Can designers learn anything from old-school role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller? Sure! Designers of all kinds are getting comfortable applying principles of game design to non-game applications. Many of those principles date back to the early days of role-playing games, from Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson's first edition of D&D in 1974 to less well-known games like Runequest and Traveller. Game designers have been revisiting these early works and extracting wisdom from them, and I'd like to bring some of those lessons to the user experience community. In this deliciously nerdy talk, I'll present user-experience lessons from old-school gaming, including the role of showmanship in constructing an experience, how imperfections and missing pieces can increase engagement, and the difference between sandbox and railroad designs. Talk given as IA Summit 11 in Denver CO.

1. Pig-faced Orcs
Can designers learn anything
from old-school roleplaying
games?
James Reffell
IA Summit 2011
March 3rd 2011

2. Gamification
This is not a gamification talk. There will no talk of badges, points, leaderboards, or anything of that sort. I’m not even going to
talk about flow. Those concepts are interesting, but they mostly come from a very specific subset of games. And those were
not my favorite games, even as a kid.

3. awesome map i drew
first convention badge
I liked Dungeons & Dragons. Most D&D players (at least ones my age) can tell you a story of how they discovered the
games. You can ask me that one tonight at the bar. What I will say is that while I had no idea I was going to be a designer
when I grew up, many of the things that made D&D fun for me were very ... designey. Like obsessively making elaborate
maps on grid paper.

4. Dungeons & Traveller Runequest
Chainmail (1971)
Gygax & Perren Dragons (1974) (1977) (1978)
Gygax & Arneson Stafford & Perrin Stafford & Perrin
Quick and totally incomplete history of pen & paper RPGs. Wargaming around for a long time. In the 70s, some folks got
bored & changed a few things: focus on individual, non-military units, fantasy elements. Realized they had something
different, packaged it up. More or less BOOM. Explosion, huge cultural impact, co-evolution w/ computer games.

5. Pig-faced orcs. Theme for the talk. Orcs, from Tolkien. Usually portrayed as monstrous humans like in the
movies. But in older D&D modules you often saw them illustrated w/ pig faces. Apparently a miscommunication
between Gary Gygax and the artist, now kind of symbolic of the earlier age.

6. Recently a few gamers have been delving into what made the originals interesting. Maybe some things that work
better (or differently) from what has come since. Old school. And the more I read and thoughts about it, the more
some of that seemed to apply to design as well. So here goes.

7. Give them something to
Use sandboxes & railroads.
manipulate.
Preserve inconstancies &
Embrace showmanship.
messiness.
Use randomness to build
Steal from everywhere.
story.
Create minigames. Enable risk-taking.
I’m going to propose 8 ideas. They start pretty concrete and move into the fuzzy. I’ll talk about how they are
used in RPGs, and how they could be used in design.

8. Give them something to manipulate.
Dice. Miniatures. Graph paper. Maps. Screens for the game master. These are all tools for games, and they all
have their official purpose -- creating randomness, simulating exploration, visualizing combat. But there’s another
purpose. They give you something to futz with. (Hand up who has tried to build a dice tower?)

9. Give them something to manipulate.
So pop psychology. Having things to manipulate -- particularly physical things with texture & visual interest you can
look at and hold and move around -- helps concentration. It has intrinsic aesthetic value. It also gives a feeling of
control. It gives you something to do during down moments. And it’s something traditional software usually lacks.

10. Give them something to manipulate.
There are some examples. Random number generation my wiggling the mouse -- strangely satisfying. Totally
equivalent to rolling dice, maybe not quite as much fun as that. Mobile devices are a better fit for this -- any app that
you need to shake, wave, wiggle, or whatever, is a god fit. Think about incorporating twitchy movement into your
designs.

11. Give them something to manipulate.
Those are a good start. But they’re missing two things. 1. Ongoing, idle manipulation while doing other tasks. 2.
Texture. When we start seeing more touch UIs with feedback (video games have been doing this here and there) we
me have something.

12. Embrace showmanship.
“A DM only rolls the
dice because of the noise
they make.”
Here’s Gary Gygax. “A DM only rolls the dice because of the noise they make.” What’s he saying? Obviously dice
have a functional purpose (creating randomness). But sometimes -- and maybe in some sense every time -- a DM rolls
the dice, it’s also to build tension. Especially when the DM doesn’t tell you why she’s rolling it. That’s showmanship.

13. Embrace showmanship.
So I talked about dice as something to fiddle with. But there’s another reason for all the stuff -- miniatures, dice,
screens, etc. A good DM can use these to enhance the experience. Brenda Laurel has talked about computers as
theater in a theoretical sense, but I think we can learn from the tricks of theater. The cheats. Showmanship.

14. Embrace showmanship.
This is basically UI fanciness territory, but specifically the UI fanciness that adds drama. Let’s talk about Etsy. I love
Etsy. But the newsletter was a little too frequent. So I unsubscribed. Sad kitty. Sad kitty builds tension.

15. Embrace showmanship.
And when you DO unsubscribe, you get Paul Young. Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you. That’s
drama! Well, at least pathos. But they key is if you want to embrace showmanship, you can’t be afraid of being a little
silly.

16. Use randomness to build story.
So, dice again. What are they for? In a basic sense, resolving actions that have a chance to succeed, just like in any
game of chance. But that’s in some ways the least interesting use of chance in role-playing games.

17. Use randomness to build story.
This is the famous Harlot Table. [Explain Harlot Table.] So, this is iconic and hilarious, but it’s also representative of a
core concept -- using the dice to generate story. Obviously a story with a brazen strumpet wandering into it will be
different from a story with a aged madam.

18. Use randomness to build story.
Maybe a better example is the rumor table from B2: Keep on the Borderlands. This was explicitly a training module for
new GMs and players. Are it suggests that you arm the players with a random selection of rumors before they start.
Some of the rumors are true, some false. Depending on what you roll, the characters may react very differently ...

19. Use randomness to build story.
1--Think of one of your players, describe his/her impact on your game, what he/she does, how his/
her presence or absence affects your GMing (if at all). What you expect to happen when s/he's
around, what kind of PCs s/he chooses, etc.
2--Add something to the wiki then explain why it was influential enough to you that you added it.
3--Four things you wish you want more of in your campaign, four things you wish you had less of.
Or, if you can;t do that, tell us why you can't. Is your campaign perfect? Rock--tell us why you think
it's humming so well.
4--Compare your favorite moment as a player to your favorite moment as a GM.
5--Write up a monster/trap combination. Neither the monster nor the trap must be original, but
the combo must be interesting.
6--Give us a spell. Just one. Or more if you're hardcore.
7--Dragons. Seriously, how often do you use dragons? Did they work the way they were supposed
to when you did? Were your players scared? How did it go?
8--Describe your local area, gamerwise--is their a local game store? Where do your players come
from? Do you want more players? Are they your friends? If you play with strangers, who are these
people? Where do they come from?
9--Google up a random mini, then describe this fellow or lass as an NPC. Give us some hooks for
him or her.
So, software? I don’t have a lot of examples, but here’s one idea. A lot of sites that involve user-created content give
10--Pull a gamebook off your shelf. Drink as much alcohol as you can. Generate a PC for that game
folks cues or hints to get them started. Adding a visibly random element might be entertaining. This table was posted
and liveblog your emotional rollercoaster as you create the person.
by Zak Smith to get other folks started writing blog posts. Now, this is a D&D context, but you can imagine ...

20. Create minigames.
Minigames. All roleplaying games basically have subgames -- sometimes clearly defined as such, sometimes more
fuzzy -- that you can play.

21. Create minigames.
Character
Trading Ship combat
generation
Traveller is great here. Character generation is it’s own game. Your character can die before you’re “really” playing!
Trading is a game. Different kinds of combat (starships, on planet, mass) are games. World creation is a game.

22. Create minigames.
37 Signals had a bit in their iPhone app where there was a setup delay. So they let you play Tic-Tac-Toe. Now, that’s
cute, but it’s not really related to the larger goal. The first mini-games in RPGs are usually character generation, so it
makes sense that the closest cousins in our domains are usually signup & portfolio creation.

23. Use sandboxes and railroads.
Sandboxes games and railroad games. These are concepts that span all sorts of games, they come up a lot in video
games. But that can get hung up on technical limitations, so let’s stick with pen & paper.

24. Use sandboxes and railroads.
Sandboxes. The game designer creates an area to explore, and maybe some mild motivation. The players choose
what to do first and how to do it. Plot emerges from play.
Railroad. There is an overarching plot. The players make choices within that, but the game designer makes sure they
experience the main points and usually in a set order.

25. Use sandboxes and railroads.
This one is less a pronouncement than an analytical framework. Think about what you’re designing and break it into
sandboxes and railroads. Take e-commerce. Someone is browsing -- they may have a vague idea what they want to
buy, but they’re more than happy to look at other things, comparison shop, research, get distracted. Sandbox!

26. Use sandboxes and railroads.
But eventually they’ve got some items in their shopping cart and want to check out. Boom! Railroad the crap out of
them. Lead them by the nose. Eliminate distractions. It’s not just about efficiency -- you have a narrative (in this case
“you are happy with your purchases and trust us to ship them to you”) and you’re going to give them that story.

27. Preserve inconsistencies and messiness.
OK. So the thing about the old-school games is that they were originally built by hobbyists for other hobbyists. It
showed. There were mistakes, inconsistencies. Game balance was a concern but there wasn’t really any way to
achieve it and in any case that never stood in the way

28. Preserve inconsistencies and messiness.
“Every rough edge I pound smooth
is one I can't use later in order to
prick my imagination.”
“Give me a sketchy, hodgepodge
setting with lots of holes and
unmapped areas and incoherence
and I'll give you a campaign to
remember.”
James Maliszewski wrote an essay called “Stop Making Sense.” He talked about how when he was first creating
worlds, he strove for complete order, perfection, explaining everything. Leave no holes. But he’s found that the holes
and the things that didn’t quite make sense gave him room for continued creativity.

29. HASHTAGS?!?!
Expand that from a single person creating to a community and I think it holds. If we, as designers, leave some features
out (for a while), leave some messiness and inconsistency, it gives our users room to co-create with us. That’s how we
got hashtags and retweeting. You can always go back and fix, but sometimes you don’t need to.

30. Steal from everywhere.
This one is kind of hard to explain now, because D&D (and its successor like WoW) have been such a cultural force
over the past few decades that a lot of these things have been diffused. But at the time, this stuff was a complete
hodge podge of Tolkien, Burroughs, Leiber, adventure movies, actual medieval history, mythology. Total mishmash.

31. Steal from everywhere.
This is similar to the “leave gaps” point, but it’s not just cramming things in. It’s putting in seemingly disparate elements
and watching them gel, like magic. This is why I’m not really persuaded by the metaphor purists -- I find it kind of
charming when real-world metaphors mix with purely digital ones. As long as it works, throw it in.

32. Enable risk-taking. (Carefully.)
So it’s really important that characters can die. Some games have other kinds of risk, but in old school RPGS, death is
usually the big one. Characters die. That adds spice, it gives the stories meaning, it makes for legendary action. Game
I remember the best was a Star Wars game. One shot. My Han Solo-ish character heroically sacrificed himself to save
the group.

33. Enable risk-taking. (Carefully.)
Now, in design, some sorts of risk are unacceptable. It’s not acceptable to lose your users’ data. Or expose it to other
people w/out permission. But without ANY risk, sterility. So, how do you as a designer, expose your users to
“good” (fun, narrative building) risk, but not “bad” (unfun, cynicism building) risk? I haven’t the foggiest. I’m working on
this one. :)

34. The ideas.
Give them something to
Use sandboxes & railroads.
manipulate.
Preserve inconstancies &
Embrace showmanship.
messiness.
Use randomness to build
Steal from everywhere.
story.
Create minigames. Enable risk-taking.
So, here are my 8 points. If you want to start using them in your work, obviously the thing to do is get a D8 and rolle to
see where to start.

35. Thanks, Gary.
Gary Gygax (1938-2008)
James Reffell
@jreffell
designcult.org
james.reffell@gmail.com

36. Image credits
CC Tracy Lee http://www.flickr.com/photos/tracyleephoto/5442965871/
© Otherworld miniatures http://www.otherworld.me.uk/
CC Scott Akerman http://www.flickr.com/photos/sterlic/5364706165/
CC Dave White http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrdestructicity/5028309972/
CC Alan De Smet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gary_Gygax_Gen_Con_2007.JPG
© Elena Hill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zak_Smith.jpg
© XKCD http://xkcd.com/393/