the course of several days to a week, allowing it to “settle”, until you’re confident that the Design Goals List you have before you is the “true” and “correct” list for this specific project. The full picture, as objectively as you can articulate it.
Rest, then Second Pass: After a break of around 2 or more days away from this project, allow yourself another week or so to reconsider and edit your list further, where you can choose to elaborate on each point, redefine certain terms or phrases, adjust the order of importance, etc.
Write It in Fire and Stone: Save the file as a PDF. Write the list itself in permanent marker on something more important than a sheet of paper (a big rock in your backyard, the back side of your unfinished wooden patio, that old vinyl of that artist from the 70’s in your closet, the cover of your binder of magic cards, etc). Don’t go crazy, but write it on something that has a cost to you.
Design goal lists are good when they’re both as short and detailed as they can possibly be.
It’s okay if you have a design goal list that’s quite short, as well as quite long.
But if it’s too short, you probably won’t get much actionable guidance on it.
On the other hand, if it’s too long, it can become crippling, or set you up to make a bloated rules set out of the gate (we will define what we mean by bloated later on… maybe).
However, after you’ve completed this gauntlet of design goal construction, you are only allowed to reduce or erase points off the list.
We’ll show you how to break that rule later, with style.
For example, here’s some example Design Goal lists from our past projects:
As you can see, our language around these ideas has progressed much since 2017, but the spiritual core is the same.
Here’s a more recent design goal list of an unrelated upcoming project that we may or may not produce:
Revealing the Heresy
In this section, I will reveal myself. Removing all my masks of science, neutrality, stoicism, etc. to share with you our first heresy, and Icon of the Epic: Pinnacle.
There is a hierarchy of design goals, and it is inherently bound to the ideals and identity of the archetypal Muse. Design goals are more powerful, the more powerful the designs they create.
Design goals are more powerful, the more powerful the designs they create.
Power here is not a synonym for popularity. Power is instead measured in the quality of experience provided, and breadth of application.
This is the Pinnacle immersive roleplay experience, quoted from KTTK:
[To go] “Where the Myth meets the Real
Where each soul clicks together as one seamless whole
Where pure imagination meets apex focus, creating a symphony of living story.
Pinnacle is at once a lofty goal for role players, but is also often much closer than you think.
It is that moment where each individual is fully engaged in pure imagination, combined with sincerity and a shared singularity of will, allowing them to unlock the maximal experience of shared invisible worlds teeming with drama and mystery.
From this mountaintop as one, the gathered behold and even participate in the music of the spheres - the ancient living patterns which conduct our reality.”
Pinnacle is our first and foremost design goal for The Epic of Dreams RPG. We have enshrined this principle as our first rule and Icon of the game, stating this design goal as law.
Doing this sets player expectations, and displays the game’s intended tone.
The effect of this presentation approach loses power the more you do it, partially due to dilution of focus, and juggling ideas. I like that we have 10 Rules icons, because half of them don’t need to be remembered by the Hero players - they barely need to know the game to start playing. How we present them as a series of 10 is more so to incentivize the Game Master demographic, literally gamifying rules mastery.
Tangent about Keys to the Kingdom: In our upcoming Basic Rules set, once you choose your Muse College guild, and become a fully fledged Singer of Tales GM, you unlock an in-game ability you can use when you play as a Hero character in other Singers’ campaigns.
This also helps create a player community culture diegetically.
The next most important design goal in the Ultra True Design Cult Orthodoxy of Drew is Elegance, also known as presentation. Which just so happens to be the second Icon in The Epic of Dreams, and the subject matter of next weeks’ article…
How To Use Design Goals:
Navigating the Dark Forest of Game Production
Now that you have your design goals written down, give yourself a pat on the back.
You have created a pact with yourself:
To abide by what you have written in fire and stone, slaying any new darlings that would dare persuade you away from it.
You must now adopt this design mantra deep into your soul: you are your own worst enemy, because you can very easily convince your subjective self to make the objectively wrong choice.
Now, whenever you finish drafting or editing a particular mechanic, or are faced with a design decision of any kind (including presentation), you can compare your new creations against your design goals.
When you find something that doesn’t fall inside of your goal list, ask yourself how your new design invalidates your design goals, noting each aspect. Be brutal.
Then, you have the option to do one or more of the following:
Edit your new design, taking each invalidation you found, and hammer it down so it will fall in line with your goals
Scrap the entirety of the new design, noting what you need the next iteration to do, and get to work on that
Keep the new design and tell yourself that you’re not sabotaging your project, cheating fate itself
Consider amending your design goals by adding a new design goal at the bottom of your design goal list, making it the newest least important design goal …breaking the rules (but not with style, with poopie bad bad)
The more you change your design goals within a single season of brewing will damage the resilience of your project’s focus. If you can’t commit to a single vision for a dedicated amount of time, iterating through to make a somewhat complete vision, you’ll likely end up with a bunch of half-finished projects…
And we both know that you’d much rather be able to have like two or three finished projects amidst the twenty other unfinished projects you’re still toying with working on. Day and night difference!
How to Break the Rules with Style
This process we’ve elaborated today is what I would call the Step 1 of several in what I’d define as “a design session”.
A design session ends when the design made is either finished and produced, or abandoned for a time, for either months or years or aeons.
After this period, you may come back to some old designs with a fresh perspective, and some more years of experience and patience beneath your belt.
Usually, your perspective and lived experience has varied so much from where you were when you wrote down all the old stuff that it wouldn’t make sense to just pick up exactly where you left off; instead, you must start over in some amount.
This is when you take everything from your old design session, and regard it as a new source of inspiration, similar to your Appendix N, instead of a working document that bears its prior authority.
When you make it to this point, start over with a new design list, keeping the mechanics and goals that still bring you joy, and with sobriety, culling everything else that no longer makes sense.
Design Goals for Virtuosos: Design Manifestos
Now, we zoom out 80,000 feet. This one project you’ve been working on is but a pale white speck; a google doc in a sea of screens.
Consider your life. Your entire career as a creative.
Why do you create art?
What is the reason why people need to experience your art?
What if you could intentionally make sure that you never lose your artistic soul?
Whoever said that limitation breeds creativity is a true prophet.
With a design manifesto, you are able to define and declare your ethos as game designer, which can both serve as a way to promote yourself, but also hold yourself accountable to potential future fans.
Here’s ours, which you can always find on our itch.io page:
You can always use these in the same way you use design goals, to help ensure the right creative DNA gets into your art intentionally (this can also be very helpful for when you’re working on teams of multiple people who probably aren’t “read in” to your projects yet)
BONUS NUGGET BECAUSE YOU READ TO THE END:
You don’t have to rely on other people to playtest. Basically ever.
You always have the ability to playtest the design and mechanics of a game by playing it solo.
I know it won’t feel as special as having your buds gaggled together, awkwardly skimming through the packet you gave them a week ago that they haven’t read yet, asking you about something they don’t understand on page 2, and the answer is inevitably right at the top of page 3, and then after about an hour and a half you get a really solid 20 minutes of playtesting half the material you were trying to cover…
YOU GET THE IDEA.
By setting up a bunch of journals and computers on a table, complete with all your gaming equipment, you can write down (and/or record via a computer!) every interaction in the session.
You must then use your imagination to imagine a room of players with you, each with their own characters. OR, playtest your RPG in what I call “final fantasy” style, where you are commanding a party of however many characters, treating the experience as something closer to an analog videogame RPG.
“but how do i do in-character dialogue by myself drew”
“you already talk to yourself James, this time you just speak using different character names”
Again, you must use your imagination, in ways which you probably already know how to do.
Alternatively, you could skip the narrative aspects as needed, and instead have this phrase written down in bold sharpie on an index card like so: “INSERT PLOT AND DIALOGUE HERE”, and decide that the story goes towards a direction that helps you playtest the design material that you want to explore more.
We’ll talk more about playtesting in its own article, assuming I don’t burn out first.
Let there be pure imagination.
Drew Cochran
P.S.
If you haven’t bought The Epic of Dreams: Basilisk Edition yet, what are you doing with your life?
We’re the original setting agnostic diceless d20-friendly RPG.
The only one that uses GAMIFIED SOLILOQUIES, and allows you to seamlessly port in any setting, faction, class, monster, or spell from your favorite IPs…
…without any real amount of mathy preparation needed.
In fact, if you’re usually a player, all you need to start playing is to know your favorite character’s backstory by heart and be able to guess a random number between 1 & 20.
If you’re usually a GM, imagine being able to play in your favorite world (the one you’ve created or otherwise), and not having the rules ever get in your way of playing, but instead accelerating and reinforcing your dramatic immersion inside of your favorite fantasy.
PDF is here
Limited Print Soft & Hard bound copies are here