7 Tips for Designing Storytelling TTRPGs From Our Massive Interview With Jay Dragon & Minærva McJanda

We sat down with Seven-Part Pact designer Jay Dragon and Children of Time RPG designer Minærva McJanda for what was meant to be a short interview about designing storytelling games, and ended up more than an hour long. You can click here to read the full interview, and we've pulled out some of our favourite insights for you here.

If you’re working without a GM - or even with one - letting your players take ownership of details of the setting, and have responsibility for what happens within it - creates a story experience in play that’s surprising and delightful for everyone involved. It also makes games more accessible if one person isn’t taking on the whole burden of creating the story, the world and all the characters within it. Share that power around and build structures for satisfying mutual storytelling - give each player a job, like being a different type of wizard, or occupying a different play stance and having responsibility for different questions. 

We’re all human - we don’t like it when other people feel bad, so it’s hard at times for players to give each other’s characters a bad time, or introduce adversity into the shared story. But as Jay says: “Games are about balancing on a tightrope, and when you’re being a dick, you’re maintaining the tightrope.” You don’t want it to be too tight, and have people fall off; you don’t want it to be too slack, so there’s no tightrope at all.

When you’re playing something together there’s a tendency to keep lingering even after a scene has reached a natural conclusion - and that can mean play drags or doesn’t sparkle. Quick cuts keep the story moving. Players love a ritual, so giving them a set of ritual questions - even something very simple and gentle - can help them to end scenes and move on in a way that feels finished and narratively satisfying. For example, Jay suggests: “It sounds like we're done here. Is there anything else we want to say?” “What do we linger on as we end the scene?” “What catches our eye as we end the scene?” “What is revealed to us when we end the scene?”

Rules are a way to introduce productive and interesting friction into your collective storytelling. In free-form games, you can always make up something that solves the problem in front of you completely, but it won’t be exciting or satisfying – rules are there to provide the constraints that make creativity feel fruitful. As Minærva says, “Every rule is closing off a possibility space,” in a way that pushes play in the directions that make your game unique. 

When a game introduces a throwaway detail – a character, an item, a location – it starts out with very little importance to the story. But if it comes back repeatedly, it starts to accrue layers of meaning, and over time becomes a crucial part of play. Not everything should be meaningful like this, but some things ought to be – that’s how a story emerges at the table. People care more about characters than they do about objects or resources, so make important things into people; Minærva says: “A character, by definition, has agency… By making something a character, you have given yourself and everyone else at the table permission to act.” If you can turn an important game element into a physical thing in your shared world (a wooden token, a scrap of paper, or even a Miro sticky note) then you’ll instinctively attach even more meaning to it. 

In Seven-Part Pact, the rules are in-character – they’re abstractions of how the wizards see the world. So breaking those rules means the character is pushing back against their own world-view – and that says something meaningful and adds to the experience. In Children of Time, your character is massively defined by their social role and how they sit in society – but you can rebel against that role, and in doing so potentially change the world not just for yourself but also for generations to come.

Not everything needs to be mechanised. What matters is what matters to your game – to the themes you’re trying to evoke, to the world you’re creating, to the stories you want to tell. Children of Time is a game about evolution, culture and entropy, so at its heart there’s a mechanic that relies on chance, while Seven-Part Pact is a game about lonely men feeling like if they just know enough about the world they can control it, so almost every system is deterministic and there’s very little random chance involved. When your mechanics drive your themes and vice versa, you can end up with moments of magic – where the game is making you feel the thing that the game is about, without telling you about it overtly.

Seven-Part Pact and Children of Time RPG are both crowdfunding now on Kickstarter.