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20
January
2026

An interesting post from Clayton discusses what he calls Dominant Mechanics: “Dominant Mechanics are rules that cannot co-exist in a system without monopolizing play and overriding other rules.” My favourite example of this would be skill checks in later editions of Dungeons and Dragons. This idea relates to one of my big complaints about 4E, where your characters various powers end up being the sum total of play.

Keying Dungeons

by Ramanan Sivaranjan on January 11, 2026

Tagged: osr advice design

I have written about keying dungeons in the past, when discussing Dwimmermount, and when talking about Deep Carbon Observatory. This topic seems to be in the news again, after Ben shared an enjoyable video of his dislike of Goodman Games’ house style for their modules.¹ DCC RPG is quite text heavy, and uses simple two column layouts reminiscent of old TSR modules. They are essentially the best version of an old TSR module. I love many of the DCC RPG adventures, but I don’t love all the walls of text. On the flip side, I am not a big fan of the Old School Essentials house style Ben advocates for either. I find the excessive bolded text and bullet points harder to parse than straight forwards sentences. I also think it’s much more enjoyable to read plain prose.

All the room keying hacks you see really aren’t necessary if your room keys are short and quick to read.
You should start room descriptions with the things players will notice right away. Don’t bury the lede.
You should cut anything extraneous. You could take the time to list out all the torture devices found in the torture room, but I would only bother if there is some value in letting the GM and players know about the particulars. A GM can likely ad-lib there is a rack and iron maiden if those things are simply there to provide colour.²

To me, there is more value in trying to write something short and evocative, than try and turn it into a deconstructed sandwich.

Orthopraxy has written a great blog post in response to Ben’s video, defending Goodman Games’ approach. ↩
Of course, once ad-libbed into existence, they become part of the fictional world, something players can take advantage of in play. ↩

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04
June
2022

Jason Tochi of 24XX fame wrote a great post a little while ago about what he calls the three layers of rules: social, fictional, and abstract. If you’re interested in game design it’s a great way to think about things, especially in more rules light games. Where do the unspoken rules go? Probably to the social and fictional layers. This post is in the news again as Jason shared a version included in the rules for his new game, Alight.

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31
May
2022

My friend Alex discusses Fuck You Design, an interesting response of sorts to my post about negative space in RPGs. His post in turn has me wanting to write more myself. I love simple systems, so I am always looking for a good minimalist one. The problem is so many miss the mark. It takes a lot of care to make one that isn’t just you filling in all the holes with D&D as you remember it. Carcosa is a good setting in my mind despite missing a lot of details because what’s there is enough to help get you the rest of the way. Some adventures lean so far into terseness you run them and realize you are doing all the work. OD&D doesn’t tell you what a helmet does, but there is enough to the game you can house rule something coherent. If it didn’t tell you what armour did that would be way more annoying. Anyway, this is enough for now. Read the post, it’s great!

#design

Keying Dungeons