Abstract
Problem: What would a veteran CRPG designer do differently when designing a tabletop RPG, and what advantages and disadvantages does computer game experience bring to that process?
Approach: Tim Cain responds to a viewer question by systematically cataloguing the advantages and disadvantages his decades of CRPG development would give him if he sat down to design a pen-and-paper RPG.
Findings: Tabletop RPGs have massive structural advantages over CRPGs in human adjudication, variation cost, and creative player solutions — but CRPG designers carry habits around computational complexity, inventory tracking, and logical systems that don't translate well to human players. The key is designing for human strengths rather than around computer strengths.
Key insight: The cheapest thing in tabletop design is variation — environments, creatures, classes — because a human GM handles complexity that would require enormous engineering effort in a computer game. Lean into that strength.
The Question
A viewer named All Lucky Seven asked: "Would you like to write a pen-and-paper RPG? Considering your knowledge of computer game design, how would you approach it? What do you think you would make differently from someone who's never done a CRPG?"
Tim admits he's thought about it off and on but never seriously. The question intrigued him because the design spaces are genuinely different, and he believes his CRPG experience gives him both significant advantages and notable disadvantages.
Advantages From CRPG Experience
A Library of Settings and Mechanics
Tim has multiple books full of settings and stories that would work great in a tabletop RPG. He also has ideas for system mechanics originally conceived for CRPGs that would translate well to tabletop — though not all of them.
Humans Are Better Adjudicators Than Computers
Both tabletop and computer RPGs are collections of rules, but humans excel at handling edge cases, interpreting intent versus literal wording, and — crucially — prioritizing fun over rigid rule-following. Different GMs do this differently (which is why players prefer certain GMs), but in general, human adjudication edges out computer adjudication in most situations.
Dynamic NPC Interaction
In current computer games, NPC dialogue is fixed — once you exhaust a dialogue tree, you're done. A human GM can vary dialogue, respond to individual players, and create continuous interaction. Tim highlights the "patron" mechanic — a recurring NPC who gives advice, items, and loans — as something that's deeply fun precisely because a human drives it.
Clever Player Solutions
Tim has spent his entire career trying to enable clever solutions in CRPGs, using systemic rules rather than scripted events. But human GMs can go further: they can recognize when a player's solution falls outside any written rule but should work, and allow it. "If there's one thing I've learned about players," Tim says, "they will always think of things that you never in a billion years would have thought of." Tabletop games should be designed around this — rules should be loose enough for GM interpretation and edge cases.
Skipping the Boring Parts
Human GMs naturally know when things are getting boring and move forward. Computer games try to approximate this with fast travel (Fallout, Arcanum, and Temple of Elemental Evil use world map travel with random encounter drops), but a GM does it instinctively: "You're there, or you're not there because you ran into some bandits — boom, you're in the interesting part."
Variation Is Cheap
This is the biggest structural advantage. In a computer game, varying creature colors, textures, dialogues, and environments requires enormous upfront work that may never be seen. In tabletop:
- Classes and subclasses can be as complex, simple, vague, or straightforward as you want — a human adjudicates them, and players only need to know their own class.
- Creature variation is trivial: dragons come in different sizes, colors, alignments, with different breath weapons, intelligence levels, and spellcasting abilities — all built on general rules you've already established.
- Environment variation is the cheapest of all. "I can just say you're in a snowy area." A computer game needs new art, props, textures, footstep code for snow versus brick versus wet brick. Tabletop games should lean hard into this strength.
Knowing What Players Actually Want
After decades of game development, Tim has learned that "what people like and what they say they like aren't always the same thing." He believes he could make a TTRPG people would enjoy even though no one has asked for it — a gut-level designer instinct rather than a programmerly one.
Disadvantages From CRPG Experience
Thinking in Computational Complexity
Tim naturally thinks about mechanics in terms of what's easy for a computer to calculate — which is very different from what's easy for a human. Things that are trivial for computers but painful for humans at the table:
- Tracking bonus/penalty sources: Attack bonuses from attributes, skills, perks, flaws, items — a computer was made for this; a human doing it by hand is miserable.
- Inventory management: Lots of inventory slots, encumbrance by weight, sorting and searching. Tim tells a story of GMing a session where the party nearly wiped to fire giants, several members died, and afterward one surviving player noticed he'd had a Potion of Fire Giant Control the whole time. "I seriously thought the other player was going to kill him."
- Ammo tracking: Different ammo types, stacking, varying magazine sizes, explosive vs. armor-piercing, losing bullets when ejecting a non-empty magazine — trivial for a computer, a nightmare of bookkeeping for players.
Humans Need Categories, Not Numbers
Computers work in continuous numerical ranges. Humans work in discrete categories: light/medium/heavy, low/middle/high, easy/medium/hard. Tim references the cognitive limit of roughly 7–11 discrete items a person can track. Tabletop design must respect this by collapsing numerical complexity into manageable categories.
Randomness Perception
People accept bad luck from dice and cards far more readily than from a computer's random number generator. Three bad rolls in a row at a table get a shrug; three bad results from a computer get accusations of a broken RNG. People are emotional, not logical — "even when they pretend they're being reasonable." Tim notes this will be hard for him to shift, since his career has been building completely logical computer GMs, but tabletop rules must be designed for illogical humans who think they're logical.
On Innovation and Novelty
Tim raises a concern he has with both tabletop and computer games: so much has already been done. He's been asked for decades — by publishers, VPs, fellow designers — "What's your hook? Where's the innovation?" But he's learned this mostly doesn't matter. Players don't care about novelty as much as the industry thinks. "If I had listened to those people, would I have even made Fallout? People would have just gone, 'Why? We already have Wasteland.'"
The Tim Cain TTRPG
Tim can't say exactly what he'd make from his books of ideas — the range is too wide. But he offers one honest prediction:
"If I made a Tim Cain tabletop RPG, I think it would be really, really fun — but probably not well balanced."
He asks: would that be something you'd like? Going in, he'd just accept that's probably what it would be.
References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NorMGww9CA