Week 1: Loops and Motivation
TTRPG Design 201 - Personal Curriculum
New Substack, Who Dis
LichLight Imprints is an indie soloRPG studio based in South Africa. I am a one lich operation who has had to rapidly learn how to do everything myself. I design games of cozy horror, academic dread, and strange roads. Stories meant to be explored alone, with cards, dice, prompts, and a notebook open at your elbow.
My first title shipped in 2025. In 2026 I’m rebuilding it from the ground up for a second edition and laying the foundation for future releases. The long-term goal is simple: build a small but deliberate publishing engine that makes fun long campaign solo games.
This Substack is the public design journal for that process.
I am documenting the theory, the experiments, the missteps, and the uncomfortable business questions alongside the actual craft of making games. If you are a solo developer, an aspiring one, or someone who enjoys peeking behind the curtain of how journaling RPGs are built, you are in the right place.
This is not a marketing newsletter, though I will talk about the games I am making a lot, as I try to level up my skills from the lessons I learn along the way. The curriculum you’re about to read about is part accountability, part obsession, and part infrastructure.
TTRPG Design 201
Last year a personal curriculum trend that swept through TikTok/Youtube. Productivity influencers were making videos about self-designed learning tracks, and for a moment it felt like everyone was building their own informal education. The trend cooled off soon enough, but for me it stuck because it wasn’t actually new. I’ve been a self-taught learner my whole life, out of necessity and preference. I’m neurodivergent, I don’t test well, and traditional classrooms have never been where my brain does its best work. So I’ve always created my own learning plans, little mini curriculums scattered across notebooks and projects.
This year, I decided to formalize what I was already doing. I built a quarterly system for 2026, and each quarter I’m committing to a 10-12 week structured learning track. I pull from video essays, academic papers, whatever related books I can get my hands on. It’s deliberate, time-boxed, and focused on something I actually want to get better at.
My first curriculum is TTRPG game design, with a specific focus on soloRPGs. Throughout this I will be continuing to work on the 2nd Edition of The Archivium, my dark academia / cozy horror journaling RPG and I will try my best to relate what I am learning in this curriculum with implementation examples from my own games. Will some of it go horribly? Of that I have no doubt. But if I get just 10% better along the way, I will call it a success.
I learn better when I’m trying to teach. Explaining what I’m discovering forces me to actually understand it, not just consume it. So I’m turning my curriculum into a series of “what I learned this week” posts. Consider it utterly self-indulgent, but maybe useful to you too.
Week 1: Loops and Motivation
The focus of this week is learning: What does the player do, in what order, and why do they keep going?
The Loop Is the Engine
A loop is the smallest repeatable cycle of play:
player acts → system responds → player interprets → player acts again.
System in this scenario can be the actual game system the mechanics are built on, the GM in a group game adjudicating the rules, or in the case with solo games it’s your prompts or oracles. The loop ripples and repeats at every scale, from a single die roll to a scene to a session to an entire campaign. If that cycle is weak, everything built on top of it feels weak.
I found a framework called MDA that adds language to this. It stands for Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics. Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek introduced it in 2004 as a way for designers and researchers to talk about how games actually produce experience.
Mechanics are the rules written on the page
Dynamics are what happens when a player interacts with those rules over time
Aesthetics are the emotional responses that emerge from those interactions
Most designers think mechanically because rules are concrete and writable, but players experience aesthetics first because that’s what they feel. The path goes: mechanics create dynamics, and dynamics produce emotion.
Here’s why this matters for solo games specifically. If your oracle table gives vague answers, the dynamic that unfolds is confusion. Over time the player stops trusting it. The aesthetic result is frustration.
If your oracle gives concrete but partial answers, the dynamic becomes investigation. The player builds hypotheses and tests them. The aesthetic that emerges is discovery.
In a group game, a GM can adjust tone on the fly, clarify ambiguity, redirect energy in real time. In a solo game, the rules and tables have to carry all that weight on their own. This is the thing we need to remember when designing oracles and prompts. Everything has to work without a person there to massage it. Because one of the biggest complaints I see from solo players is not knowing where to go next.
Momentum and the Problem of Extremes
Feedback loops shape how a game feels across time, and this is where things get interesting.
Positive loops build momentum: success compounds into more success, your character grows stronger, your options expand, your victories get easier.
Negative loops stabilize by softening runaway victory and preventing failure from becoming permanent, keeping things in balance.
Multiplayer games use negative loops to keep competition fair. Solo games need them to keep engagement alive.
Here’s the problem a lot of games run into: a character accumulates power without constraint, encounters scale neatly, threats rise in proportion to player power. The numbers go up but tension evaporates. Advancement becomes cosmetic.
Now flip it. A campaign where early failures permanently cripple momentum, resources vanish, allies die, the system offers no recovery. Very quickly, players stop leaning in and start playing defensively.
Both problems come from the same place: the loop has no counterweight.
A healthy loop lets power accumulate, then asks something of it. It allows setbacks but keeps the door open. When something is taken away, it should change the shape of play rather than simply shrink it.
For solo games, the translation is practical. If your system allows growth, you need to design limitation into it. If your system allows failure, make sure recovery is possible. If you remove something from the player, tie it to narrative transformation rather than punishment.
Examples:
In Ironsworn, you advance by completing vows. Each advancement makes you more capable, but the world escalates with you as new threats match your rising power. The challenge doesn’t become trivial; it evolves. The loop stays tense because the system always has a counterweight to your growth.
In Thousand Year Old Vampire, every success comes with a cost. You survive but lose memories, so you’re more powerful and more fragmented simultaneously. The positive feedback is real (you’re aging, you’re becoming monstrous) but it comes at a narrative price that keeps things complicated rather than simply accumulating power.
What both games do is tie power growth to narrative consequence. Your advancement means something. It’s not just “number go up.” It’s “character becomes something else” or “stakes get higher” or “the world responds.”
Curiosity as a Design Tool
The most useful concept I encountered was something called information gap theory.
Curiosity appears when a person becomes aware that something is missing, and that awareness produces a small psychological tension that drives them to act. In games, that tension becomes propulsion.
Combine this with loops: a question leads to action, the action reveals partial information, and that partial information exposes a deeper question. The loop continues because the gap reshapes itself constantly.
The critical detail is visibility: the player has to be able to perceive the gap. A locked door signals missing knowledge, a redacted journal entry signals hidden history, a map with a torn corner signals incomplete territory. These are the outlines that draw curiosity. This is especially important in mystery design. The goal is not to bury secrets so deeply that no one can see them. The goal is to reveal the outline of something just out of reach.
In solo games there is no external GM pacing revelation, so the mechanics must generate these outlines themselves. An oracle answer should not close the question; it should sharpen it or shift its scale, leaving the player with something new to investigate.
Think about how Brindlewood works. You discover someone has a motive. Cool, one question answered. But now you have ten new questions. Why did they have that motive? Are they working alone? Who benefits from the crime? Each discovery opens new angles to investigate. The curiosity loop keeps turning.
Or look at how a good oracle works in solo play. You ask a yes/no question. You get an answer. Simple enough. But a good oracle answer doesn’t feel like the system deciding. It feels like discovering what the world already was. The player thinks: “Oh, I didn’t expect that, but it makes sense.” That sensation, that expected-but-surprising moment, creates the information gap. They want to know more. They ask the next question.
The Sweet Spot of Uncertainty
But curiosity doesn’t scale infinitely, there comes a cognitive threshold. When uncertainty is too small, boredom sets in. When uncertainty is too large, paralysis sets in.
One way to manage this in design is to maintain questions at different scales:
Short-term questions resolve quickly and provide immediate traction (Who left this dagger? What’s making that sound?), giving you steady engagement through micro-rewards every few cycles and making you feel like the world is responding.
Mid-range questions stretch across a session or chapter (Why is the Baron buying grave soil? Who is sabotaging the communications array?), persisting over time to justify your character’s choices and create narrative coherence.
Long-term questions might never fully resolve (What destroyed the old empire? Where do the enchanters get their power? Why does magic behave this way?), serving as deep uncertainties that shape how the player interprets everything else. Their power is in the asking, not the answering.
Keep all three active at the same time. Answer one short-term question per session, but replace it immediately with another. Let mid-range questions simmer. Let long-term questions lurk. This creates a rhythm where the player always has something pressing, something hanging, and something profound to chew on.
The rhythm prevents the flat feeling that comes from nothing-to-do or too-much-to-do.
The Pit Solo Games Can Fall Into
Here’s the trap I see solo designers stumble into: without real opposition or stakes, the world can feel too responsive. Everything bends to the player’s will, NPCs only exist when asked about, problems resolve too neatly, consequences don’t matter. This is the flat world problem; it’s not that nothing happens, it’s that everything happens on the player’s terms. The world isn’t a place but a vending machine.
The fix is to give the world its own agency: NPCs pursue goals independently, situations escalate whether the player acts or not, danger has inherent signals. If you walk into a trap, it’s not random cruelty but a consequence of ignoring obvious warnings. You chose to ignore them.
This means being generous with information and showing danger, letting the world teach the player how it works through early encounters and visible consequences. A trap that springs without warning is unfair, but a trap that’s clearly a trap and the player walks into it anyway is a choice.
NPCs need motivations that don’t depend on the player noticing them. The villain is scheming whether or not your character is paying attention. The town guard has routines and goals. The mysterious noble is pursuing her own agenda. These things should be discoverable but not dependent on player intervention.
How to Actually Build This
So here’s what I’m taking into my own design work:
Map feedback loops. What happens when the player succeeds? What happens when they fail? Do successes compound? Do failures spiral? Where’s the tension? Where does the game get boring or hopeless?
Identify information gaps. What does the player want to know? What are the questions the game should make them ask? Are they visible gaps, hints that something is hidden, or invisible gaps, absence of information they don’t know they’re missing? Make gaps visible. Players engage with mysteries they know exist. V1 of Archivium has a big issue with this, there is a MASSIVE mystery in the Archive… that you don’t know exist until you are many many shifts into the game, and which most players might never even uncover. Bad design! No biscuit!
Build curiosity into resolution system. When the player rolls the oracle or consults a table, does it give texture? Does it complicate the picture? Does it suggest bigger questions? If they’re getting yes and no without complications, you need more detail. I need to re-look at all my prompts!
Tie advancement to narrative consequence. Make growth mean something. Not just you’re stronger now. Make it you’ve sacrificed something or the world has noticed you or you’re becoming something other than you were. This keeps positive feedback from feeling hollow.
Give the world independence. Have NPCs pursue goals. Make the player feel like they’re uncovering a world that was already there, not that you’re building it on the fly to respond to their choices. In solo play this is very much an oracle / GM emulation problem… that I still need to fix.
Practical Exercise: Applying Loop Theory to The Archivium
I am looking at a couple of downtime prompts from the Library location and running them through everything I just learned and asking myself these questions:
Loop Strength:
Does this prompt create a clear feedback cycle?
Is the consequence of the player’s choice visible?
Does the prompt leave them wanting to know more?
Information Gaps:
Does the prompt reveal the outline of something, or hide it completely?
Can the player perceive what they’re missing?
Does the answer create a bigger question?
Psychological Needs:
Autonomy: Does the player have meaningful choices?
Competence: Is the feedback clear about what happened?
Relatedness: Does this affect a world the player cares about?
Prompt A: The Hidden Desk
Original Prompt: You find a secluded desk hidden behind a wall of encyclopedias, its chair still warm as if recently vacated. A small personal item has been left behind. What is it? Do you leave it where it is, move it somewhere safer, or take responsibility for returning it?
What’s Working:
Three choices: what is the item, who does it belong to, what do you do with it. Autonomy check.
The warm chair creates presence in that this is a space where someone was. Worldbuilding check. Information gap… eh, it could be stronger.
The Weak Loop:
There’s no real feedback cycle. It asks a question and offers choices, but there’s no oracle moment. The player decides what the item is, which is great for ownership, but then what? The loop breaks because there’s no system response, just player input followed by silence.
The Information Gap:
The prompt reveals something mysterious (someone was here, they left something behind) but doesn’t create tension about what’s missing. A warm chair signals recent activity, but the prompt doesn’t make the player wonder what the person was doing, why they left, where they went.
Potential Revised Prompt: You find a secluded desk hidden behind a wall of encyclopedias, its chair still warm as if recently vacated. A small personal item has been left behind. What is it? Decide, or Ask the Oracle: did this person intend to leave it here, did they forget it, were they in a hurry to go? What do you do with the item? Leave it, move it or try and return it? Does this change your relationship with whoever used this space before you?
Opinion? Is that a stronger prompt with a more complete loop or am I adding unnecessary padding?
This is also making me wonder if I need a general oracle for items of sentimental value…
Sources
Video Essays:
Game Maker’s Toolkit: “How Games Use Feedback Loops” - The Pyre case study showed me how negative loops serve solo games without being about multiplayer balance.
Game Design with Michael: “Loops - Game Design Theory” - Gave me language for core loops vs. meta loops, and how decision density actually works.
RPG PhD: “How to Build Curiosity Loops That Last” - Applied information gap theory directly to solo play. Made visibility of mystery the core principle.
Chubby Funster: “Understanding Player Decisionmaking in Tabletop RPGs” - Established that not all choices are equal, and information provision matters more than option quantity.
Academic Papers:
Hunicke, R., LeBlanc, M., & Zubek, R. (2004). MDA: A formal approach to game design and game research: MDA framework let me diagnose why a vague oracle creates frustration instead of engagement (broken mechanics → dynamics → aesthetics pipeline).
Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation: Information gap theory grounded curiosity as tension-relief, not mystery-revelation. Changed how I think about making gaps visible rather than secret.
Ryan, R. M., Rigby, C. S., & Przybylski, A. (2006). The motivational pull of video games: Self-determination theory gave me the three psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness) to evaluate prompts against.
Juul, J. (2005). Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds: Half-Real validated thinking about rules and narrative as equally important in solo games, not rules as substrate.