[Interview]: with Tabletop Designer, Steve Dee
Author: Elodie.
In this interview I speak to Steve Dee, one of Australia’s most prolific tabletop designers, about his upcoming Kickstarter project, The Worldwell, as well as some of his general philosophies on design.
Hi, I’m Steve Dee. I’m a game designer from Sydney, Australia. I’ve been working in the roleplaying industry since 2006. In terms of working for companies, I was doing a lot of freelance stuff before that, since the 90s. I also run Tin*Star Games.
Tell me a bit more about your history as a designer.
I’ve spent a lot of time working in the roleplaying game field. That’s how I got my start; that was always my biggest passion. I was a huge, huge, roleplayer for most of my life. I really wanted to work in that field so I started doing freelance work- and that was how I spent my first 15-20 years in the industry- and then I started publishing my own RPGs, and doing some more experimental stuff. I think I’m someone who’s very easily bored or frustrated- at least with my own work. I want to always be pushing the envelope and going ‘Okay, well what hasn’t been done with a roleplaying game? Where can we go next?’ I guess that’s why also I’ve gone on to do more (non-RPG) tabletop games as well, because I wanted to push myself and find new places, things I hadn’t done before.
Your latest project is about to go to Kickstarter. Give us the pitch for The World Well.
The World Well is a worldbuilding game with a difference. The focus is on building factions that are in conflict with each other, and fractures that are building across the world and tilting it towards conflict and change.
The inspiration for this is that I have worked on so many different roleplaying game settings and when you’re designing a roleplaying setting- and indeed any game- you generally want to build factions because it’s a really good way to wire in different types of characters, and character motivations. It also creates plot, and so do fractures where things are changing.
I’ve actually just written a book about how to build worlds for games, and I talk a lot in that about why factions matter, and also why you have to think very carefully about change. Worldbuilding theory often starts with ‘design your cosmology!’ or ‘design your geology!’ And I like a lot of the games out there that take a different point of view. For example I like In This World by Ben Robbins, which says ‘what if we change a fundamental assumption that we have about our world?’
[In The World Well] first everyone generates a central core of ideas, and then we see which of those ideas end up in each player’s factions. The more a thing gets selected by different factions, the more important that thing must be to the setting. So you don’t know exactly what’s going to matter when you generate the well; it’s only when you start to draw things out later that you figure out ‘Oh, okay, in the setting, this thing is really important.’ I think that’s a really interesting way to come at things, because you have a bit of freedom at the generation stage, just throwing out ideas. And they could mean nothing, which means that you’re not worried about ‘Oh, what does this mean?’ because you haven’t connected it to anything yet. You’re just going ‘Oh, everyone here thinks wearing hats is lucky.’ and that can just be a random idea, and it might not mean anything, so the pressure is off. But later on, you might find out that every single faction is very concerned with that fact, and it changes what that means. That makes it more collaborative, and also in a different way. A lot of worldbuilding games are ‘Hey, everyone throw in an idea and we’ll riff off that,’ whereas what I’ve tried to do here is [let] players go off into their own little corner and say ‘Here’s my faction.’ And that separation actually causes more randomness because you do your own thing without consulting the other people. It means you get things pulled further from a general consensus.
What is one piece of wisdom you would like to impart on the game design community at large?
Be aware of the assumptions you’re making, and interrogate them. Because that’s often where really interesting things happen, when we say ‘Oh, hang on. We always do that. Why do we do that? What do we gain from doing that? What do we lose by doing that? Can we change that?’ And I think that’s just a really good way to start at something- just ask those questions. It’s a good way to think about life, as well. ‘What are we assuming? What might we change, or look at differently?’
For the upcoming Kickstarter, you decided to bring on other designers with their own games, myself included. What inspired you to do that?
It has sort of crept up on me that I am the ‘old guard’ a bit. I’ve been working in the industry, as I say, for 20 years now. You don’t think of yourself as suddenly having a position of experience and power but I look around and we are one of the largest, and leading, roleplaying publishers in Australia- after Storybrewers maybe. We’re starting to have a bit of a voice and a bit of an audience and I think it always is a responsibility of someone who is ahead in terms of audience, range and reach to pass whatever they can back down, to people who are maybe in different positions.
It also occurred to me that lots of zines come out in Zinequest, and obviously we’re going to be pointing people to the ones around and saying ‘Hey this might be good,’ or ‘This might be something you’re interested in,’ but it also occurred to me to go ‘If you’ve already clicked on this, you don’t even need to click away... Here are some other things that you can add on.’ And that gives energy to all the projects that are connected here, so that people can have a bit more of a community.
One thing that the ‘hustle culture’ of self-publishing does to the roleplaying game industry is it can actually drive us apart, because it’s really hard to figure out what everyone else is doing out there in the industry. At best, we tend to pick a few very big trends and follow them. What we’re not doing is talking about what we can do to compare and contrast the choices that other games are making, and I would love to find more ways to encourage that conversation. To say ‘Why does Game X do this when Game Y does not? Why were those choices made? What is similar about these two games; what is different?’ So as well as trying to support the community, I want to support that kind of conversation.
What are some of your favourite things about The World Well?
I’ve already sort of said this- I love that you don’t know what’s important until it becomes important. But I also love that it’s very sensitive to initial conditions and things like that, so someone will just say some random thought based on the prompt and it can just change the whole tenor of the game. That’s true of all good worldbuilding games, I think, that a single random idea can trickle down and change things. And people have already started making roleplaying games based on some of the settings that have come from this, so that’s exciting.
Anything else?
Please, if you do run this game, I want to see what you make. I want to see your sheets, and I want to see the factions you make. And I’d love to see someone use it as a basis to making a roleplaying game. If you have an idea for a system or you’re a bit stuck on your worldbuilding, I’d really love to see if you can use this to build something that you can later build into a game.
In programming language, in computers, they talk about high-level languages. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s everything had to be coded from scratch, but then they built these programs that sat on top of those things. So if you wanted to make a menu, you just go ‘install menu’, and things like that. So much of roleplaying games really are components of other games, and that’s why we reuse systems, but I think it could be really interesting- and I’ve got some other ideas- [to ask] ‘what tools do people want for making roleplaying games, making them faster and more easily? Is that something that’s interesting to people? Can they use these techniques?’
Also interesting to see if anyone’s using it for writing. [...] I think there’s a lot of crossover between fictional world creation and roleplaying games, so I’d love to hear about anyone who’s doing that kind of work.
Links to things discussed in this article:
The World Well (and Friends) prelaunch page