Survey Says…

I had met a surprising amount of people who wanted to start playing RPGs, but were intimidated. So, I surveyed my university to discern what barriers to entry most people experienced. At first I sat at a table at the entrance to the student’s covered eating area, then I moved the table to the student union, then I set up an online survey and circulated it through Facebook. The results were fascinating.

The Challenge

After pouring over my survey results, I got together with a classmate, Sophia Miller, and started brainstorming solutions. Our key insights were clear, the equipment needed to be accessible, the math needed to be simple, and the rules needed to fit in a single volume. We just needed to decide how.

Playtests!

Playtests!

Playtests!

Averaging four playtests a week for about a year, our team played through more than 100 playtests with deliberately diverse groups of users. The three axis we tested for most consistently were age, level of RPG familiarity, and gender. It’s not a secret that RPGs are a very male dominated hobby and I wanted to understand that divide better.

A group of people playing Night Side together.

Key Takeaways and Future Projects

My User Research found an untapped market of people who would be playing tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons who are turned away due to various barriers to entry. There is clear need for games that are easy for a first time player to enjoy.

Due to constraints, we focused on addressing the price, mathematic complexity, and mechanical complexity. There are other difficulties first time players mentioned that we could not address, due to the constraints of the project timeline.

Working with my team of designers throughout the project has been a valuable experience. During this process, we acknowledged the project’s limitations, and chose to focus on the challenges we were best equipped to address. As the project evolved, we also discussed a future for Night Side and improvements we could make.

Thank you for reading!