Our 1 Page RPG - Trails Less Traveled - Lessons Learned

We recently participated in the 2023 One-Page RPG jam and wanted to share our entry. For it, we build “Trails Less Traveled” a system/location-agnostic survival game. It’s built to be run alone, but can also be dropped into an existing system to add some survival and travel mechanics. I wanted to put down some notes on my experience in this jam, and hopefully provide some tips for those doing something similar or working on next year’s jam.

You’re free to check it out here. Bear in mind, being a one-page game means its rules are light by definition, so don’t expect lots of details. If you’re interested in a little bit more on the process of creating such a condensed game, then read on.

The Challenge of Constraint

The biggest challenge of the one-page jam is also what makes it so appealing, you only need to come up with a page of content. On one hand, that forces you to only create as much as needed, and that reduces how much you can create. Building elaborate rulesets and coming up with ideas for different scenarios just won’t work with this limited real estate.

On the other hand, that constraint can also become difficult to work around. You’re limited in how much space you have, so you have to be picky with what you come up with. I ended up having to cut some of my planned content as it just didn’t fit on the page.

Start With High-level gameplay

The first step is to come up with a high-level flow of what gameplay looks like. A couple of questions you want to answer here are:

• What setup does the Game Master (or is there even one) need to do before starting?
• How do players create characters?
• What does a typical “turn” look like for a player or the party? What’s the main game loop?
• Is there a win condition?
• What about a loss condition?
• Is there a concept of gold, items, collectibles, or other things the players acquire?

There might be more depending on your game, but these were the key questions I came up with writing down the flow of the game. Ideally, for a game this small you want to be able to answer each of these questions in only a few sentences. If you need half a page to describe character creation then you’re going to run out of space quickly.

Do a Rough Draft Of Rules

Once I had the flow of the game down I did a quick draft of the rules. I tried to answer all of the questions above and also tried to put myself in the place of a stranger reading them. Does it make sense, could someone play this without any extra outside help, or am I relying too much on my own prior knowledge to fill in the blanks? This can be tricky; it’s best to find someone else to give the rules a read and let you know if anything is confusing.

The goal here isn’t to have a perfect draft, but just to get the core of the rules down. I think at this point I had about 3 pages worth of rules, so I still had some work to do in condensing them down to fit within the constraints of the jam.

Playtest and Tweak Rules

Before I started cutting back on content I wanted to make sure that some of the numbers I came up with made sense and that the game was reasonably fun to play. This meant running through a few playtests of the game and seeing where things ended up.

During this, I realized that some of my initial values made the game too punishing and meant that players would die too quickly. I was able to tweak them a bit and get them to fit in a length and difficulty that felt more fair.

This step is going to be heavily specific to your game and how it’s played. My survival game required some tweaking, while a more narrative-heavy game that relies less on numbers might require less.

The great thing about a one-page game like this is that there is generally not too much to playtest. That means running through a few instances of the game was pretty quick, at least much more so than a full-featured TTRPG game.

Prune Back as Needed

Once I was happy with the gameplay I needed to spend some time going back and reworking the content to fit on the page. This can be a bit tricky depending on the scope of your game. I had about 1 - 1 ½ pages of content to cut which proved to be somewhat of a challenge.

In my case, reducing some wordy sentences and rewriting in a more concise style got me the majority of the way there. I also got creative with some of my formatting to reduce the space some of the tables took up.

Once again, this step is going to be game-specific. If you were careful at the beginning you shouldn’t have too much to do here and can probably get away with some of the formatting and rewriting I did.

If, however, you got too complex with the rules then you might have a bit more work ahead of you. If you’re pruning lots of rules then you should also go back and give the game another play test and get it in front of potential players. You don’t want to have pruned back so much that the game becomes confusing or unplayable.

Moving Forward

And there you have, a short overview of how we went about creating a one-page TTRPG. While one page sounds like it should be easy it’s deceptively difficult to cram an entire game worth playing into a single page. Hopefully, the game we’ve created is at least moderately fun, we’re looking forward to 2024 and participating in next year's jam! We learned a lot of lessons this time around, and are excited to put those into practice next time.