the guildpact gadfly: a dungeons & dragons ux design

This work was originally published on Medium in 2021.

In tabletop roleplaying games, the most significant job the game master (GM or DM, dungeon master in D&D) has is, first and foremost, to design an itinerary for players to travel through — and an enjoyable itinerary, at that. However, the point of a tabletop RPG is to give the players complete agency, or at least the illusion of complete agency, in an imagined fantasy world. The game master should ideally focus on the player experience and, instead of directing them through a premade “story,” they should react to their whims and offer situations and consequences to these whims. Thus, unless the GM follows a prewritten adventure which already offers an existing worldbuilding (leaving the GM with the task of just reading the adventure book instead of having to create it), most of the content the players will encounter will be created from scratch, or “homebrewed” as it’s known in TTRPG communities.

The balance between sandbox-style worldbuilding and fixed storytelling, then, was the main issue I had to negotiate when I agreed to run a Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in the world of Ravnica for my friends. I was not fully starting from scratch in my worldbuilding — Ravnica is a vaguely-retro-futurist setting borrowed from Magic: The Gathering, the other major fantasy game franchise that Wizards of the Coast owns. However, the sources were limited: as of February 2022, the main available official content is a sourcebook on the setting and worldbuilding (not a full-fledged adventure). This is generally agreed to be an incomplete source by the GM community, who have updated its contents and offer solutions in a Reddit subforum. Most of the player experience in the setting of Ravnica, then, is homebrewed.

“You craft such amazing sessions when you get the chance, that it’s so worth waiting for them” Jodie, who played Meloe the barbarian

I needed to structure the player experience without limiting their options. What I did, then, was to use my journalistic experience (both in design and content creation) to make a product: a fictional newspaper that eventually formed the framework for the players’ decisions from one session to the next. In the Guildpact Gadfly, the players were able to find banners with job listings, ads with secret messages hidden in them, and among other things, copy that served three main purposes — first, to introduce a range of potential plot hooks for the players to choose from; second, to give context about a world which none of my players were familiar with; and third, to offer independent stories and create a sense of depth in the setting. I wanted to create an immersive experience, that would make the players feel like no matter what, the world they played in wouldn’t stop when our game session did.

“It was awesome, bravo [...] Buzzing for next week, thanks again Anne, you crushed it” Cameron, who played Azuloth the wizard

This fictional newspaper became an extremely powerful tool of adaptability and narrative design potential, both for me as a game designer and for my players as a tool to move through Ravnica. At the end of each session, the players would discuss what news/notices/ads they were most interested in, which in turn gave me hints as to what I should prepare for upcoming sessions.

When prepping for events in the game, then, I knew what areas of the map I needed to develop, what type of worldbuilding would be required, etc. My mapping process became much more streamlined: with­ a few bullet points worth of the players’ interests, I was ready to write potential scenarios, setting descriptions, item stats, guidelines on tone/voice for me to roleplay the NPCs the party might encounter, etc.

Timeline mapping of the events of a masquerade ball, planned as a murder mystery event­.

“So thoughtful [...] You always go above and beyond, and our sessions so far have been amazing” Zach, who played Luka the rogue

Additionally, after each session, the impact of the players’ decisions on the fictional world would often appear in the next issue of the paper, detailing the (positive or negative) consequences of those choices. This added to the immersive quality of the game, and it paid off for the players, who had extremely enthusiastic reactions and became very involved.