Conveying the new, minimally

Background and Objectives

Tabletop Roleplaying Games are not for the faint of heart. In order to successfully grasp one, a complex plethora of rules awaits any so eager. Key to this is a character sheet, tracking player actions as well as the mechanics of the game. On this latter part, some are more guide than others. As a new game, this sheet is for beginners.

Playing around with the norms and news of RPG design

Sometimes the designer is given less to produce more…

Challenges and Compromises

Coherency (challenge): Any new idea takes a while to be fully understood. This is omnipresent in the boardgame market. Often times these games follow the “learn by doing” mantra. Creating a sheet that allows for this philosohy to be followed will help retention.

Elegance (compromise): The main conversation had with the creator of the game was how much of the rules could be condensed into a single sheet. Given this was a complicated game, only some of these rules could fit. As such, the compromise was deciding how much information a player could handle before overwhelmed.

Simplicity

Though the design may not appear as the most simple, previous iterations attempted far more data or data abbreviations. This project emphasized knowing when to break content across several pages and when one page had sufficient content.

Some Conclusions and Takeaways

Recreation vs. Reinvention

Work Examples

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Work Examples 〰️

Challenges

  • How can we develop a character sheet that conveys the character basics yet instructs how to play?

  • What do other sheets do well that can inspire us? Where do they lack?

  • Where are the chances to innovate?

Starting the Design Process

Competitive Audit: When this sheet was in construction, there were no users and limited internal feedback. As such, there was wide autonomy over the design. This came mainly from individual interpretation of the content and competitive analysis.

Key Questions:

  • What is the most streamlined way to prevent a wide array of information?

  • What information is inessential and can be removed from the sheet?

  • What do competitors do in conveying a simplified version of their rules?

  • What is the competitive landscape like? Where can we innovate and where can we be inspired?

  • What potential issues would a new user have when experiecing this entirely new conceit? How can we design around those pain points?

This project, given the limited engagememt with the produt owner and no engagement with the users, relied a lot on internal interpretation and competitive inspiration. The key takeaway on this project was that other competition will have ideas worth being inspired from. There’s no need for reinvention when reinterpretation will accomplish as much in half the time.