Inside & Outside Game Design

I started my current project, a Cy_borg module called Dead Internet Theory, five years ago after a conversation with a coworker who was a Joe Rogan fan. A few of us were talking about our Spotify wrapped’s and he had like a billion hours of Joe Rogan in there. He is a bit of a rule follower and sort of bland, although he volunteered at a homeless shelter chopping vegetables, so I like him and respect him to an extent. Anyway, he's probably not fully what you'd expect a Rogan bro to be. He said that he felt overwhelmed by politics and that he was interested in knowing the perspectives that are out there, even if they belonged to people he didn't like. At the same time, it was pretty clear that he related to and absorbed some of the macho identity that Rogan capitalizes on. The idea spark for the module was more or less that people give up their brains to the internet, but like, what if people really, really did literally give their brains up to the internet?

I am now playtesting the module, it is pretty cool to see my 5 year back burner project finally put to use. I never really dug into it timewise except at the very end when I tied it all together. It came together very slowly as I'd randomly think of a cool thing for it and note it down. Still, I've probably put more thought into this module over the years than I have into any system I’ve made, so it has me thinking a little bit about what game design is. There are people who will emphatically differentiate between system and adventure design, but the two feel pretty close right now. 

To me, an ideal system will support you and your friends to improvise a story, as you all play to find out what happens. An ideal module is artful and has work put into it to a polished degree that provides an experience that could never be improvised on the spot, no matter how well your group knows and locks gears with each other. A good module is also reactive to player decisions, rather than creating the illusion that they have control over the story. No module can account for every contingency, so the GM has to improvise what happens when things go off in an unexpected direction. At one point during playtesting we realized that our hacker character wasn't there when we needed a hacker, so I asked the players if any of their characters would know one based on their backgrounds. We found something plausible, rolled a few random tables from the book, and had a great little set of scenes.

Even with the module slowly simmering for 5 years, playtesting has revealed a number of things that I wanted to add or change. It’s funny how no amount of preparation can do what actually sitting down with a group can. I make notes for changes during sessions on things that never actually come up in game. Somehow the perspective of running the module, rather than looking at it from a birds eye view as a static text, helps you see things with a fresh eye. I don’t know if this difference is an idea that gets discussed in game design circles, but the idea of being inside a game versus looking at it from the outside feels big to me. Maybe it's not profound but it ties to my interest in GM prep as play.