it's funny, at first, i thought it was a recent thing, until i thought more about my past experiences with TTRPGs, and realized i just needed to shift my lens!
i starting playing D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder in high school. by the end of high school and early college, i started GMing, and got very much into designing intricate campaign worlds. in early college, i got really into this little one-page system called Simple D6 (second edtiion, but here is 3rd), which really exploded my mind as to what a tabletop roleplaying game could be. i started writing up big spreadsheets of item sets for Simple D6 in various settings—one for cyberpunk, one for space western. i ran multiple SD6 one shots in those settings using those item sets, tweaking and tuning as i went. i even designed a modular APC system for the cyberpunk SD6 setting for my players to customize their own, and oriented all those games around your squad's APC.1
at no point had i considered that i was doing game design. to me, i was just coming up with cool items, because it was fun for my players to be able to use them, and maybe even more because i was having fun writing them up.
then i slowly started trying other small systems. i tried running one called Blaster, but was disappointed in some of the mechanics, so i started making little tweaks. i started GMing more and more, building more elaborate campaigns. eventually, after college, i got really into Shadowrun, tore through the books voraciously, joined a campaign that ran surprisingly long, and ended up trading off GMing it. now that i was in a sci-fi setting & had the size of the Shadowrun sandbox, i really went wild. i set up factions, i gave my players a base they could upgrade,2 i made a persistent meta-universe between different campaigns and one-shots with cameos.
at no point had i really considered that i might be doing game design.
gonna accelerate a bit here, but playing The Quiet Year really exploded what i thought TTRPGs could be once again, and from there are started playing all sorts of different systems—especially falling in love with GMless ones.
then...galactic. our galactic game. it was supposed to be a one-shot. it was also like, just past peak lockdown in the early pandemic. the four of us were desperate for something...and this was it. we were obsessed. in the discord daily. we wrote 150k words of short fiction about our characters in 9 months. it was everything.
so when the galactic 2e game jam rolled around...i had to do something. it was a campaign made up of all designers, and we had been playtesting 2e. we talked design all the time. i loved rogue one, i loved galactic, i wanted to tell that story, but it had a different tone. so...i set out to do it myself! like 2 months later, i had written and playtested my little expansion 3 times! playtesting was hard—i literally cried at the first one—but also taught me so much immediately, and i found what i made from it so satisfying. then i submitted to the public form for Party of One, an actual play podcast by @jeffstormer, and...he invited me to play it on the show! omg. someone wanted to put my work in front of the world. it was fun to play, fun to record, and people enjoyed listening to it. this really motivated me.
i'm getting a bit bored of writing this so i'm gonna stop here, but the big thing i realized recently was:
i was already doing this! it just became more formal, more intentional, and more aimed at releasing a "finished work" for the public. but GMing...is already game design! and the more effort you put into GMing, typically, the more design work you're doing yourself! i had already been playtesting those Simple D6 item sets. there are many people out there who are game designers and don't even know it yet. and that's ok! if they don't ever want to release a Game™ and just want to make little things for themselves and their friends, that's also lovely and creative and good for the world and for them. but also, with a bit more intentionality, they already have the skill foundation for some really cool things :)
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fun fact: this whole little setting was inspired by the barebones original Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, before we knew anything about what it would be
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partially inspired by The Shadowrun Arcology Podcast i was listening to—the GM Cliff is a big inspiration for me as a GM.
