Designing Brave the Dreamer #2: Principles of a Dream

Welcome to Part 2 of a design diary series about my tabletop role-playing game Brave the Dreamer. If you haven’t already, you can read Part 1 here!

This entry is about the design principles that went into creating Brave the Dreamer’s gameplay and prompts.

A Case Study in Specificity

When you were young, at that tender, malleable age, you tasted the Dream.

Maybe it was swords and spellbooks, angels and demons, vampires and werewolves, the summer court and the winter.

This is how the very first draft of Brave the Dreamer started. In trying to cover all my speculative genre bases—fantasy, sci-fi, and horror—I left the Dream nebulous and undefined.

Maybe it was pulsing lasers and superhuman intelligences, faster-than-light travel, wastelands and outriders, neon lights and hazy cityscapes.

I had thought this would make for a more accessible gaming experience, something that would celebrate and invite whatever players were bringing. The text later suggests: “Some remember [the Dream] like a work of fiction. Others, like a strange sojourn. Still others, like an intimate relationship.” The game goes on to emphasize the validity of any of these interpretations by saying that the Dream was all of these things, and more.

Because my game was heavily inspired by I Saw the TV Glow, if players wanted to tell a story about searching for their true selves in the fictional canon of a media universe, I wanted to be here for that. If they wanted to locate said universe outside of the fantasy genre, in gothic horror or cyberpunk or paranormal mystery, I wanted to be here for that, too.

But in playtest, I found that players tended to gravitate towards the common, low-friction interpretation of the Dream as an alternate world their characters had visited, and a fantasy world at that. Moreover, later gameplay prompts that tried to give space for the “media universe” interpretation caused confusion among players, who weren’t sure where/when their characters were located when they were answering.

Pre-production (not yet released to the public) version of a card that affirms the Dream is an alternate world.

Hearing game-designer friend Kona express the sentiment that games with specific narrative stances tended to be more memorable for her, and finding myself in agreement, I decided to establish that the Dream was indeed an alternate world the player characters had visited and returned from prior to the beginning of Act One.

My takeaway? Creating a specific, memorable narrative experience for players will sometimes mean closing off certain paths. But I’m making an intentional decision to prioritize clarity over confusion, and choosing specificity in certain places doesn’t prevent me from offering flexibility in others.

Specificity in Prompts

While the design principle to “take specific narrative stances” only emerged for me in those terms after my conversation with Kona, it was already a lively undercurrent in Brave the Dreamer as a whole.

As a Descended from the Queen game, Brave the Dreamer’s gameplay consists primarily of reading and answering written prompts. Therefore, the quality of the prompts hugely influences the gameplay experience. Prompts—whether they feature as a core part of gameplay or are more limited to sections like character/bond generation—are common in TTRPGs, especially those that rely on theater of the mind. But I’ve read (and played) many games that unfortunately fail to present compelling prompts, often because they are too generalized.

“what hard choices must you make” -- no. tell me who doesn't make it. tell me which of my life support systems i have to turn off. or if it’s about my brave face, tell me what breaks inside me.

Shing Yin Khor is the designer of several games, including A Mending, shown here.

When designing Brave the Dreamer’s prompts, I was building off some practice from Shing Yin Khor’s Designing Keepsake Games workshop. Shing offered the following sequence to consider when writing prompts:

1. What is the game about?
2. What is the feeling you want to incite/embed/deliver?
3. Why?
4. Playtest.¹

They also highlighted this talk that For the Queen designer Alex Roberts gave about writing good prompts. TL;DW: A good prompt will focus on the present, convey interesting information, leave an interesting gap in that information, and make the question itself more specific and complicated. For example, this prompt from For the Queen:

• You sometimes think you might be the Queen’s favorite. (interesting info about character)

• Why? (missing info)

• And why does that worry you? (specific/complicated)

It’s my hope that Brave the Dreamer’s prompts are specific and complicated enough to foment specific, complicated feelings in the players. (In fact, an ongoing risk is they may be too complicated!²) In Act One, I’m trying to get at how the Dream enthralls its visitors, but to undercut that amazement and glamor with fear, insecurity, and loneliness. The sense of nostalgia and belonging in the Forum is influenced by my time on early-2000’s oekaki BBSes. Meanwhile, Act Two is all about accepting, forgiving, and releasing³; and Act Three… well… you’ll see.

(I’m not just being coy here. Act Three, taking the prompt-choice-duos of Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year but making them dichotomous, is designed so players can explore whatever narrative feels right for their characters.)

A few more pieces of advice that were kicking around my head while writing prompts:

• I have mixed feelings on his project nowadays, but I remember something I’d heard Brandon Stanton, the photographer/interviewer behind Humans of New York, say during an event many years ago, re: his process of facilitating intimacy with a stranger on the street. On top of taking the interviewee’s response to his generic opening question and complicating it—e.g., if he asked “What’s one piece of advice you’d give?” and they replied “Be optimistic,” he’d say, “Tell me about a time you struggled to be optimistic”—he’d use superlatives (words like “most,” “best,” “least”) to push the interviewee to more intense answers: “Tell me about the time you most struggled to be optimistic.” I can’t find a public recording of him speaking to this exactly, but the idea of employing superlatives to ask better questions has stuck with me ever since.

• An idea that comes from game design theory is using verbs to define the game’s core mechanics. (I wanna shout-out the recent video game Tactical Breach Wizards for deeply understanding its verb is Breach and being oh-so-very enjoyable for it.) I think it’s equally valid to design a TTRPG for a verb instead of or in addition to a feeling, and one paradigm may work where the other does not. Although my own creative work has historically proceeded from feelings first, I found the verb paradigm helpful for further conceptualizing Brave the Dreamer, writing marketing copy, etc.

Screenshot of a rumination I posted to game jam chat.

Structure Is Safety

There is a saying among parent-types: instead of asking a child what veggies they want to eat, ask them whether they want broccoli or carrots.

Over the past year, I could’ve done with someone asking me the same. A combination of stress and other factors were making it nearly impossible to decide simple matters like what to eat, let alone devise a snazzy backstory for a potential TTRPG character. Generative creativity—the ability to come up with ideas when faced with a blank page—felt even more out of reach than usual.

At my last job, an ethos that emerged among my team was “structure is safety.” This phrase referred to our shared belief that written processes helped folks on the team feel more secure and less unmoored when working with edge cases or clients’ intense emotions. Wherever we anticipated someone might encounter a “blank page,” we tried our best to make sure it was pre-filled-in with something. The broccoli vs. carrots question is a version of the same idea; instead of asking the child to come up with next steps from scratch, you’re giving them something theoretically easier—a choice between A or B.

Not to infantilize my friends and players, but I’ve since carried “structure is safety” into the rest of my life, and it shows up in Brave the Dreamer.

In the first draft, players were asked to define the Dream by answering, as it came to them, “How do you remember the Dream?” I had imagined the earlier allusions to speculative genre tropes would offer some starting points, and the answers would simply flow spontaneously. In playtest, though, players were hesitant. I hadn’t given them “A or B”—I’d given them a huge field of wildly disparate choices, as seen in the screenshot at the beginning of this post. And players were largely reluctant to strike out and potentially step on toes, especially if they were new to TTRPGs or each other.

Screenshot from the Story Synth (online) version of Brave the Dreamer.

That’s why in the released version of the game, I included questions about specific experiences like a powerful artifact or a breathtaking view to help define the Dream, and gave players a short menu of responses to choose from. In other words, instead of asking “how do you remember the Dream,” I said “here are four ways you might remember a specific aspect of it; pick one or make up your own”—building in room for flexibility if my phrases didn’t inspire. (Players were then asked to describe how interacting with that breathtaking view or etc. changed them, deepening the character’s connection to the world.) At a playtester’s excellent suggestion, I also adopted the “word cloud” mechanic from Caro Asercion’s i’m sorry did you say street magic to help players collaboratively decide on a few tonal/aesthetic touchpoints beforehand. In addition to providing the “structure” of 48 pregenerated adjectives, this mechanic helped players align and cohere their mental images of the Dream.⁴

To Cringe or Not to Cringe

In Part 1, I wrote about the influence of I Saw the TV Glow on Brave the Dreamer, and about one scene in particular where the main character revisits their teenage obsession and feels disappointed at what they find. I connected this to my own experience revisiting an online game that had been a fixture of my teenage years.

While I don’t think either I or the character had a reaction strong enough to be called cringe, there’s been a lot of Discourse about cringe in the last few years, spurred by Gen Z memes like “I am cringe, but I am free” or “don’t kill the part of you that’s cringe, kill the part that cringes.” Honestly, teenage me could have used that pep talk twenty years ago, since I was existentially terrified of being labeled an “attention whore.” (I’d say the kids are all right these days, but the existence of the term “pick-me girl” tells me some things haven’t changed.)

Playing into the retrospective cringe of the Dream, the first draft of Brave the Dreamer had questions like the following:

Fortunately, my first playtest group (of fellow game jammers) was an emotionally secure group overall. They picked up on this undercurrent of cringe and told a story about lovingly embracing the cringiest parts of their characters. It was truly a privilege to witness. However, that playtest solidified for me that I wasn’t actually interested in making a game about cringe.

I Saw the TV Glow is a film about the choice between living into the authenticity of one’s transness vs. forever remaining a dysphoric egg. The film makes the correct choice obvious, but it also makes both options a horror. In Brave the Dreamer, I didn’t want there to be an obviously correct choice, and I wanted both options to be joyful. So in later drafts, I nixed the prompts that encouraged self-consciousness and embarrassment about the Dream (a “running away from”) to instead make them about compelling aspects of the Present (a “running toward”)—awakening, agency, responsibility, kindness, self-acceptance.

These aspects don’t make for a big, barnburning set piece. They are small, personal stakes compared to the enthralling glamor of the Dream. To find the Present compelling, players have to choose to find it compelling; it requires active effort, as hope requires active effort. In this way, Brave the Dreamer is hopepunk: it insists that the small, incremental practices of Act Two are as narrative-worthy, as revolutionary, as the big escapist fantasies of Act One—even as said fantasies also represent living into one’s fullest authenticity.⁵

Actors Teo Yoo and Greta Lee in Past Lives.

I found the second-closest touchstone for Brave the Dreamer might be Celine Song’s film Past Lives—another recent A24 masterpiece. Past Lives is a quiet, spacious film, beautifully performed, and one I discussed at length with several Asian American women in my life. One of the ideas it raises is that while this may not be the life we imagined we’d be living, it can be the one we’ve chosen for ourselves—and it can be heartbreaking, but also powerful and freeing, to lay to rest the paths we didn’t take. If I’ve done my job, Brave the Dreamer lets players tell that story, too.

The Personal Is Political

A final note here is that all art is political, and Brave the Dreamer is no different.

One pitfall I wanted to avoid when making a game about a portal world was the Narnia-esque white savior fantasy of the outsiders becoming that world’s monarchs. I don’t know if I’ve fully succeeded, but it should hopefully be clear from the text that the player characters arrive to a world that existed before them and will exist after them, and their experiences are transformative for themselves but don’t involve dominating or out-experting others in the world of the Dream. Similarly, it was clear to me that if I was offering players pregenerated options for “a powerful artifact” they might have encountered in the Dream, there would not be any weapons in that list. In general, I’ve tried my best to push the options at least a smidge beyond the most well-trodden fantasy genre tropes. (Players of Cyan Worlds’s Riven may notice an easter egg, though!)

Prioritizing player safety over the game is also a political decision and one that I hope Brave the Dreamer provides plenty of structure to facilitate. I include content warnings in all appropriate locations, and I’m once again indebted to i’m sorry did you say street magic for that game’s thoughtful integration of safety mechanics into gameplay via the provision of scripts that players can read aloud, which is reproduced almost whole cloth in Brave the Dreamer.

More to Come

This is the second entry in a series of design diaries:

• Part 1: Shoulders of giants

• Part 2: Principles of a Dream

• Part 3: Playing well with others

I’ll be tackling the topics of playtesting and designing for production in future entries. In the meantime, you can check out Brave the Dreamer below:

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1. While I fell short of making a full game in that workshop, I did make several one-sentence games (and, later, a weird circuitboard art piece). Making microgames was excellent practice for this loop. ↩

2. The prompts, not the feelings, but not not the feelings… ↩

3. Playtester comment: “I had to pause to process real life.” 😭 Yeah. The feelings are real. I’m breezing over the several years of concerted internal work and shadow excavation I did in order to earnestly make a game about these things. Suffice it to say there was a lot, and too much to connote with a single touchstone! ↩

4. In For the Queen this is accomplished by having a set of queen portraits that players can collectively choose from, but I felt that wouldn’t work in this game as the Dream would resist visual depiction. (Maybe I would feel differently if I had more artist collaborators?) And coming up the 48 adjectives was a fun exercise all on its own, but I also retooled this mechanic and significantly reduced that list for the upcoming card-based version of the game. I’ll talk more about redesigning for printed cards in a future post. ↩

5. I Saw the TV Glow is a deeply compassionate film that resonated intensely with trans audiences; its most popular review on Letterboxd is a trans woman’s coming-out post. With Brave the Dreamer, I hope not to invalidate the experience represented in that film, but to expand on and be in conversation with it. ↩