The prompt for the 30th and final day of #AprilTTRPGMaker is “Top tips and advice.” I think I'm going to go a bit meta on this one.

Be skeptical of advice

A nontrivial amount of advice is probably bad advice. Even if you put aside intentionally self-serving “advice” that puffs up the advice giver more than it helps the advice receiver, consider that there's a reproducibility crisis currently ongoing in several fields of science, and the testing on a lot of those turned-out-to-be-wrong ideas was a lot more rigorous than most game design or creative advice. A lot of people give advice because it sounds good and wise to them, but not every story that sounds good is a true story.

There's a brilliant business book, The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig, which shows that even well-meaning people who are trying to be rigorous can end up telling themselves stories that seem true rather than getting at real methods that work. For example, he talks about “The Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots” – you look at a group of successful businesses and try to find their common features. That seems like a reasonable approach, right? But consider this hypothetical: Most successful RPGs have a lot of art on the pages. So it seems like “include a lot of art in your RPG” would be good advice. But isn't it the case that a lot of failed RPGs also have a lot of art on the pages? Is there a systematic difference between the amount of art that successful RPGs have and the amount that unsuccessful RPGs have? That's a much harder question to answer (especially because most of the unsuccessful ones are probably games you've never even seen or heard of, because they failed to catch on). If we don't know if including a lot of art makes you more likely to end up in the “successful” category than the “unsuccessful” category, do we know whether “include a lot of art in your RPG” is actually good advice?

Zero-sum strategies vs. non-zero-sum strategies

Consider another hypothetical situation, a classic bazaar. Suppose someone offers advice to one of the merchants: “Hawk your wares more loudly than the stalls around you, then more customers will notice you and buy from you.” That seems like reasonable advice that could work. But what if everybody starts following that advice? The entire place becomes unpleasantly cacophonous. It's only “good advice” in the zero-sum game where it gives you an advantage over similarly-situated competitors. Alternatively, someone else offers different advice to one of the merchants: “Keep your stall clean and inviting so people will have a pleasant time while inspecting your wares.” That seems like reasonable advice that could work. What happens if everybody follows that advice? The entire bazaar is a nicer place to be. It's non-zero-sum, it's good for you but not at the expense of anyone else, it's making the entire environment a better place.

Everybody needs to get through the day, and everybody has their own struggles, so you can't always pick the most virtuous option. But, when you can, it's better to pursue approaches that are good for you in a non-zero-sum way than it is to pursue approaches that are good for you in a zero-sum way. For example, the world will probably be a better place if you can sell people games that you're genuinely proud of at a fair price than if you pursue a P.T. Barnum style “whatever I can get away with” attitude.

The #AprilTTRPGMaker questions

(From Kira Magrann's twitter)