Idle Intellectual Games

Thinking Like a Rogue: Art in RPGs

Art has a huge impact on the perception of a role-playing game by its audience. The genre and style of the art a game chooses necessarily changes its audience, and that’s good, but it also causes huge problems for systems built around a theme, instead of a setting, or genre, or certain characters.

Taking Rogue as our example (which other one would we be concerned with?), let’s consider it’s theme: “The World Owes You a Living, Go Out and Take It.” Fine. Good, as far as it goes. But how does that get illustrated? Most games seem to choose to build their illustrations around one of these:

1. Iconic characters

2. Setting

3. Genre

But how do you illustrate a theme? Do you choose iconic characters and run with them? If you do that, many players will (and should) think that the game is designed to play those characters. So maybe you build around a setting. But then the game creates the perception that it was built for that setting, and not around a particular idea. And genre has the same problem — it’s pretty hard to illustrate “fantasy” without at least vaguely sketching a setting and some characters who strike you as “fantastic.”

So your game is limited the instant you choose some art. With Rogue, we chose to go with 3 Iconic characters, each one from slightly different “genres” of the fantastic. We’d hoped to avoid pinning down what you could do with the game, but here’s the problem. Read 2 sentences back. See the word “fantastic?” Yeah. There’s no avoiding it. In order to give an artist direction, you need to give instructions in a way they can understand in a brief. In order to do THAT you have to use words like “Victorian England” or “Sword & Sorcery” or even “A red-haired woman dressed in a captain’s jacket and carrying a flintlock pistol while smoking a cigar.” As soon as art enters the picture, the game narrows even further than the rules already do.

The solution Rogue took was to pick a style and run with it, in this case, sword & sorcery. Can Rogue be played in Victorian England? Sure can. Can it also be set in a cyberpunk future? You bet. But the art pushes readers in a particular direction, and while that’s probably fine, its hard to avoid the conclusion that it suggests the rules were designed for a certain genre of game.

So we did what we liked the look of. We like fantasy, so we had some pretty fantastic characters illustrated and put them in different roguish settings. What’re your thoughts on this, you rogues?