I’m taking the lion’s share of this summery Sunday to work on formally articulating the rules of a game I’ve been developing over the past few months. The mechanics, as is the case with most games, are none too exotic, but I think the inner workings of any game communicate two critical things about its design. The first is the designer’s essential sense of possibility, the sorts of stories their game should be equipped to tell, and the second is the designer’s attitude toward newer gamers.

It’s the second point that’s topmost in my noggin right now, since my partner is relatively new to TTRPGs and doesn’t know the ins and outs of some mechanics that veteran players will instantly recognize. In many ways I’m simply trying to articulate mechanics in a way that will be accessible and engaging for players like her. She’s got plenty of gaming under her belt–we’ve played D&D 5E, Blades in the Dark, and several homebrew games with our circle of friends–but putting together the complete picture, anticipating many of the questions and eventualities that are likely to occur as play unfolds, involves a strange bit of perspective adoption.

The game I’m working on in some ways goes against the grain of the TTRPGs I generally play, in that it involves working out narrative possibilities in a more or less functional polity. Trying to design a well-run kingdom or nation is a distinctive sort of challenge, as quite a lot of modern fare is dystopian and/or grimdark. Some of the more common motivational tropes of gaming–monstrosity, villainy, crime, and corruption–feel considerably different if they are exceptions rather than the rule. Conflict and complexity take on different shapes when wickedness isn’t centralized or explicitly authorized by those in power.

The other risk in this kind of navigation is the presentation of governmental and cultural structures that players will find facile. As a population role-playing gamers are notoriously unpredictable, which is, I think, the point. Games allow us to test out agency, so of course some stretching of essential premises is sure to happen. Some folks will defy an existing civic order simply because it’s not the one they would have chosen for themselves, or because it’s lacking in some way the designer overlooked, and some will try to take advantage of institutions that can be profitably bent in their favor.

I think newer and experienced players alike engage with a game more interesting ways when the terms and conditions are flexible, when they leave everyone with sufficient room to move, to flesh out their vision of their character persona. I’m trying very hard for that reason to avoid devising mechanics that yield a meta, an established set of systemic exploits and advantages that everyone knows to capitalize on. A meta makes it possible, even likely, for players to feel they are playing wrongly or badly, letting down their fellows at the table.

A good/bad example of the kind of tricksy game I have in mind is Destiny 2. At one level it’s a beautiful play environment, a space opera that installs the player as the main character in a galactic drama. I took a break from the game for almost a year, and getting back into the swing of things this summer has been pretty seamless. I also remembered, however, why I stopped playing in the first place. For all its many virtues, Destiny 2 depends on meta-gaming to a dispiriting degree. Beyond the basic rules of player engagement there is a metric ton of optimization information. Playing solo offers a limited array of satisfactions, but if one wants to play as part of a trio or team of six the tacit expectation is that all participants will know what to do and be fully optimized for the doing.

When our gaming group is in the throes of game testing, the designers usually take for granted that they’ve missed something essential in the design, that players will identify oversights that functionally “break the game.” I think I’m more comfortable with that possibility than with mechanics that are infinitely fiddly, that stand in the way of player self-expression, or that stand in the way of climbing aboard.

In some ways I suspect my writerly sensibilities are at odds with my design tendencies. In a good story, I find that there’s generally plenty of guidance but a little room left over for the play of the imagination. In my first drafts I almost always overwrite, trying to make sure I’ve offered all the plot bread crumbs I can think of, and in revisions I do my best to trust in readers a little more completely. As a designer I take for granted that players will do just what they like within the framework of a game, but I need to define in pretty granular terms how those possibilities ought to unfold at the mechanical level. When I write for games I generally write quite a lot and find I need to add more and more. When I write stories I move in the opposite direction, editing for clarity first and then cutting away hundreds or thousands of words.