The day 20 question for #AprilTTRPGMaker is “Favorite design tools?”. My favorite tool for game design is something inspired by an old pinned post at The Forge: imagining people playing the game and writing it down like a script. This leverages some of the same mental hardware you use when writing or reading fiction (or playing an RPG), such as projecting yourself into the heads of the various “characters”, where, here, the characters are people sitting around a table playing a game. Your sense of conversational flow and so forth can help guide you in terms of what you want people to be saying, when they should be consulting the mechanics, etc. Obviously this is the sort of thing you need to do to write examples once the game design is finished, but you can also think in this way while you're still designing the game to help you flesh out what mechanics you want to design in the first place.
I had a hard time thinking of an answer to this question at first, because "design tools" mostly made me think about software and graphic design tools like Adobe's InDesign. In the indie game/story games world there's a lot of deference paid to layout and graphic design. My personal suspicion is that this does more harm than good (especially early in the design process).
First off, I think there's a “halo effect” problem where people unconsciously allow the slickness of presentation to affect their judgment the quality of the game design. This gives an “unfair” advantage to people with certain skills and access to certain expensive software, and creates an unnecessary barrier to entry for beginners or others who don't have those things (which is especially bad in design contests).
Second, I think that the fact that people can sell their services as graphic designers make those skills seem more intrinsically valuable than game design skills, which people do “for free”, but I think that tends to get the true value proposition backwards. If graphic design is as important as some people think, why wouldn't graphic designers be hiring freelance designers to fill their beautifully-designed documents with content? It's easy to tell stories about how layout and graphic design are super important, but a lot harder to do apples-to-apples comparisons to judge exactly how important. Yes, good graphic design can act as a metaphorical lubricant to let the players/readers more usefully interact with the game design, but I don't think we should confuse having good leverage with intrinsic importance.
Third, getting locked into layout can make your design seem much more “fragile”. This is a problem I have with my game Final Hour of a Storied Age. At one point I tried to implement a somewhat attractive “layout” in OpenOffice Writer in order to make it more palatable to read and hopefully attract playtesters. As a result it's now a lot harder for me to modify the text because if I end up re-flowing the pages it can toss everything out of whack, that makes me a lot more reluctant to “crack the codebase” then is probably healthy. The free tools that are available don't have a good mechanism for separating layout from content. (Scribus can be a bit maddening this way, the last time I checked it has a concept of character styles, which you need for modern writing because things like bold and italics are considered part of the content for a contemporary writer, but there's no way to get the character style assignments from any sort of marked-up text imported into Scribus. The Scribus workflow tends to assume you're starting from a finalized text and will make any last-minute tweaks within Scribus itself.)
(from Kira Magrann's twitter)
