Making Decisions Part 1

I feel that its really easy for me to loose the forest for the trees when making decisions about roleplaying games. Looking at my past, the questions I though were important were not, what I spent time focusing on was not worth spending time on, and so the decisions I made were wrong. And I don't mean I was subjectively wrong; I mean as objectively wrong as is humanly possible in this beautiful, inscrutable universe of ours.

I don't know what this is but I think it looks pretty.

The reason I am able to say this with such confidence is that I had no set of metrics by which to measure or reason about my decisions. When I was working on my games, constructing narratives, crafting characters, planning encounters, I never had a goal which I was striving to achieve with these decisions. With no goal, my decisions couldn't be correct because I had nothing to measure them by. I had no idea if I was making progress and achieving what I desired or not. For this reason, I think the most important thing to do when writing a game is to come up with the core set of goals which you hope to achieve through the game.

I don't want it to seem like I'm arguing for something totally grandiose and out there when I say this. These goals don't have to be lofty and pretentious like "create world peace," "critique late-stage capitalism," or "convey the experience of smearing vanilla ice cream over your naked body"; 99% of the time the main goal is going to be just "Have Fun," and that's ok. The important thing is that this fun is approached in a consistent and meaningful way to make sure that it is actually reached. In addition, getting a little more specific will probably help in achieving this fun. Do you want this fun to come from telling a funny story and having the players join in? What about from the pure power fantasy of pretending to be awesome and doing awesome things? Maybe the fun is in having a believable system and rewarding players for solving difficult situations using the tools available to them. All of these are valid decisions which would probably lead to fun, yet they all would play totally differently.

I think that once one decides what it is exactly they want to convey and explore in their games, they can then find the best way to do that infinitely better than if they had never specified their goals in the first place. Now that I've written a bit about the importance of setting goals, I next want to write about some pitfalls I have run into in making my games in the past and how I hope to avoid them again.