Two RPG design insights

One of these is mine, and one of them is not.

First, a most briefly, heartbreaker games are reactionary designs. I’m convinced this is a simple and complete identity. The supposition, which bears out under anecdotal evidence and personal experience, is that one comes to one’s heartbreaker game as the result of finding the things ine’s favorite RPG that frustrate your personal idiom. After grinding your teeth on whatever grit you find in your first puppy-love of a system you figure out how you would fix it. But you love that first system which makes you hate, and hate but good the things you find that are wrong with it. So that first design, that lovingly recapitulated copy of the One True Way, with these fixes and Oh! what a shiny bauble is the result.

Which brings me to insight two: that roleplayers metamorphose over time and the impetus of the metamorphosis is frustration. Ultimately, every player gets fed up with his GM(s). Maybe in the nicest possible way. Maybe fed up is too strong. Maybe, just maybe, there are players out there who are so inspired by their GM that they just burst with enthusias to run a game themselves. But honestly, I think that most players turn to running games because, on way or another, they think that they can do it better.

The transition to designer is similar. Even if you don’t finish a single design, the urge to design is spawned by the feeling that you could write game that’s better. This sort of ties in to insight number one, in that the first game is a heartbreaker. The design comes out of wanting to do it better than this game.

So, I don’t know if there’s an application to all this, and it may not be all that profound, but both thoughts were pretty striking, and I wanted to get them down.