Leyline Press Blog — ttrpg

Panny explores their love of tabletop gaming starter sets from childhood to the present day.

 'Mother May I' is a complaint, often thrown disparagingly at tabletop roleplaying games with simpler rules sets, that lean on 'rulings' based play, that play devolves into the players 'begging' the GM to let them do things in play. 

Therefore, the argument goes, tabletop roleplaying games need to have a robust set of rules and mechanics in order to ensure consistency during play, prevent GM favouritism and ensure players are able to engage with the gameworld fairly and with a wider degree of depth.

I believe 'Mother May I' is an issue far more in theory than in practice, during actual play that's thrown unfairly at games with simple rules set, implying they are arbitrary, or lack depth when this isn't the case. 'Mother May I' is in fact a positive feature of roleplaying games that allows them to have the depth and scope that they do. 

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned as a game designer is to know when to kill your darlings. As much as you may love an idea, sometimes you have to just bite the bullet, take it out back, and shoot it in the head. This will make your game better, but it's a tough and painful process.

Salvage Union is a post-apocalyptic Mech game where players assume the roles of scrap salvagers. We, as the developers, aimed to create a gameplay experience centred around the core concept of salvaging. To achieve this, we drew inspiration from the 'Gold for XP' system in early editions of Dungeons and Dragons. This system tied experience points to the discovery of gold, with each piece of gold found translating to 1 Experience Point for the player character. This encouraged exploration and strategic thinking as the goal became to explore the environments in the game to discover the gold, rather than to simply defeat the monsters. In Salvage Union, we sought to establish a similar connection between the importance of scrap and exploration.