designing games — development diary 01

I feel like in many ways we have been working on thedrawn32 forever. There's been stories and ideas and aspects of it in development for a long time, but the past few weeks, we've come along fast with structuring something that, until recently, existed largely as a collection of ideas, sketches and rough notes.

What started as an interest in creating a particular kind of written narrative jumped over to a miniature skirmish game because of my love for the artform. And that developed into a much larger undertaking that I expected. Rules have been written, tested, dismantled and rewritten. Combat encounters have been worked out, mechanics challenged and more than a few seemingly good ideas thrown into the feeding pit of the denizens of thedrawn32.

I hope that from here this journal will follow the process as we move along it. Essentially the development of the game in its public form, its miniatures, its world and, inevitably, the things that don't work.

Mordheim and Inquisitor remain important influences for me, particularly in their ability to make individual miniatures feel like inhabitants of a much larger world. More recently, Peter Vigor's Necropolis and Trench Crusade have demonstrated how much creative territory remains unexplored in independent miniature gaming.

But the influences extend beyond the tabletop.

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, with its immense, decaying architecture and grotesquely human inhabitants have worked on me ever since I started reading his stuff. And Joe Abercrombie's morally compromised characters, whose decisions rarely produce straightforward consequences are a key aspect of the writing I like to do. And China Miéville's strange worlds, where the impossible is treated as an ordinary part of existence appeals to me in a big way.

What connects these influences isn't simply a dark aesthetic. It's their capacity to create worlds that seem to possess an existence independent of the characters moving through them.

That's something I want to try and bring to thedrawn32. I don't want it to be another "grimdark" setting built around familiar factions and interchangeable rules, but a world whose nature is expressed through the game itself.

The difficulty of making something distinctive

It's relatively easy now to construct a competent tabletop combat system.

There are decades of established mechanics to draw from. I think a game can be balanced, elegant and enjoyable while remaining almost indistinguishable from the systems that influenced it. And I don't want to make another game like that.

The difficult question is what makes a game unmistakably its own.

For thedrawn32, the answer cannot simply be different dice rolls or another method of resolving combat. The mechanics need to express the underlying nature of the world.

The Tear is not merely a feature of the setting. Its instability is fundamental to what happens during play. Magic carries consequences beyond its immediate target. Fear, faith and belief matter. And the Drawn themselves are something more complicated than conventional monsters or summoned creatures. Once they arrive, they are there, and they will play their own game and we may find ourselves on the defensive and the original reason we had for the game may change to literal survival.

The boundary between what exists, what is believed to exist and what might eventually become real is central to the game's identity.

I want players to encounter those ideas through their decisions, through the risks they take and through the stories that emerge without anyone having written them beforehand.

That is the real design challenge.

Making the mechanics work

Much of the recent development has involved finding the simplest possible way to make these ideas function together.

thedrawn32 is being designed around small groups of characters, dangerous encounters and a world that responds to what happens within it.

Combat is brutal and I don't want it to become arbitrary and any magic cast needs to be powerful without becoming an obvious advantage. Characters need opportunities to change without burdening players with excessive bookkeeping. And unpredictability must create interesting decisions, rather than replace them.

Whilst working all this out, some mechanics which worked well in isolation became sticky and heavy when combined. Others have introduced problems we hadn't anticipated, particularly around equipment, character balance and the relationship between magic and the entities it attracts.

A recurring lesson has been that complexity is remarkably easy to introduce and considerably harder to remove.

We've repeatedly returned to one question: does this rule produce an experience that couldn't exist without it? If the answer is no, it's difficult to justify keeping it.

The ambition is a relatively compact ruleset capable of generating encounters that are varied, unpredictable and, above all, memorable.

We've now conducted numerous encounters, testing different combat situations, character combinations and interactions between the game's core systems.

These exercises have been useful precisely because they expose weaknesses.

What happens when heavily equipped characters face faster opponents? Can a particular combination of abilities become disproportionately powerful?

The results have already led to substantial revisions and this is why I am now starting to write the process as I feel we are entering a defining phase of development.

I feel like we have done well to identify contradictions, imbalances and potential exploits but these can't establish whether a game is genuinely enjoyable and exciting.

That requires people around a table, making decisions we haven't anticipated and we have now reached the stage where an initial ruleset and quick-start guide are ready for controlled physical playtesting.

It's probably the part of the process I'm most excited about.

I'm particularly interested in what happens when the game begins producing stories of its own. When an apparently insignificant character survives against the odds, or an unexpected encounter with a Drawn changes the course of a battle, or something emerges that neither player could have anticipated.

One of our longer-term ambitions is for those stories to extend beyond individual games. The Drawn offer opportunities for characters and histories to emerge through play, with players contributing to the evolving mythology of the world.

But first, we need to establish whether the game works as intended.

And I fully expect the tabletop to challenge some of our assumptions.

What comes next

This journal will continue to document that process: playtesting, rules development, miniature design, conversions, terrain building and the gradual development of the world itself.

I'll also explore the artistic and literary influences behind the project, and some of the practical challenges of bringing an independent miniature game into existence.

As development progresses, we'll be inviting a number of players and gaming groups to help test thedrawn32.

If this sounds like something you'd enjoy, or you have a group interested in running a campaign, we'd like to hear from you.

We'll be establishing a list of Founding Members who would like to participate when we reach version 0.9, our planned public testing release ahead of the complete version 1.0 ruleset.

I don't know exactly how it will work but I like the idea of Founding Members getting some official miniatures when we get the Rulebook for v1.0 finalised.

We're particularly interested in people excited to explore the game, challenge its assumptions and share the stories that emerge from their own encounters.

There is still loads to do, and a lot of games to play.

A ruleset can be designed on paper but the game has to be played to be alive.

If you'd like to be involved in the founding playtests, get in touch via the website or DM on IG.