What is your backstory? 

I’m René-Pier, but everyone calls me RP, and I’m a tabletop game designer.  I run a little Canadian based RPG studio called Fari RPGs, and people may know me from games like Breathless, Firelights, Stoneburner, and, most recently, Songs and Sagas. 

I’ve been doing that for around 3 years now, but I initially did not get my start in game design.  I’m a software engineer by day, and when I started getting into this hobby, I was trying to play with my friends online, and there weren’t any virtual tabletops that I liked, so I decided to build my own.  Through doing that, I connected with some people online, and, over the years, continued to build that virtual tabletop and forked into game design and game publishing, as a whole. 

How did you start playing tabletop RPGs?  And do you have a single favorite story about your experiences? 

The way I got started was a bit rocky.  I was about 12 or 13 years old, in secondary school or high school.  I joined this group that was playing D&D during lunch.  I got so excited; I went down to the city and bought dice and got miniatures and read the books and all that, then we played the first session, and one of the other players asked if he could “kill RP’s character and steal all of his stuff.”

We were like… level one characters, and the GM allowed it.  He rolled, he killed my character, and I never touched the hobby for like 15 years.  I was like… this isn’t fun. 

Wow!  I’m sorry… that is a rough way to start into this!  How did you end up wanting to get back in later? 

I had a friend who asked about playing tabletop role-playing games with friends, and I asked if it was the same thing as D&D.  He was like… there are other games.

So, I read the Fate role-playing game by Evil Hat, and I fell in love.  This can actually be fun!  It seemed fun.  I always felt like games like D&D were too crunchy for my tastes, and the concept of fate and aspects and fiction first game really felt like storytelling as a group.  

I bought Fate Accelerated and Fate Core and started playing every two weeks with my friends at some Irish pub in Montreal.  I’ve been playing ever since.  It was a rough start, but I’ve healed.

You make a lot of different systems that you’ve described before as “rules bright” – can you explain what “rules bright” means?

To me, when a designer makes a game, they need to think about how they can reinforce the themes of the game.  

There are a ton of people who like D&D as it is today, and that’s amazing, but if you try to take the rules of D&D and apply it to a genre that isn’t about dungeons and slaying dragons and looting stuff and fighting and becoming heroes, then the mechanics will not be built to reinforce the other themes.  With sci-fi and horror, they wouldn’t be reinforcing sci-fi and horror. If you look at Mothership or Alien RPG, there are mechanics in there to reinforce horror, and they work wonderfully.

With mechanics mismatch, there will be a big discrepancy between the rules of the game and how you’re actually playing it. 

There are rules-lite games, there are crunchy games, but those variables are not as important as how the rules can be clever and reinforce the game’s themes and setting. 

The layout is the same.  If the layout can help reinforce the theme of the game, it becomes one cohesive piece.

Your game, Breathless, does a really good job building tension and intentionally coming up to action points.  It makes me think of that – it’s a well defined and intentional mechanic.

Yeah, with Breathless, in particular, if you look at all the zombie related media out there, you see a bunch of tropes.  If you take those tropes and mechanize them, then you’re able to actually get a zombie movie but as a game.  There are so many zombie movies and games where they lose ammunition and other items, they get tired… and eventually they have to catch their breath.   When they do so, something worse happens!  There’s always another zombie banging on the door and they need to survive once again. 

If you’re able to mechanize those tropes, it makes it more fun. 

How do you think “rules bright” systems would be particularly useful or engaging to young or new players?

I think it will act as a hook.  If you take a d20 game where you roll to beat a number and add modifiers and then you have weapons and that’s it and you play a Fallout inspired game with it or a slice of life cafe management game with it or you play Dungeons & Dragons with it, eventually, everything kind of stays the same.  

I think it would be easy for someone to get bored if the setting is not entirely there to hook them in. After a couple of games, you just get tired of it, and you lose people who would like to invest more time and passion into this hobby but who just see everything as rolling a d20 or a d6, and  it’s all generic. 

However, if you’re on the edge of your seat waiting to see where the mechanics will take you and have cleverly designed rules, they’re more likely to come back. 

For example, in Mothership, it has this fun mechanic where, if your character goes to 0 hp, you make a death save roll, but you’ve got to do it inside an opaque glass, so you don’t know if your character is in good shape or not.  Someone has to come over and look under the glass to see if you’re doing OK.  That tension is so fun!

I’ve tried out a lot of different systems on my kid through TTRPGkids, and figuring out the mechanics to find the little nuggets and seeing how it all fits together… It is so satisfying.  I definitely agree with what you’re saying. 

It’s true, when you understand the underbelly of the system and get to what makes it click is great.  

In Songs & Sagas, it feels like OSR where you roll a d20 and try to beat a target, but you also have a deck of cards where you keep some in your hand and that ends up being really important.  Red cards are good and black cards are bad, and every time you take a card, you have to pick a red over a black one if given a choice, and you put discarded cards in the deck.  That means that over time, the probability of the deck having more black cards shifts, so it encourages you to play red cards. The odds will stack against you if you’re hoarding red cards. 

Mechanics like that are super fun to design.  They are tricky to design, but they’re fun. 

What advice do you have for youth or new creators to make their own games?

Don’t worry about making the perfect game.  It’s not going to happen.  No game out there is the perfect game.  It is about finishing it so that you can learn and add more to your toolbelt over time. To finish something, you may also need to reduce the scope and make it smaller. 

My tips would be to first try to think of a cool setting.  Like… take two video games or two books and merge them together to make something that seems fun.  

Then, there are open licensed games out there where you can take the game, change the text and make it into a new game.  Lasers & Feelings by John Harper or Honey Heist by Grant Howitt are super easy to hack.  You can change literally two words and a couple elements in the rolling tables, and you’ve just designed your first game. 

It’s a single page, it doesn’t have to be complicated, and it is done. 

From that, you learn something and you can get started again using another SRD or open license document.  You can make something a bit bigger and a bit more complicated.  Add some more elements that you come up with yourself.  You’ve finished that first game, so you’re a game designer. It’s as simple as that.

Yes!  There is such a learning curve, and just getting it out there will get you past a lot of those barriers. 

There are many barriers, but you’re not going to learn everything from the get-go.  I’m still learning things!  During my first Kickstarter, I realized that I didn’t use the proper tone of black throughout the document, and the printer wouldn’t print the book because of it, so I was like… oh no  I need to change everything!

It’s normal, and setting yourself up for success by reducing the scope will help you, for sure.

Do you have any final shoutouts before we sign off? 

I would say, to kind of build on your previous question, there are a lot of game jams out there; I run a few throughout the year. Trying to find one, like the one-page RPG jam in August, that’s a fantastic starter.  Right now, we’re doing a jam around Songs & Sagas; it’s maybe a bit late to join when this goes out, but joining jams like that can really help.  Find an open game license, join a jam, and release your game. 

If what I’ve talked about seems interesting, there’s FariRPG.com that has a bunch of games.  There’s a lot of free games there; I really believe in accessibility, so I try to reduce the price of my games as much as I can to bring more people into the hobby.  

In terms of game design, I also have a YouTube channel, Fairy RPG, where there are tutorials for learning how to do game design and layouts.  I also release free templates for Canva and Google Docs and Affinity Publisher to help get people started with this because there are so many barriers… I try to crush a few of them for people. 

Thank you very much for all that you’ve done and for being part of the interview!

Thank you for inviting me!  It’s been super fun. 

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