One of the things that I'm thinking about right now is how to get the right amount of content into my games. I'm pretty happy with Hammercalled, but Hammercalled has content generation, something that only works because it's a more complex system with a lot of moving parts.

For something like Genship Exiles or Jupiter Sovereign, what's the answer to how much content is too much or too little? There's probably a gray area here where you can have a certain leeway in betwen things, so it's not a question of numbers (no commandment of "Thou shalt have twenty weapons")

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Finding a Premise

Part of the problem here is that I'm not sure how to trust myself. I've been seriously trying to improve or make games for over a decade now. However, my first game was Shadowrun. I love Shadowrun. It's a shopping game. I'm willing to invest an effectively infinite amount of time into learning a roleplaying game, because it appeals to me a lot. I'll spend hours testing theories and coming up with interesting combinations. It works very well for me.

If you're a novice trying to make decisions, Shadowrun can be downright paralyzing. Eclipse Phase, one of my other favorite games, is the same way. When you're trying to pick a body from a couple dozen, some of which have very small but distinctive differences, then have dozens of options for how to customize that body going forward you hit a lot of slowdowns.

I'm going to spend a lot of time today thinking about five-year old homebrew I made for games shortly before I started Loreshaper Games and stopped dabbling in homebrew, since that was primarily an exercise in trying to add good content to good games to create something better than the sum of the parts.

And I'll be honest: the homebrew writings that kickstarted most of my later game design work were intended to add new gear and rules to Eclipse Phase and Degenesis (disclaimer: I now am a freelancer working on some upcoming Degenesis stuff).

Both Genship Exiles and Jupiter Sovereign are my attempts at "common people" games, not in the sense that they're dumbed down and simplified, but they're simply trying to be approachable.

So, here's some ideas that I've come to with regards to figuring out the extent of content I'll put into the game.

Keep Mechanics Meaningful

So the general rule is that anything that you add should be meaningful. One of the things that I found was really interesting with my Eclipse Phase homebrew stuff is that my work on morphs (bodies that characters can transfer their minds into) was probably as well received or more so than the work I did on gear, despite being a much shorter project that didn't keep my interest for quite as long. The gear I added was largely a projection of what could happen further in the system, plus an attempt to give more distinctive options to characters, but in between the stuff that had new niche roles you had a lot of things that made characters die or kept them alive. Neither of these are foreign concepts in Eclipse Phase.

The content that I got a lot of good feedback on were the morphs, in part because I made a custom system for creating them, but also in part because it offered new opportunities. For a game with a lot of different possible character bodies, Eclipse Phase depended a lot on seat-of-the-pants interpretations for how they differed in terms of things like movement, and the new rules that I focused on were intended to both codify those and add new opportunities for designing morphs (like quadrupeds).

I might be reading the response wrong (or inflating it, as the ego has a tendency of doing), but my gut feeling is that the reason why those rules were well-received despite being less well-developed comes from the notion that they were adding things that were uniquely interesting to people who had played the game.

Keep Settings Interesting

I'm not as eligible to talk about this because relatively little of my work has gone into the setting side of things. I actually consider myself a worldbuilder (though I make no claim to great quality), but I tend not to always make a whole lot of setting stuff for my games or my early homebrew.

As a result, I'm going to have to strictly look at other peoples' work here.

The Wayfarer's Guide to Eberron, one of Wizards of the Coast's supplements for the Fifth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons is what I consider to be one of the best examples. I'm relatively familiar with Eberron on a theoretical level (one of my favorite video games is Dungeons and Dragons Online, which is set in Eberron primarily), but I had never actually read a book detailing the setting.

The Wayfarer's Guide has a really good balance of information: it gives enough to be interesting, but not too much so that it gets oppressive. One of the strong points is that it brings up key characters, but doesn't define them into a pidgeon-hole. This leaves them free for interpretation but also actually has them become significant in stories, creating common plot elements.

The real strength of Eberron, however, is that it creates just enough history to be important (without wearing out its welcome), but also puts the player characters right in the center of that history, since the Last War is a very significant setting element and almost every event that comes up in play can be tied back to it.

Another game that does a really good job of this is Spire (affiliate link), which earned its place as my Game of the Year 2018–if that counts for anything–by having a really weird setting that kept me turning pages eagerly through the entire experience.

One of the things that Spire does really well is that it creates a setting, but one that is more fluid than Eberron. It lacks some of the crucial placement in history that Eberron has (though it does have a driving struggle between the drow and high elves), but makes up for it by being weird in a sort of fantasy-punk way; one gets the feeling that it is a time of change and growth, and there are enough players with skin in the game that it can go any way that you could imagine.

Degenesis: A Case Study

One of the games that I think is tremendous is Degenesis.

Back when I was a game reviewer, I used to avoid any game that clocked in above 400 pages, because it was almost always a sign that there was going to be a lot of mediocre content in it.

Degenesis: Rebirth clocks in at 715 pages. There's a lot of art, and it's somewhat generous with white-space, but that's still 300 pages into a giant warning sign for me.

Fortunately, I had reviewed an earlier version of Degenesis. While Degenesis: Rebirth is the definitive and objectively better edition, I had been impressed by the first version (which I had discovered because it was published in English by Posthuman Studios, creators of Eclipse Phase), and decided to check it out.

I think that Degenesis may be the game that best pulls off the content that it has, and some of it has to be the result of the design philosophy that went into it.

Today Marko, the brains behind Degenesis, said something in passing that reflects an ideological approach to game design that is important to consider as one of the best statements that can be made on this topic:

Loot... always needs to lead to something bigger. A secret of sorts, or it's just an award for players accidentally collecting benefits
I'm a firm believer in the principle of what you own is what defines you

I think that there's something to be said for that approach working well for Degenesis. It's a game with roughly 50/50 setting fluff and rules text by volume, and a good chunk of that rules text is tied to setting elements.

In Katharsys, the rulebook for Degenesis, there are 104 weapons (I might be off a couple in the count), and 52 are unique to a particular faction. This is not entirely by accident, and it leads into the notion that there's always going to be some meaning behind every mechanical representation in the rulebook.

Most of these unique items have blurbs that tie them to the factions that issue them, and tie into the role that they play both literally and symbolically.

Each faction has defined ranks and special abilities (and a new collection of special abilities is coming out tomorrow).

This creates a ton of content, but it is both filterable (you don't need to know everything about some random cult on the other side of the accessible world), and everything has a purpose in telling a story in the universe. This creates an antidote to the analysis paralysis that might otherwise crop up.

Likewise, Primal Punk, the setting book for Degenesis, touches on thirteen factions, six regions, and the history and unique elements of the setting. Each chapter has a very clear purpose, and it is almost never concerned with simply explaining geography and population counts.

This is what makes it so good.

Wrapping Up

In short, I think that the answer to how much content a game should have is simple: as much as can be meaningful.

If you have a profoundly beautiful setting, spend time exploring it. However, going into repeated detail, or simple mechanical digressions, is not going to provide a new insight to the universe or improve the player experience.