So this week I’m going to attempt to dump a little of my institutional knowledge on you. In my day job I do IT compliance and have my IT audited by outside entities.

• policies that say why you do things — we update our systems because security!
• processes that say how you do things — every month we update our software 
• procedures that showed at a fine level of detail how you did specific things — specifically how we update Windows or Linux
• artifacts that showed you did the things outlined in the processes and procedures — evidence of monthly system patching

Policies have a lot to do with written legal authority, if management wants a thing done they write a policy. Thinking kind of simply here, I don’t think game publishers probably need a policy to say why they write or publish books.

I believe game companies might benefit from some written processes to say how they develop, write and publish books.

I believe game companies benefit from style guides that nail down details of how work should be submitted as part of the process of making books. Getting Artists and Writers to work to a known set of guidelines saves trouble later when the book is in layout and can’t be printed without rework from the artists that sent in low resolution images in the wrong format and the printer can’t use them at all. The style guide for your fantasy books and science fiction books might be different, the artist submission guidelines which are dictated by printing realities might be the same for both.

As far as artifacts go, I don’t know if RPG companies have checklists they use before a book goes to print, there might be lots of artifacts (sign-off approval sheets) created to ensure the book is as good as you can make it and weird things still happen at the printer, like the Pathfinder Advanced Class Guide.

Last year I took a class on Agile, I’d read books on Agile (Video) Game Design, but my employer had a training opportunity and so  I went to class and now I’m an Agile Institute certified something. In the Agile process you have:

a backlog is a list of things you need either requirements provided by users or things that have grown out of other project requirements.

a sprint is a collection of features or requirements from the backlog to be worked on over a specified period or time

Someone making a Bestiary or Monster Manual might have 300+ requirements for creature stat blocks, 100+ requirements for creature artwork and a dependency for someone to work out the math that balances the strength of various creatures.

I pick this specific example because in order for both the D&D 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual or Pathfinder Core Rulebook and Bestiary  to launch at approximately the same times they both needed monsters and monster building rules.

Some people on the internet have said that the creatures in the 5e Monster Manual do not fit the guidelines for monster building in the DMG. I do not know if the creatures in the Pathfinder 2e Bestiary are all reflective of the monster building rules in the back of the bestiary, but logically it would make sense it would be easier for the monster writers to write monsters if they knew what the math involved should look like. BUT

Sometimes you do not know what the monster math should look like until you have some monsters and characters to playtest with. So you need rough character class progression math, rough monster progression math and then some playtesting to challenge all the math working together and then you can have monster building math to populate your Monster Manual or Bestiary. People on the internet have said that using the encounter design rules in the DMG and monsters from the Monster Manual gives you fights that are too easy because the creatures in the MM are underpowered for their CR. Other people on the internet have said that the creatures in Volo’s Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes are much closer to the DMG math.

Starfinder didn’t have NPC or Monster building math until the first Alien Archive book and so people with the Core Book had to have their players face other player character style challenges or use the 13 sample creatures in the Free RPG day book First Contact. That was not a lot to go on for a book that sold out day 1 at GenCon and I would not recommend it as a strategy.

acceptance criteria in agile are how people know when a requirement is met, game companies could easily include their style guides as part of that criteria and in the definition of done. In this example when the art or writing assignment moves from To Do — Doing to Done then the money people can stroke them a check. Writers and Artists in the industry often have to wait for other parts of the work to be done, for the book to publish, all sorts of things beyond the freelancer’s control are holding up their rent money.

MoSCoW method for prioritizing requirements uses the following big buckets to organize development priorities

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