# Clint Warren-Davey on the 5 Player Psychology Insights For Game Design tags: #thoughts ![[One Hour WWII (illo).jpg]] [Clint Warren-Davey](https://x.com/Clint_Davey1) is an excellent tabletop board game designer, and the things that he talks about in the context of design are important not just in his specific niche but in tabletop RPG design as well.  His discussion of *loss aversion* is something that is incredibly important in tabletop RPG design and something that traditional RPG designs very much go in the opposite direction - to their detriment. But it also has become a badge of honor to have suffered this particular element of bad game design. When people talk about the difference between buffing and nerfing their abilities between editions, for example, this is really what they're getting at. The last bit is the most important: > If you must punish a player in some way, it might be better to reward their opponent. Pre-**[Deep Cuts](https://johnharper.itch.io/deep-cuts)**, **[[Blades in the Dark]]** gets around this problem in a very neat way. The conversation by which you set position and effect incorporates understanding and explaining why the results are as they are, rather than simply giving you a minus to a roll because the mechanics are built up out of accumulating dice. Rather than explicitly taking them away when you have difficulty, you just don't build up as many. It short circuits a bit of that loss aversion response. (This is actually part of why I think the new threat roll mechanic in **Deep Cuts** is not nearly as good for gameplay as the older version, but that may be a different discussion altogether for another day.) > People hate down-time. Absolutely, without question true, and something again that classic RPGs aren't particularly good at, though it's fair to say that very old games were somewhat better than those that came out in the mid-90s. Too many fiddly bits and too many people prone to analysis paralysis do not make a good combination. Players are more willing to tolerate downtime in an RPG if the action of other people at the table is interesting. In order to be interesting, there has to be a sequence of interesting decisions that everybody is aware of. The level of tolerance is higher simply because doing something entertaining is considered part of the game itself, as opposed to a board game where that has no real play per se. All that said, minimize the amount of fiddling that you have to do with the RPG mechanics themselves to make the engine run, and you're going to have happier players. > The end game is the most exciting part. More relevant to board games than to RPGs, *except when it's not.* You can absolutely run one-shots and short arcs in RPGs, there's no question of that, and there are entire games specifically built to just do that. Those built intentionally with that design do a damn fine job of ramping up the excitement at the end, in part by simply letting the players get more excited because it's obvious you're closing in on the endgame. If your structure is more narrative, however, this is not useless knowledge for you. Recognize that as a story arc comes closer to completion, you need to step it up in terms of exciting events. Characters should actively care about what's going on. If the characters aren't invested, then you as the player can't be particularly invested. If you're invested, then the characters will inevitably be invested. The way that quests/challenges/explorations are handled in **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]** is an excellent example of a mechanism in an RPG that helps make the endgame exciting. It does that by simply presenting you with the information about how close you are to being able to resolve the issue. A vow has ten boxes. The more boxes that are fully filled, the more that you're able to resolve that vow is likely to happen just the way you want it. If you actively want to court more complications, you can do that simply by going to try and “complete” the challenge with fewer boxes. If you fail, then the nature of things are different than what you thought, and you go on. If you partially succeed, then there are complications, but you largely get what you want. If you fully succeed, you get what you want. This is a great setup for cranking up the endgame excitement, except you can do it all the time at various scales across and throughout the game. > No player elimination. Or as I like to put it more controversially in the RPG field: *Death is boring. Don't do that.* Again, this is one of those issues where classic RPG designs go exactly the opposite way, but with a slight amelioration: character creation tends to be fast, easy, and cheap. When character creation is neither fast nor easy, and it's definitely not cheap, then death is worse than boring. Death is just telling you that you're done playing for the rest of the night and you should go do something useful, like clean up the garbage from the pizza boxes. It's often more effective by far to think about what you can *do to* a character rather than how you can *kill* a character in terms of RPG design. Give them things that matter. Wounds that have lingering effects rather than just some sort of malus to a roll. (See previous point.) In a narrative game played in the way that people used to classic RPGs do, it's often difficult to introduce a character meaningfully with a hook in the fiction. This is because they don't build up connections to characters that they care about, and thus there's no one around to step up and step in if their character leaves the narrative. If you can mechanically incentivize creating bonds with characters that the player cares about, then having one of them become the new character in a worst-case scenario flows very easily. > Meaningful decisions. This is simultaneously the most and least applicable to RPGs in terms of advice. The least because we all go into a game thinking that what we do as our characters, or through the proxy of our characters within the narrative, makes a difference. If it didn't, why would we be playing after all, right? But consider the difference between a game designed to be a series of dungeon crawls, where the point is simply to improve your gear, improve your numbers on your sheet, and go back in to take on bigger enemies and make bigger numbers… … versus a game in which your character is expected to intervene in the narrative of the world and change the course of a war or protect a homeland. The kind of decision which is meaningful in the first case is not nearly as meaningful in the second. That's not to say that either of them is *better* than the other. Both of them are extremely fun when that's what you want to do, but it's fair to say the nature of those decisions needs to be up front with the players. I often refer to the fact that Sid Meier referred to games as *[“a series of interesting decisions,”](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/75461242-sid-meier-s-memoir-a-life-in-computer-games)* and I believe that is definitely in play here, whether or not your platform is a board game or an RPG. The players need to feel that the decisions make a difference. Whether you are writing your own RPG or running/playing in one, think about how these points can be useful to you in the context of your gameplay. One or more are almost guaranteed to be something that you can iterate on and have a better time, whether it be solo or with friends. Give it a try.