This is it. Our fiftieth episode marks the end of our long conversation about designing tabletop RPGs (and everything else we spilled over into). This episode addresses audience questions, the past, and the future. What do you do when you're done and the thing you've been working on leaves the workshop? Let's talk about it.

You need funding. You might give your game away for free, but you didn't make it for free. Your time and work have value. How does that translate to cost and how does your product help fund itself and the next thing you want to make? Check out the full show notes for a link to Nathan's "Notes on Independent Publishing," too!

Let's talk about some of the software that we—Nathan and Will—use for production purposes like layout and graphic design. More importantly, let's talk about how that impacts our game designs and workflow across the board.

As you're proceeding into production of your game, ask yourself: What can I do myself? When should I ask for help? What would I say to externalize my vision to a hire? What you do yourself, what you expand your skills to accomplish, and when you hire experts — these are parts of the spheres of production. Support us on Patreon and help future episodes of the show come into being!

What form does your RPG take? Is it a book? A deck of cards? A poster or mousepad or business card? Are you sure? Design Games is made possible by our supporters at Patreon, where you can back Nathan and Will, too. Every dollar helps.

Let's talk about another means of delivering random results and packaging information for players in your tabletop roleplaying and story games: cards.

Look around. Get your bearings. Take a look back at what's working and what you've learned, then move forward with the knowledge. That's what we're doing, this time.

You've got a lot of notes, you've got rules and systems, maybe you've been writing for yourself. How do you start writing all of that out for other people in addition to yourself? Let's talk.

Say a thing. Say it again. A design isn’t right the first time, so we revise and restate and iterate. Let’s talk about that.

Do you know about the Game Chef design competition? This time we talk about our experiences with Game Chef and what we know of its history and influence on games and designers.

(Episode forty?! Ye gads.) Here we explore more notions on the topic of your early playtests, and how to get information out of them, make sense of some of it, and prepare for revisions to your design.

We’ve reach that time. Let’s talk about playtesting your design—specifically, how to prep and participate in the early playtests of your RPG.

We set out to talk about designing games to be ready for hacking and remixing by the end user, but first a stopover at a discussion of universal systems, too. Let it go, Will.

Let’s talk about how a game moves, functions, and adapts. Let’s talk about affordances.

Some game designs are highly visual. When does that work happen? How early is too early to think about art and a visual arrangement of ideas? We talk it out.

This time, we tackle a great listener-submitted topic about how to makes risk and challenges feel dramatic and satisfying in your RPG designs — and how to help players think about risk and challenge in play.

Another great listener topic, another episode wrestling with said topic. This time: we talk about designs involving Player vs Player and Player vs Environment mechanics and, y'know, some of what that means.

Here we attempt to tackle another great question from the G+ community. This one’s about designing with purpose and how purpose can align with (or away from) content, context, vision, and more.

We’ve talked a lot already about design steps and techniques, thoughts and approaches. You’ve got vision and notes and notions. Now let’s talk about bringing it all together.

What even is a playstorm? We think we know and we dive into the answer in this episode, to consider what makes playstorming different from playtesting, what it’s for, and when we do it.