Charm
When I saw today's #RPGaDay2026 prompt was charm, I laughed, scratched my head, and sat here thinking about it. You see, I'm not a very charming person in real life. I'm a very forgettable person with the personality of a rock. This prompt gave me some thinking to do from a game developer's perspective.
The longer I've worked on building my game, the more I've realized that charm and charisma aren't exactly the same thing, and that's an important distinction to make during game development — especially for a TTRPG like mine.
For a game developer, charm is the quality that makes someone want to keep poking at the world after the mechanics have already made sense. It's those strange details that stick around in your head after you've closed the computer down or left the gaming table. It could be the abandoned festival grounds where brass bells still ring in the wind, or the creature that watches the party leave and looks satisfied. That's charm to me and the world I'm creating.
Making my world feel believable, alive, even livable, is the goal. I'm chasing that every time I write a bestiary entry, plan the next expedition for my players, or design the maps they'll be playing on. Most of my creature designs come from what I call "waking dreams." If you've checked out any of them, you're probably going to ask if I'm okay. For me, these creatures feel almost as real as anything else when I encounter them. They're vivid, and they stick with me. Take the creature from a few bestiary entries back — it waits there, motionless until a player makes the first move. I take notes, write descriptions, build lore and situations that end up translating into the game world. Luckily I'm a horror fan, so most of these turn out cute or adorable to me somehow. Don't ask me to explain that one. If you've ever caught one of my streams and just chatted with me about my interests, you'd probably get it pretty quickly — there's even an old room tour video buried on one of my YouTube channels that gives a glimpse into it.
I want my game to feel like it existed before players arrived and that it keeps thriving after they leave. If it has any charm at all, it won't come from smooth dialogue or clever one-liners. It'll come from curiosity — that moment when a player connects two seemingly unrelated pieces of lore and realizes the world runs a lot deeper than they thought. I've already watched this happen at the table — one player stopped mid-session just to ask how a piece of the world's lore actually worked. That kind of genuine curiosity is exactly what I'm chasing.
That's a kind of charm even a rock can aspire to.
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