A zine that teaches you to design a game
RPG Design Zine and Make Hard Moves treat design as a practice of choices. A library making session can follow those choices through testing and revision.
Nathan D. Paoletta’s RPG Design Zine describes design as making choices and understanding why they were made. Its twenty-four cut-and-paste pages draw on examples from his game library to explain different ways of approaching the work. That is an appealing promise for a small publication. It gives the reader decisions to think through. Paoletta’s description
A library workshop can take that promise seriously by asking participants to explain a change in their game and examine what its instructions cause another person to do, alongside the accomplishment of finishing a folded object.
The exercise proposed here is my own application of the cited ideas. The creators’ accounts establish their intentions; they do not establish measured learning outcomes for a library audience.
Start with a decision that can be examined
A participant who is asked to invent an entire roleplaying game may spend the session choosing a setting, drawing a cover or negotiating what the assignment means. Those are legitimate activities, but they leave little room to inspect a rule in use.
I would begin with a smaller task. Design one decision for a character trying to cross a flooded passage. The character can risk the current, spend a scarce resource or seek help. The designer chooses what information the player receives and how the consequences are determined.
This is an invented example, with no requirement that the result use dice. A conversation, a card draw or a written choice could suit the intended experience. What matters is that the participant can connect a procedure to a purpose rather than treating a familiar mechanic as inevitable.
The facilitator can ask the designer to write that purpose in one sentence. Perhaps the passage should make cooperation attractive. Perhaps it should make spending a resource difficult. The statement gives the later test something specific to examine without prescribing the correct game.
Another reader reveals the missing instruction
Wood, Bruner and Ross’s study of tutoring describes assistance shaped by the learner and the task, including reducing complexity and drawing attention to important features. The original study concerned children assembling a wooden structure. Its concepts suggest ways to organise assistance here, without proving the effectiveness of this proposed workshop.
The limited encounter reduces the number of things a new designer must manage at once. A worked example can show how an instruction connects an action to a consequence. The facilitator can then withdraw that example and let the participant choose another route.
A second reader should try the instruction before hearing its author explain it, allowing both participants to notice where the reader pauses, which choice seems available and what must be supplied from previous gaming experience. The pause is evidence about that encounter between text and reader, rather than a verdict on the person’s ability.
If the designer wants cooperation but the procedure rewards acting alone, the discrepancy becomes a useful revision question. The participant can change the reward, the information or the available choices, then ask the reader to try again and describe what changed.
Design traditions offer different vocabularies
In a January 2026 interview about Make Hard Moves, Aaron King describes wanting to connect PbtA principles with practices across old-school and lyric games. King presents that connection as a reason for writing, and hopes to reach readers alienated by story games.
The pedagogical interest lies in the attempt to translate between vocabularies. A participant may recognise a difficult choice through one tradition and fail to recognise it when another tradition uses different language. Comparing the actual instructions can be more productive than deciding which label should win.
The comparison also needs limits. Two procedures can address similar fictional situations while distributing authority differently. A rule that gives a referee a decision and a rule that gives the player a choice are not mechanically equivalent merely because both produce an interesting consequence.
In an academic session, I would ask students to identify who acts, who interprets and who records the result in each example. In a public making session, I would use those questions conversationally, with enough explanation for people who have never encountered the named design traditions.
Keep evidence of the revision
The workshop’s useful record could be very small: the first instruction, a reader’s observation, the revised instruction and the designer’s explanation. That record shows a relationship between intention, use and change. A polished final page alone cannot show the same relationship.
Participation should not depend on drawing skill or public performance. A participant could dictate an instruction, work with a partner or use an accessible text format. The chosen format should support the design decision being examined rather than becoming a second unannounced test.
Staff time belongs in the plan. Someone must prepare examples, explain the task, support the trial and allow enough time for revision. If the session ends immediately after the first draft, the advertised emphasis on learning through making has lost its opportunity for reflection.
The assessment should remain proportionate. A participant’s account of one revision can demonstrate that they identified and addressed a particular problem. It cannot establish lasting confidence, general literacy gains or a change in wellbeing without evidence designed to answer those separate questions.
Leave the design open
Paoletta offers screen-reading, home-printing and booklet-printing files for RPG Design Zine. That choice of routes suits a publication concerned with helping readers make their own decisions. A workshop can preserve the same openness by letting a successful exercise end as a clear rule on a plain page.
Some participants will want to continue into layout, illustration and publication. Others may want to revise the encounter once and stop. Both responses can be meaningful within a session whose purpose was stated accurately at the outset.
I would judge the session by whether participants can explain what they changed and why. The zine supplies an invitation to design; the library supplies time, materials and a reader willing to try the result. The most useful object to take home may be the instruction that finally does what its author intended.
