There’s a (potentially apocryphal) story about the design of Apocalypse World that says that the first thing Vincent Baker designed for the game was the Angel playbook. (Or possibly Brainer? I’ve heard both.) Before what dice you were rolling, before the basic moves, before any kind of MC-facing mechanics, Vincent started with some evocative stats and abilities. Before he knew what “open your brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom” meant, those words existed on a page. From there, he and Meguey built the game around what that playbook would need to function instead of starting big picture and gradually filling in.
Now, I’m sure that first playbook was iterated on later. Maybe it was completely revised. I’m sure a lot of that game existed before the fifth playbook was written. Maybe all of this is a lie! But I think there’s something very useful about the idea of starting a game’s design with its character sheet and/or playbooks and building out.
When you start with the character sheet, you’re immediately making decisions about what’s important in your game. If you know gear’s going to be important, you put a spot for it on the sheet. If you know you want to mechanize who owes who favors, you’re gonna put a slot on there for a list of people plus a number of favors owed to them or that they owe you. Etc.
Yes, you’ll have to build out how everything works later, but planting flags early gives you direction. It gives you a roadmap for what you’re going to have to design, and a set of principles and goals you can refer back to as you work. If you’re ever feeling lost, you can look at that sheet and remember what your first instincts were for what in this game actually matters.
(Of note: my guess is that this works much better for smaller games. But I wouldn’t know, because I only make small games. This is probably a way to keep your games small.)
Maybe best of all: if you have a character sheet, you can playtest. You might want more rules, too, but you can probably roll in to a group of playtesters with a character sheet, some general inclinations about mechanics, and good vibes and get valuable information about where you want to take your design.
Notably, I’m not saying you should make it look good. Chicken scratch something up, or just write out a list of checkboxes and traits to fill out in a google doc. It’s fine. The thing I’m saying is important is just getting your main ideas / thesis / goals down on a page that your playtesters are gonna see.
Your first draft at a sheet is never going to be final. Sometimes your game shifts directions entirely; maybe your game about trading favors in a complicated world of assassins has become more about meticulously planned fight sequences, and you cut the favors slot from your sheet. Things change.
Still, I think there’s a lot of value in putting yourself in the headspace of the player sitting down to play your game for the first time, who hasn’t read the book, who just knows the 2-3 sentence elevator pitch their friend gave them a couple weeks ago. Assuming the game has a character sheet, it’s likely to be the first thing that person interacts with mechanically. Whatever it emphasizes, whatever vibes it conveys, that’s going to be what they think the game is about. I think those vibes and first impressions are where a lot of us begin our designs, and dumping them into something that looks like a character sheet is a great way to collect your initial thoughts and get started.
Let’s round this out with a...
Case Study
Here’s the very first thing I made for my upcoming game Space Fam:
I knew this game was going to be a Firebrands / Our Traveling Home hack that did “found family in space” vibes. I knew the structure mechanically was going to be a series of minigames chosen by players, but I hadn’t written any of those yet. Instead, I started here.
I had some idea what Excuses, Convictions, and Fears were mechanically. I’d just come off a game of Thirsty Sword Lesbians with a Seeker, a playbook that has a bunch of Commandments and a Tradition stat that measures how much you currently believe in your Commandments and the culture that gave them to you. As you go, you can slowly swap out Commandments for Convictions, new beliefs you’ve learned for yourself instead of old directives give to you by an authority.
I wanted to do something similar with personal anxiety. I think there’s a lot of that in a normal found family arc: “am I worthy of these people’s love? Are they worthy of mine?” You’d start with a bunch of Excuses and gradually swap them out for Convictions, similar to how in Stewpot you gradually trade Adventure Experiences for Town Experiences as you set aside your life of fighting monsters for a life running a tavern. But I wanted to emphasize that the root Fears behind those Excuses never go away, so I made those separate.
I had no idea what Guilt or Camaraderie did, but they felt like important stats, good vibes. And I had space, so I included them. Then I filled out the sheet with basic character details and these “between scene” questions to regulate how you’d travel the Excuse -> Conviction pipeline.
From here, I thought about what would happen if you hit maximum Guilt and wrote some rules for that, and I thought about what you might use Camaraderie for and did the same. Then I wrote a few minigames and ran the thing.
Excuses didn’t survive a single playtest; they were super redundant with Fears. But I still didn’t want Fears to ever go away, so I changed the system to “you have some Fears, and you gain Convictions, and when you have more Convictions than Fears, that’s when you hit emotional endgame.”
Other parts of the rules have changed a lot as I’ve designed, but this character sheet remains very recognizable in the game’s closer-to-final form:
Regret is new, but it’s just an extra bit of flavor; it has no mechanical purpose. Convictions are now Beliefs. Comradery and Guilt look a little different. But this sheet remained a north star for me throughout the development process.
Coda
When I’m reading a new game, if there’s a character sheet, that’s where I start. A good character sheet is a table of contents of the game’s main ideas. It’s a guide for what to look for when reading the rules and for what’s going to matter at the table. It’s the only part of the game you can be sure everyone who plays it will take a look at.
It’s a good place to start your design, even if it’s also probably the last thing you should finalize.