Practice First: An Approach to Campaign and RPG Design

As I wrap up Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms, the Northern Marches, I am thinking ahead to my next major project, the full version of the Majestic Fantasy RPG.

While I still need to write the final manuscript, the rules themselves are written and have been playtested extensively. I started out with Swords & Wizardry by Matt Finch back in 2008 and adapted it to my Majestic Wilderlands setting. This involved adding a light skill system so players could have their characters be better at things other than combat and spellcasting, adding viz and other tweaks to the magic system to reflect how magic worked in my setting, tweaking the cleric class to reflect the diversity of religions, and so on.

The design process I used was iteration. Starting with Swords & Wizardry, informed by ongoing research into the origins of D&D, I added, tweaked, and modified the system until it took its current form. The final proof was always how it played at the table, measured against how I described the Majestic Wilderlands and what people actually did as their characters in past campaigns using other systems like GURPS or AD&D 1e.

However, the point of the campaign was never just to play these rules. How I used these rules mattered. I have discussed sandbox campaigns many times, along with my own specific variant, which I call a Living World Sandbox. My living world sandbox approach started out as me finding it fun to let my players trash my setting back in the late 70s and early 80s. Over time, it developed as I tried to make trashing the setting both fun and an interesting challenge.

In time, I realized that what I was doing to make this happen was bringing the setting to life in a way that left the players feeling as if they had opened a door, stepped into my world, and pursued some interesting adventures of their choice. The setting endured, reacted, and changed as a result of what they did.

Again, my design process here involved iterating across many different groups and using many different systems. I also applied my Living World Sandbox techniques to other settings in other genres, including Middle-earth, the Third Imperium, the four-color world of superheroes, and so on. In each case, I weighed what happened at the table against whether it left the players feeling as if they were in the campaign's setting and had the freedom to pursue the adventures that interested them.

While doing this, I experienced other RPGs like Fate and Blades in the Dark that played very differently from my own campaigns and those of my friends. As I learned more about RPG history and encountered various ideas and theories about RPG design, I noticed that all RPGs shared certain practices, regardless of how they were implemented or the rules they used.

• At some point, the campaign's circumstances were described, including the characters involved.
• The characters' actions were described.
• Those actions were adjudicated.
• The outcomes of those actions were determined, and the campaign's setting was altered as a result.
• The session and the campaign involved repeating the above over and over again, in various orders and at various levels of detail.

What makes individual RPGs distinct from one another is how these shared practices are implemented, including the order in which they occur, not just what the rules say. The rules are only part of the equation. To understand how a campaign or system actually operates, you have to look at how the rules are used, how they are practiced, and what the group does at the table. This includes the order in which situations are described, actions are declared, and outcomes are resolved, as well as how adjudication is handled and who is responsible for making those decisions.

As I discuss RPGs, campaigns, and design going forward. I will start with practice and work outward from there.

Wrapping up this post, I want to give a shout-out to my friend Greg, known as the Chubby Funster, who also made a good video on this topic. In the video, he tackles the same issue from the angle of individual referees' "spheres of practice".

Heading out to PAGE

Packing up and heading to the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo.

I’ll be running Scourge of the Demon Wolf and The Deceits of the Russet Lord on Friday and Saturday, and I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the State of the OSR during a panel on Thursday morning.

Hope to see some of you there!

What is the point of the OSR?

 Over on Reddit, Kaliburnus asks What the point of the OSR is? He concludes his post with some questions.

So, honest question, what is the point of OSR? Why do they reject modern systems? (I’m talking specifically about the total OSR people and not the ones who play both sides of the coin). What is so special about this movement and their games that is attracting so many people? Any specific system you could recommend for me to try?

My answers

Game Balance: RPGs Aren’t Games. And That’s the Point

In my last post, I argued that “rulings, not rules” wasn’t a gap to be patched but a foundation for how tabletop roleplaying works. The early hobby assumed referees would make calls, and in doing so, developed a craft of rulings. That craft became the foundation for the rulesets that shaped the hobby in the mid and late ’70s.

In this post, I want to build on that idea by asking a deeper question: what are tabletop roleplaying games, really? Why do I approach them differently from most game design frameworks? And how is my approach just one path among many for running campaigns and writing systems?

Throughout the decades I've been playing and refereeing, I've read many of the seminal books and essays on game design. Crawford, Costikyan, and other academic works like Playing at the World and Rules of Play are all outstanding, and they offer detailed and useful analyses of games, including tabletop roleplaying.

Where I depart from those frameworks is in how I classify tabletop roleplaying. I don't view tabletop roleplaying as a game. It is a means for people to pretend to be characters having adventures in other places and times. The "game" elements tabletop roleplaying uses are not the end in themselves, but a crucial aid; they make the experience more engaging than Let's Pretend, and more accessible and entertaining for the average person to enjoy within the time they have for a hobby.

In Salen & Zimmerman's Rules of Play, the issue of game balance is discussed. In Chapter 20, in the opening paragraph of "The Level Playing Field of Conflict," they write:

Competition and cooperation, goals and struggle, victory and loss: how does it all add up? What are the general conditions of a game conflict? One core principle of conflict in games is that it is fair. Game conflict is impartial conflict: it is premised on the idea that all players have an equal chance at winning, that the game system is intrinsically equitable, that the game's contest takes place on a level playing field, which does not favor one side over the other. Anthropologist Roger Caillois points this out in speaking about competitive forms of play: "A whole group of games would seem to be competitive, that is to say, like a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that the adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions, susceptible of giving precise and incontestable value to the winner's triumph."

This is excellent advice, and I agree that this is one of the central pillars of designing a good game.

However, I don't view what I do with tabletop roleplaying as designing games. Rather, I view what I do as designing something to be experienced, experienced by people pretending to be characters looking for adventures. Game design considerations are not ignored. For tabletop roleplaying to be enjoyable and feasible as a leisure activity, a good game needs to be part of the package. However, the game elements are subordinated to the larger goal of creating an experience. Anything that gets in the way of that goal is jettisoned.

Next, we need to consider the experience I focus on. There are many ways this can be handled, but every tabletop roleplaying designer has their own creative focus. My particular focus is on crafting products that enable referees to create campaigns that leave players feeling as though they have visited a setting as their characters, while having interesting adventures. 

For example, in a Middle-earth campaign, my goal is satisfied if the players feel they have visited Tolkien's world. However, my goal isn't to leave them feeling like they experienced a Tolkien novel. I'm not interested in recreating particular narrative structures. However, I am deeply interested in bringing worlds to life in a way that feels real to the players.

Given this focus, what does it mean for the tabletop roleplaying material I publish or share? It means that often what I design isn't "fair" to the players. It is not impartial conflict. The players will not always have an equal chance at winning, the system isn't equitable, and the playing field isn't level. Certain aspects of the setting,or sides within it,are favored over others.

Instead, my material is consistent with how the setting is described. It is consistent with its own internal logic, not with the idea of equity and fairness that the concept of game balance addresses.

Now, others, when designing their campaigns for players to experience, or when publishing and sharing material, may not handle things in the same way. I've encountered many who feel that game balance is crucial to the creation of a good tabletop roleplaying campaign and its supporting material. That works as a creative goal; however, it is just one entry among many in the arena of ideas that form our hobby and industry.

And I have no quarrel with designers who go that route and focus on making the game behind their rules or campaigns balanced. Where the rules are judged to be fair, impartial, and create a level playing field. As long as they are upfront about their creative goals and acknowledge that other approaches work just as well for different creative goals and have their own fans. While I have my criticisms of RPGs like D&D 4e, one thing I don't criticize is its quality as a game on its own merits. It is an outstanding example of an RPG that focuses on game balance, and I recommend it to any group that views balance as crucial to their enjoyment of tabletop roleplaying.

Rulings, not rules,” was about equipping referees with craft, not just tools. This follow-up is about why I use that craft: to build campaigns where the setting’s logic takes precedence over balance. Where some designers seek a level playing field, I seek the living world. That’s the design philosophy behind my work, and the experience I want players to step into.

Previous: Rulings, Not Rules: A Foundation, Not an Oversight

Rulings, Not Rules: A Foundation, Not an Oversight

There's been a lot of discussion over the years about how Original Dungeons & Dragons handled (or didn't handle) the common situations you'd expect in a tabletop role-playing campaign. Things like jumping a chasm, climbing a wall, or fast-talking a city guard. The critique often boils down to: OD&D wasn't complete, it left too much out.

What people forget is that Gygax wasn't writing OD&D for newcomers to gaming. He was writing for the early '70s wargaming community, people already creating their own scenarios, modifying rules, and running campaigns. His audience wasn't looking for a complete, airtight system with exhaustive coverage. They wanted a framework they could expand on, the kind of framework that would let them run the campaigns they'd heard about, like Blackmoor or Greyhawk.

That mindset shaped the game. Gygax and Arneson distilled what worked in their campaigns into OD&D, trusting referees to fill in the rest. What they didn't anticipate was how quickly the hobby would grow beyond that core group, or how differently newer players would approach rules and systems.

Next Post: Game Balance: RPGs Aren’t Games. And That’s the Point

"Rulings, Not Rules" Is a Design Philosophy

When people talk about "rulings, not rules," they sometimes frame it like it's a patch, something you do because the game didn't cover enough. I don't see it that way. I see it as a deliberate design choice.

A campaign that starts with just a dungeon and a village isn't "incomplete." It's a starting point. The assumption was that the referee and players would build outward together. The game wasn't meant to hand you a world fully realized and mechanized; it was meant to give you a structure for making your own.

OD&D Worked Because of the Gaps

By modern standards, OD&D has "gaps." But those gaps weren't always accidental. They existed because Gygax knew his readers already had the habits and mindset to fill them. Wargaming referees knew how to adjudicate oddball situations, because that's what they'd been doing for years on their sand tables.

What looks like an omission today was often just a silent assumption: "Of course the referee will handle that."

That's why OD&D led to so many variant campaigns. There was no ur-text, no canon, it was a culture of iteration. Try something, tweak it, keep what works. That was the DNA of the early hobby.

The Problem When the Hobby Grew

This is where things broke down. OD&D didn't teach the process of making rulings. Once the game spread beyond wargamers, that missing guidance became a real issue.

Take the example of jumping a chasm. A wargaming referee in 1974 might've looked up Olympic jump distances, considered the character's stats, the gear they were carrying, the terrain, and improvised a ruling from that. That was normal.

But for a brand-new player or referee in 1977? That same situation could turn into a frustrating dead end. There wasn't a shared framework for how to think through it, so rulings felt arbitrary, or worse, like pulling numbers out of thin air.

Coaching and Guidance

The early hobby would have been better served by teaching how to make rulings, not just listing rules. Coaching newcomers through the process of handling novel situations and coming up with rulings, both in general, and using the designer's own mechanics, would have gone a long way.

It's not difficult to do, and it doesn't undermine the open-ended style that made early D&D so creative. In my Basic Rules for the Majestic Fantasy RPG, I wrote a chapter, "When to Make a Ruling," to address this very issue using the mechanics of the Majestic Fantasy RPG. I plan to expand on this and more when I finish the full version.

The Basic Rules for the Majestic Fantasy RPG

Rulings Are Not a Stopgap, They're the Point

Hobbyists aren't wrong for wanting more structure. Games like GURPS, Fate, Burning Wheel, or Mythras provide extensive out-of-the-box support, and that's valuable.

But here's the truth: even those systems eventually run into edge cases, a weird situation, a new setting, or something the rules don't cover. When that happens, you need the same tool OD&D assumed from day one: the ability to make a ruling.

And that's why "rulings, not rules" isn't just a slogan or an excuse for missing content. It's the foundation of how tabletop roleplaying was intended to work.

What we need going forward is more coaching and less telling from designers. Hand a referee a Difficulty Class, and they have what they need for that one situation. Teach them how to craft rulings along with Difficulty Classes, and they’ll have a skill they can apply to every campaign they run from that day forward.

Because rules give you tools, but rulings give you craft, and that craft is what makes tabletop roleplaying campaigns truly come alive.

Next Post: Game Balance: RPGs Aren’t Games. And That’s the Point

Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms, Last Day!

My Kickstarter for Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms: the Northern Marches is now in its last day!

Link to the Kickstarter

Random Party Generater

Everybody invited to tonight's Random Party Generator when the kickstarter will end at 10pm Eastern Daylight.

Random Party Generator Link

Overview

Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms:  Northern Marches is built from the ground up for sandbox play. It’s a fully detailed hexcrawl formatted setting with dozens of lairs, dungeons, and adventure hooks, designed not just to be read, but played. Every location, encounter, and faction was refined through actual campaigns using classic rulesets, then polished for publication. Whether you’re running Swords & Wizardry, Shadowdark, AD&D, Old School Essentials, GURPS, or adapting for 5E, you’ll find the Northern Marches easy to run and rich with potential. It’s a World In Motion, where player choices matter and nothing stays static.

So far, I have released 5 previews covering the major regions of the Northern Marches.

Preview #1
Preview #2
Preview #3
Preview #4
Preview #5

This isn’t just another fantasy setting; it’s a tested framework for long-term play, a living world that supports real agency. I’ve built this to help referees run the kind of open-ended campaigns I’ve run for decades. If you want a setting where exploration matters, choices have consequences, and players carve their own path through the unknown, then Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms: Northern Marches is ready. Back it now and make this sandbox setting yours.

Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms, Final Three Days

My Kickstarter for Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms: the Northern Marches is now in its last three days.     

Link to the Kickstarter

Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms:  Northern Marches is built from the ground up for sandbox play. It’s a fully detailed hexcrawl formatted setting with dozens of lairs, dungeons, and adventure hooks, designed not just to be read, but played. Every location, encounter, and faction was refined through actual campaigns using classic rulesets, then polished for publication. Whether you’re running Swords & Wizardry, Shadowdark, AD&D, Old School Essentials, GURPS, or adapting for 5E, you’ll find the Northern Marches easy to run and rich with potential. It’s a World In Motion, where player choices matter and nothing stays static.

So far, I have released 5 previews covering the major regions of the Northern Marches.

Preview #1
Preview #2
Preview #3
Preview #4
Preview #5

This isn’t just another fantasy setting; it’s a tested framework for long-term play, a living world that supports real agency. I’ve built this to help referees run the kind of open-ended campaigns I’ve run for decades. If you want a setting where exploration matters, choices have consequences, and players carve their own path through the unknown, then Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms: Northern Marches is ready. Back it now and make this sandbox setting yours.