Sultan's Musings

Rules & Tools

A thought I’ve been coming back to a lot recently is product utility in TTRPGs.

I don’t think about it a lot for other creative mediums, so it feels a bit weird to use that word when judging games. “Utility” sounds industrial. Art should not be judged on utility, surely?

I agree. Utility has nothing to do with a game’s artistic merit. But a game should be assessed for it nonetheless. Most games are designed to be played after all, and aside from rules and vibes, tabletop RPGs should also provide the tools needed to get the game going.

But a lot of games fail at providing players, and more often, Referees/GMs, the tools necessary to actually run the game effectively. But what do I mean by ‘tools’? I don’t mean dice, pencils and papers, I mean the techniques and instructions to prep and play the specific game presented.

If I am handed a copy of a game, it is often just assumed by the writer that I already know the basics of what to prepare to get my game to the table. It’s either that or the assumption is I will run a published module anyways. This happens a lot with DND derivatives. Rules get written, vibes are presented, but no structure or guides are given for what to actually prep or how to handle things at the table. It’s assumed you already know how to design a dungeon, or an encounter, or a town. You can find those tools elsewhere if you don’t already have them.

Games aren’t made in a vacuum, I get it, but tabletop gaming is incredibly diverse. What if I am a tabletop gamer who never played DND before but I want to try running DCC? The game is called Dungeon Crawl Classics, and yet the core rulebook has no tools for dungeon generation or stocking.

I think it speaks to a design philosophy that is thankfully changing in the 2020s. Tabletop roleplaying was never a particularly popular pastime. It always was and still is (to a lesser degree) niche. In the early 2010s, there just wasn’t the assumption that a bunch of brand new players would be approaching your indie game as their first RPG experience, unless you were the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

Games like Dungeon Crawl Classics, back in 2012, could safely assume that most of its new players would be coming in from prior editions of D&D and were looking for old-school flavor but with modern d20 mechanics, which the game delivers with overwhelming success - and more dice. So from the perspective of an aspiring Judge (their term for GM) picking this up in 2012, it is fair that Joseph Goodman assumed you already knew how to put together a dungeon and balance an encounter.

You just can’t have that same assumption in late 2025. The TTRPG community is bigger and more diverse than it ever was before. It is entirely possible that someone picking up DCC for the first time will have no idea how to create and stock a dungeon. They may have an idea of what they are supposed to do, but they won’t have the tools to help them do it. Not in the core rulebook at least.

It may look like I am picking on DCC for this. It is just being used as an example that I am personally familiar with. There are plenty of tools provided in the rulebook for generating specific monsters, patrons or quest hooks. It, like many other rulebooks of the time, just doesn't provide much guidance on adventure structure or dungeon design.

Take that same aspiring player and give them Shadowdark: now they have tools for generating towns, surrounding areas, dungeons, monsters, quests, NPCs and treasure. The game gives you everything you need to create your own adventures in one book. Yes, these tools are very simple and will likely feel repetitive over time. But that's the beauty of utility, it doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to work. A rusty shovel can still dig. And all you need is to make a hole.

The counter argument is to not waste space detailing tools and procedures that either 3rd party publishers can provide or that can be found using a quick internet search. After all, one of the side effects of TTRPGs’ growing popularity over the last decade is the wealth of content created to aid and assist new players and game masters. If you aren’t sure how to design a dungeon, you will find endless (and excellent) advice online on how to do so. Generally that advice will hold across multiple game systems.

The problem with this take is that search engines are optimized to sell you things you didn’t even ask for. Content creation is also encouraged to center itself around trending subjects. So if your game is niche, which is any game that isn’t D&D 5E, then it will be harder to find content creators online who are search engine optimized to give you the information and advice that you need. ChatGPT will straight-up lie to you and disregard whatever game system you asked advice for, in favor if vomiting out popular 5E advice it scraped from major DungeonTubers. Don't rely on it.

I also think that tools don’t necessarily need to be in the book, but should be easily accessible and supported by the first party, either via links on the official website or their socials. Mork Borg is a game that is rather light on tools but has one of the best online character generators out there. Beyond the core rulebook, the 3rd party community has stepped in to provide almost any resource you might need to plug into your game. Due to how lightweight that game is, fitting in any tool is extremely easy.

What seem like rules can also really be tools in disguise. Shadowdark’s torch-timer rule is one such case. You could easily track torches using B/X’s procedure (also a tool in and of itself) but that tool, while straightforward in its own right, still takes up mental bandwidth and table tracking that a torch timer doesn’t. If the game is asking you to track torch duration, then it is nice to be able to do it without thinking too hard.

Another tool disguised as a rule is Daggerheart’s Hope and Fear economy. Yes, this is absolutely a rule that is integral to this system, but it is also a tool to aid narrative pacing. In this case, it is far more of a rule for the players (hope lets them push buttons), but for the GM it is their way of tracking how much conflict and tension they can employ in a scene.

All this is to say that these days it is much appreciated when a game system is able to provide easy to use tools to create the kind of content that its gameplay demands. Procedures and rules can cover the rest. Vibes also do a lot of heavy lifting. But providing a list of tools is extremely useful in letting Game Masters prep exactly what is needed to get their game going.

Creativity can take it from there.

Here are some game books that I think offer a lot of utility:

I am sure there are plenty more examples, I am just listing games I am familiar with.

Here are some honorable mentions that aren’t specifically tied to a game: