A Design Consideration for Trad-Style Systems

28 Oct, 2026

I love trad-style systems: those chonky tomes filled with skill lists, special powers, and exception-based design that all revolve around some resolution mechanic that tries to “simulate” as much of the fictional world as it possibly can.

For all of the grievances people justifiably have with this style of system, they have, at their core, a certain elegance that persists, in my mind, even when they become bloated with character options and gear and all the rest. Namely, they boil an entire universe of possible outcomes to any action down to a single dimension of “roll good = do well”, and suddenly the entire table can get behind the tension of rolling some funny polyhedrals and use that as a springboard to tell persistent and cumulative tall tales to each other.

I love them, but, as I’ve mentioned, one can find lots of very justifiable grievances with these systems. Chief among them, for me, is the tendency a lot of them have to assume that GMs will just casually figure out how to make all of their interlocking systems work together toward something that is simultaneously believable as a simulation of an “alternate reality” as well as an exciting and tactically infinite game. How hard could that possibly be, amirite?

In particular, it bothers me when a system gives a player some special affordance - an unusual power, a way to bend or break the rules, some specialized knowledge - but gives GMs no special insight into how they should factor those affordances in when designing or running the game situations.

I think one example of this is in how Dwiz once complained about how hacking in TTRPGs is often a pain point in any design. One of several design problems it brings is that GMs are often ill-prepared to offer interesting and useful shit for characters to hack at any given moment, particularly in a way that makes the hacker part of the main “real-world” action the other characters are engaged in, and not a dude in a chair somewhere who is having their own personal adventure in the matrix (or whatever).

Because, yeah, it can be very difficult to imagine all the stupid “Internet of Things” gadgets and gizmos that could be strewn about that a hacker could leverage, particularly if the goal is to provide interesting tools that the hacker player can figure out an unexpected use for (as opposed to an obvious environmental hazard you’re clearly anticipating them to use in a particular way - which would be the more video-gamey route to designing hackeable interfaces, but also even more work for the GM to meticulously prep in advance).

But this kind of thing happens with all sorts of character affordances. Even skills often end up packing this issue, particularly highly specialized knowledge, crafting, intuition or perception skills. These skills get sold to the player as a unique way of accessing special information or technical expertise during the game, but then the GM is given no special tools or insight into what a character should be able to learn or do with these skills, or how to make them matter to any particular adventure or campaign, and they end up being completely useless as a result.

Oh, your character is familiar with nobility titles and heraldry? Cool, too bad 95% of the campaign is taking place in lawless wildernesses, and the only noble you could conceivably learn something about with this skill - assuming you even succeed in your damn roll - lives 1,000 kilometers away and is a lazy slouch who has nothing to offer the PCs. So even if you succeed with this skill, there's nothing useful to do with that knowledge you get from it for the rest of the campaign. Aren’t you glad you spent you picked up that skill in character creation?

You might say that this is a GM problem, that they’re the ones who aren’t building proper opportunities for these skills to shine. But my point here isn’t that these things are impossible to deal with, just that it is nonsense to keep dumping this design problem on GM shoulders, given that it becomes a pain point on running the game again and again!

This issue is particularly felt when players have their affordances end up being useless, but it also manifests as affordances that are so useful that they short-circuit a lot of challenges a GM wanted to introduce. At this point in my life I’ve probably read an accumulated novel’s worth of GM advice specifically aimed at fortifying D&D whodunnit plots against spells like speak with dead, detect thoughts and zone of truth, only a small number of which were ever put down in an official Dungeon Master’s Guide. Meaning the community at large is well aware of the problems these spells pose to certain kinds of scenarios, but the system itself often falls well short of giving the GM any guidance or tools to deal with it.

Which brings me to my point: this kind of advice, or the work needed on the GM’s side of the screen on how to make this or that skill or character option worth it and fun at the table, should damn well have been made obvious to the table at the very moment these affordances are given as an option, no?

So, this is a design suggestion for all of these trad-style games: if you give a player some special option, give the table - not necessarily just the GMs, the poor bastards have enough to handle already - the tools necessary to make that option matter. Tie that shit immediately to the special affordance, don’t write it down in a completely separate book!

What if you got a little textbox on the page with the speak with dead spell that says something like:

Players, when you pick or prepare this spell for the day, be sure to tell your GM in advance so they are prepared to account for it. GMs, when your players pick this spell, consider that you can now provide information reactively with it by placing corpses with important clues in your adventures. Consider also that murder mysteries require a bit more attention when this spell is at play: the victims will be able to tell the PCs a lot about their own murder - but they still might not know enough to identify the killer! If this spell is common knowledge in your setting, a canny killer could also anticipate people using it on their victims, and plan around that.

This obviously doesn’t cover everything that a GM might need to take into account when dealing with that spell, and would eat away at a good chunk of space at a page (which is always at a premium), but damn if I don’t think it is worth the price! There are usually plenty of sacred cows in trad systems that should get axed in favor of making sure that rules that see a lot of use get proper support.

Same goes with skills and similar mechanics. How about, for a cyberpunk system with hacking, the rules give us a series of tables with common hackable features by the common environments the game is expected to take place in? Imagine at the end of the chapter on hacking things, you had a rule that said “When a character looks for things that could be hacked into, in addition to whatever the GM has prepared in advance, they should pick or roll a few hackable items on the appropriate environment table.” And then you might have a table like this for, say, an office space:

Notice that I’m proposing putting this kind of information into the open, player facing part of the rules, to make it a tool that the entire table can invest into and share responsibility for bringing into the game, if they like! (For folks familiar with my post on improv, this is also essentially a way to bring an element from the “reactive with obvious impact” form of improv into the “based on prep with obvious impact” quadrant by making sure that the system already features that kind of prep for the GM from the outset.)

It might also be extremely helpful to remove dependency on odds and difficulties for affordances that are all about giving the players useful information with which to make the interesting choices. How about instead of “Make a biology check - if you clear DC 13 you get some info, and if you clear 17 even more”, we say something like “Characters with 2 or more ranks in Biology can immediately recognize any living organism that isn’t native to the area; those with rank 3 or more know whether any given species they can see clearly poses a danger to people.”

An affordance like this makes it much more obvious to every player (GM included) on how it can be useful and come up during a game. It also removes any ambiguity over whether or not a character will get the information or not, greatly reducing the risk that you’ll accidentally create an impassable hard lock by inadvertently hiding crucial information behind a successful skill check (or whatever equivalent you’ve got). And players should be encouraged to hand the GM a little card saying “[PC name] can always tell if a species is native to the region or dangerous” so they remember this is something they should keep in mind (and possibly design for, depending on ‘play culture’ preferences).

(For classic RPG-blog aficionados out there, under the Landmark, Hidden, Secret design lens, this is equivalent to saying that we could make knowledge skills function as a special affordance that automatically transfers some kinds of information out of being 'hidden' into becoming 'landmark', or out of 'secret' into becoming 'hidden' or 'landmark', for a particular character.)

And never forget the most obvious solution to this problem of difficult to use player options: if you, the game's designer, don't know or can't express how to effectively make a particular affordance relevant in a normal play scenario, maybe don't even put the damn option in the game. Or if you really want to put it in, make sure you clearly flag it as mostly useless - and ideally don't make the cost of opportunity of picking this option be something that is extremely useful.

Folks that are well read in a variety of different systems (which is presumably most people who might find their way to this blog) will certainly be saying to themselves, “But Ladino, don’t you know that [insert system they like] does this already?” or “I actually prefer the way [system they like] solves [this specific problem]”.

Yeah, this isn’t exactly an original thought of mine. I’m 100% riffing on the myriad solutions others have come up with before in making this suggestion!

My point here is to try to see the broader pattern that required so many such solutions to show up in different GM-advice and “indie” games and use it to preempt such design issues that might come up in a trad-style game.

But then again, it is kinda silly for me to be making a post that contains advice for trad game designers, right? What are the odds that one of the 100 or so readers I get on a good day are designing the next 400-page behemoth with 45 skills and 500 spells? I’m not fond of blog taxes, but even I have to admit this post is a bit too far into the “useless rant” category for my tastes if I leave it as-is. So, let me say something a bit more actionable.

Let me just remind all RPG players out there that they are, by force of being the engine that runs the game itself, also game designers. So hack your favorite problematic system to your heart’s content, and implement this kind of solution wherever you see it is necessary - if you do a bad job at patching the problem, you’ve still done no worse than the designers who failed to help you out with it in the first place!

And I’ll say it again, because it is important: don’t put the responsibility of making the player options interesting solely on the GM! Wherever possible, share that burden with as many players as are interested in the outcome of the mechanic! If one player picked Geology as a skill and the GM has no idea what to do with that, they should be telling them what they want to be doing with that skill! Work together to define what information they should get for having it, or if they can pull some special tactic with it. Of course, if the player who picked the skill isn't actually flagging something they want to do in the game by selecting it, they should be upfront about it too!

Players, if a character option with non-obvious applications looks interesting to you, don’t pick and keep it secret from the GM, hoping to catch the GM by surprise with it at a critical moment. Say clearly what kinds of things you’re hoping to be able to do with it, what kinds of problems it might pertain to!

GMs, when hearing this information, take it seriously and put it in the game! You are not being scored on originality or unexpectedness, so there’s no reason to avoid a good beat in the fiction just because a player suggested it to you in advance.

The short version of this whole argument is: we should make sure we know how to express every player option that makes it into a game at the table.

The more abstract, obscure or unusual the affordance you're giving a player, the better GM support it should have. Don't just assume they'll figure it out by themselves. If they end up having different ideas on how the affordance should work, they can always change the system by themselves anyway, at their own discretion and risk.

When you notice or anticipate that you might have this problem with a given system you're running, work with the table in advance to consider how you might make that character option interesting at the table (or, perhaps, whether it is meant to work passively and just generally prevent a certain kind of problem from happening to a particular character).

#design #theory #tools