← Instructional Design · Project Management

Case Study

Learning the Game by Building a Character

For a new player, making a character is the first time they meet most of 20 Below’s rules. The Character Creator is the path they walk through them. It teaches the game in the order the game needs it, gives feedback on every choice, stops mistakes before they happen, and explains things where the player is standing instead of sending them to the book.

Role

Producer: decisions.

Team

The playtesters, Rilla Scarberry (language expert) and Claude (AI assistant).

Timeline

21 August – 25 September 2026.

Result

Character creation teaches the game in the order it’s needed, and stops mistakes before they happen.

The Problem

A character in 20 Below is built from five Elements, their sub-stats, Descriptors, Boons, Flaws, Skills, Resources, Gifts with their Adders and Limiters, and equipment bought with Wealth. Each draws on a pool of points, and some feed others. A new player meets all of it at once, before they’ve played a single scene.

A Creator can treat that as data entry: fields, numbers and a finished file. Or it can treat it as the player’s first lesson. The early versions sat somewhere in between. They were accurate, but long lists buried what mattered, descriptions lived in the book, and some mistakes were only discovered once the character sheet looked wrong.

Analysis: Who Walks the Path

By the end of creation, a new player should be able to say what their Elements and sub-stats do, explain what a Boon, a Flaw, a Resource and a Gift are and what theirs do, read their own sheet, and know what they own and what it’s for.

Design Decisions

Sequence by what depends on what

The order of the steps is the curriculum. Attributes come before the sub-stats they split into, and the sub-stats come before the Descriptors they earn. Boons and Flaws moved ahead of the pools they can feed, so no later step changes what an earlier one showed. Whatever Boon and Gift points go unspent turn into Discretionary Points, which come near the end, when the player can see what they still want.

Ask first what’s different

A table starting above the standard build, such as veterans or a campaign picking up mid-story, used to have nowhere to say so. So creation now opens by asking what the GM granted, before anything is spent. Each press is one whole purchase, like a Gift Level or a Skill tier, and the step size is read from the rules’ own cost table. Each row reads in both the GM’s terms and the player’s.

Open what’s needed; keep the rest closed

Long lists of Boons, Gifts and Resources were a wall. Now anything with points on it moves into a Selected section at the top of its step. Descriptions sit behind a click on the name. Discretionary Points opens as one collapsed section per category, each row with a one-line descriptor. Two smaller fixes mattered more than they sound. A card no longer snaps shut when a click changes its label. And a chosen entry no longer vanishes from its list: that used to close the list up behind the click, so trying to take Wealth to 5 bought five different Resources at 1, and nothing on screen said so.

Explain it where the player is

The Discretionary Points page priced everything and explained almost nothing, so working out what to spend on meant leaving to look things up. Now every row opens to say what the thing is. Boons, Flaws and Resources show their descriptions from the book. The gear shop shows every item’s physical description, so the choice is between objects rather than rows of numbers.

Carry what the table decides

A Boon, Flaw or Gift often asks the player to invent something the rules can’t supply: what their Familiar is, which weapons Special Weapons bought them. It got agreed at the table, written on a napkin, and lost by the next session. The first fix put a description box on every choice, and that was wrong: Berserker was inviting players to describe an absence. It was corrected the same day. Now only the twenty entries that actually settle something about the character ask, and that list is checked against the rules text so it can’t quietly drift.

Prevent the mistake; don’t report it

Some mistakes used to be possible and only discovered later. Gift Adders could push the Gifts pool below zero. Options the rules say can’t be combined could be ticked together. Now what can’t be afforded or combined is greyed out while that’s true, with the reason right beside it. The same checks run at creation, when spending Discretionary Points, and when spending experience.

When the rules change, tell the player

A game in development changes its rules. When four Boons were renamed, merged or moved, a saved character kept paying for a Boon the book no longer described, and nothing said so. Now a saved character is fixed up to match the current rules when it’s opened, and a notice says what changed, once, in plain words. The same mechanism later carried renamed Skills across.

Once there’s a character, the sheet is home

The Creator used to open on step one of fourteen, with the sheet as the last step. That’s right for a new character and backwards for everyone after, because at the table the sheet is what’s open. So the Creator now opens on the sheet, and creation sits behind a Character Creator button that reads Back to Sheet while you’re in it. With nothing saved yet, it opens on a panel that says so and offers to import a character or build a new one.

How the Work Ran

• Playtesters drove the biggest change. Their feedback led to a full overhaul of how creation buys gear: three ordered steps instead of one roll for everything, on a Wealth scale where prices step by ten each level.
• A language review. Rilla Scarberry reviewed the gear shop’s descriptions for clarity.
• The rules and the Creator can’t drift. Descriptions, the list of entries that ask the player something, and the rules text are checked against each other, and the build fails if they disagree.
• Mistakes corrected in the open. The description box on every choice was undone the same day it went in, once it was clearly wrong.

Outcome

Creation now runs in the order the game needs. It starts with what the GM granted, and says what each thing is where the player is choosing it. Mistakes are stopped before they happen, with the reason in view. Returning players are told what the rules changed, and once the character exists, the sheet is where they land.

What this study doesn’t have yet is a timed first-character walkthrough with a new player, counting where they stop and what they ask. That’s the next step, alongside the playtesters’ notes.

“When I reviewed the gear shop in the Character Creator, the rules were right but the wording made new players stop and reread. Feral took every note I flagged, rewrote the steps in plain language, and had the new version back to me to check before it shipped. What stood out was how seriously feedback got taken: nothing was waved off, and nothing went out until it read clearly.”

“Before 20 Below, I’d played exactly one campaign, so I came to the design team as a beginner. Feral bends over backwards to make the game playable and understandable for gamers at every experience level. I never felt like the rules were written for someone else, and when something tripped me up, the next version was clearer.”

Credits

Decisions	Me, as producer
The feedback that rebuilt gear buying	The 20 Below playtesters
Clarity review of the gear shop	Rilla Scarberry, language expert
Package Deliverables and drafts	Claude (AI assistant), checked by me