Hallowshard vision
What roleplaying games of the future could look like, and how Hallowshard is trying to get there. TTRPGs have been my passion for around two decades now. I have played a lot of systems, and this has always been a great way for me both to connect with people and to understand myself better. I still love this hobby, but I see a lot of potential still left in it, and problems we need to resolve. TTRPGs are largely collaborative storytelling, with elements of other games sprinkled in, most notably tactical simulation. A game system plays two important roles here. First, it provides these “other games,” which in a perfect world should stand on their own as interesting tabletop games, with good balance between different players, non-trivial tactical solutions, and a variety of strategies. Second, on a higher level, the system draws the line between the parts of the narrative which belong to the GM and the parts which belong to different players. Arguably, this is one reason fantasy TTRPGs became so successful: giving more narrative power to players through magic made games more interesting. Getting this line right is hard, and many of the problems we experience come from drawing it badly. The first tradeoff is how hard this narrative divide should be. Historically, TTRPG systems have been divided between rules-light and rules-heavy games. Both can be great. Rules-light systems blur this line significantly. They leave most rules open to interpretation. How fast can you swim? Can you convincingly lie to this beggar? Most non-trivial situations are not defined well, and their resolution depends on how you present the situation to your GM, your relationships, the GM’s perception of the world, and the GM’s perception of your character. This can work well for experienced groups which already operate on a shared model of the world and naturally balance the impact of different characters. In less experienced groups, this can lead either to players trying things which are absurd from the GM’s point of view, or, which is far worse, to players not even considering options which should be available to them. Rules-heavy systems try to fix this by defining most interactions in detail, but at the cost of accessibility. A proper rules-heavy system takes hundreds of A4 pages to describe everything, and inexperienced people rarely have the motivation to go through all of it. Another tradeoff is how much we can actually afford to put into the rules. Roleplaying games take place in worlds as complex as our own. A proper description of all the rules needed to establish a hard narrative boundary already takes tens of pages, which is around how much people are willing to read before playing a game. Calculations in current rules-heavy systems are already too difficult in places. This gives game designers a very limited complexity budget. Some games spend it on one well-detailed system. Others spread it across many different places. But this constraint is felt in every TTRPG. This ties into the tension between being a good tabletop game and being a good roleplaying game. How much effort and complexity should be spent on making the game balanced, interesting, and free of degenerate strategies? A really good game should have both. An average game barely has the resources to do one properly. One trap this approach must avoid is simulationism. Game mechanics should not exist for the sake of replicating reality. They exist to make a good game and should be evaluated based on that. Another trap is sticking to the rules too hard. The GM absolutely should have options to override things. A roleplaying game is a simulation of life by default. However, we have huge flexibility in deciding which parts we want to simulate and how. These problems became worse in the last decade. TTRPGs were never very ergonomic to play. You have to convince around five people to spend four to six hours of their day at the same time and, traditionally, in the same location. You need a good table and a collection of supplies. The extra effort spent by everyone may be valuable by itself, but TTRPGs usually load most of that effort onto the GM. Society changed, and more interactions moved into digital spaces. This brought us VTTs: programs which can replace the physical table. They make it easier to play online, but technically they are not great. They are heavy, laggy, and have poor device support. Additionally, all major TTRPG systems are still designed to be played on a physical table and are only clumsily translated into digital space. All of this creates a subpar experience, which again limits the potential of the hobby. Independently of this project, I believe we will inevitably arrive at games which are: I see this direction as inevitable. The details, however, can differ significantly. On the default path, there is a good chance this future will be a locked-down corporate platform, squeezing as much as possible from users and controlling content distribution paths. But if I can predict it, I can try to build something better and earlier. To set the rules for the next age, we need: I envision it working both for people sitting around a table and using their phones to connect, and for a group playing through Discord on laptops and 4K screens, or for anything else in between. Content should be supplied from different sources and different authors. Rust is a good, performant choice and runs everywhere. Its ecosystem is mature enough in most important places, including peer-to-peer networking and game engines. The UI ecosystem is still in somewhat rough shape, but I think it is decent enough and progressing. The engine itself should be able to: The current prototype accepts changes to the world only in the form of actions. Each action has a fixed in-game time. By recalculating those actions, every client arrives at the same world state. Conflicting actions should simply prevent the world from progressing in time until they are resolved by the players. The randomness of these actions can be trust-based. Available information should depend on the character. A warrior looking at a sword can see its type and material in detail. A wizard can see whether the same sword is enchanted, but cannot say which steel it was made from. The same principle should apply to enemies and other parts of the world. Presenting information from the character’s point of view helps roleplaying. Instead of acting on meta-information, the player immediately sees what their character knows. Does the character know that trolls are weak to fire? A player using knowledge like this when the character is not aware of it is pretty close to cheating. On the other hand, an experienced character definitely should be aware of it. But does the player know they can use fire in this specific situation? Do they need to ask the GM, or perhaps roll dice to deduce it? Immediately presenting the player with this information is much better. There should still be plenty of GM judgement. The GM should have narrative actions for editing most things, changing difficulties, and adjusting the world as needed. The game should include advanced simulation of biology. There should be some simulation of behaviour. An NPC guard left in a “watch wall” state should automatically look around, smoke, sing, and have a small chance to fall asleep. The system should support electronic dice. A number of electronic dice projects already exist, and rolling dice is half the fun. There should be a content-sharing platform. It should include everything from random monsters to complete worlds and rulesets, with the ability to easily download content and synchronize it between players in a group. While I want Hallowshard to support different worlds, I still need one world built for my main system. Worldbuilding is hard, but I do not think I will have the privilege of licensing one of the existing great worlds on acceptable terms. Fantasy is already decided. The question is how to make it interesting. My idea so far is: Gods are not poorly defined beings from other dimensions. They are powerful consciousnesses split into hallowshards. These hallowshards contain parts of the consciousness. They are capable of acting independently, but should eventually synchronize with each other. Otherwise, they face problems up to splitting into two different consciousnesses. Gods are still capable of immensely affecting the real world, but they are also interactable and destructible. This vision is detailed and future-looking. How sure am I of it? I am convinced enough to see something along these lines as inevitable. But the only way to be really sure is to try to build such a system, keep an open mind, remain flexible in my decisions, and hope that something amazing emerges in the end. In a world where I succeed, I may look back on this vision and see parts of it which were naive or foolish. But the core values should stand the test of time.Motivation
How I See TTRPGs
Rules-Light and Rules-Heavy Games
The Complexity Budget
What to Simulate
The Digital-Age Problem
The Way Forward
What We Need for the Next Age
Technical Foundation
Actions and World State
Features I Definitely Want
Character-Dependent Information
GM Judgement
Advanced Biology
Simulated Behaviour
Electronic Dice
Content Sharing
World
Conclusion