Designing Freedom: Oridont on Characters That Can Change

It started with D&D and homemade modules. Over time, Oridont found that bringing new ideas to life meant stripping away more and more existing rules. That frustration became Utopia: a tabletop RPG without classes or levels, built around the freedom to shape your character, equipment, and playstyle. Here, a character can change direction as their story unfolds, without being tied to an archetype chosen before the first session.

Utopia’s community helps turn that freedom into something playable. Players build automated character sheets, discover unexpected combinations of abilities, and write stories that can become part of the wider Myramyth universe’s canon. In its West Marches campaign, life continues between adventures: characters trade, build relationships, and help shape a shared city. Those everyday interactions can give players just as much reason to return as the next quest.

In this interview, Oridont talks about designing for that freedom, sharing creative control, and learning from mistakes. The conversation also gets candid about money, burnout, and the work required to keep an independent project going. It’s a look inside indie RPG creation, from the first mechanic to the moment players start doing things its designer never saw coming.

Onwards!

How did you get into TTRPGs, and what made you go from playing to designing your own system?

I started by playing D&D, much like seemingly most people. I started by building modules for it, but ended up irritated by the limitations I kept running into; it came to a point where I was un-writing more rules than I was developing new ideas. The original massive module I created that tipped me over the edge includes special crafting rules, where you could customize and build new items, which ended up evolving into a much more in-depth custom item system. Nowadays, that's one of Utopia's flagship features.

Who is Oridont? Where does the name come from, and how much of you is in it?

The original term "Oridont" is very silly in foundation; it's basically just made up words that sounded a way that I liked. Oridont is just me, no other additional team or staff. Our company (and the founding company of Utopia), Myramyth, is a team and contains a larger universe within it; the lore, all the fun narrative stuff. "Oridont" is very intrinsically me specifically. It's now become a dividing line of sorts; Oridont and Myramyth are two distinct entities, but "Oridont" is the author of Utopia.

You work across tabletop (Utopia), a virtual roguelike (Dystopia) and an ARG-style puzzle game (The Vault). Do you see them as one creative universe, or as separate projects?

Absolutely one creative universe. There's been some new projects on the horizon to tie the Myramyth universe together. The projects and mechanics are distinct, but they even have little love-letters to each other; for example, there may be a talent or skill in two different games (with the same name), and they do two different things. Similar, but not the same. These kind of give a way to differentiate how each world's mechanics compare and contrast.

How would you describe Utopia to someone who has never heard of it, in two or three sentences?

The goal is customization, point blank. There is no level and no class system to push you into a single playstyle or archetype; there's a ton of "guiderails" that you can follow if you want some guidance, but this system can flex and bend to whatever you need it to be. Be anything, be anybody, play in any setting.

Utopia is a multiplayer, open-world system that “can handle anything.” What problem with existing systems were you trying to solve?

I think the easiest example here would be the class system of D&D, since everybody knows it. It's not intrinsically wrong by any means, but it bothers me that when I say "Paladin" on my first day of a level 3 campaign, I'm stuck in that path for what could be several years of playtime with only a few decisions that modify how the character plays. Obviously, multi-classing is an option, but most of the possible combinations are punishing unless I choose to minmax my character, which usually isn't very thematically conducive. I wanted a way to play a character that builds their backstory as the adventure progresses, that isn't punished by pivoting from Brawler to Spellsword.

With the expansion there are around 400 talents. How do you keep a system that deep “easy to learn, hard to master” rather than just hard?

Utopia is intentionally designed in layers. As you get further towards the back of the book, you venture into more and more advanced rules. More advanced often means more agency, but they can be kind of intimidating the first time. Hence, you can play Utopia without ever touching said advanced rules. The barrier to entry was a huge consideration when building the game; you can build a character with only 7 to 10 pages of content, just with a lot of creative limitation. You can play a full campaign with only 50 pages or so, same limitations. You can experience Utopia's full scope with the Core Guide, or the multiplicative effects introduced by expansions, by introducing all of the available content.

What was the hardest design decision you made in Utopia, and would you make it the same way today?

Something that dawned on me once Utopia released and got its first wave of players was that there's an entire playstyle I never even considered. When the game first came out, there was this influx of minmax players; and I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that in finding new creative ways to push the game to its limits, to become as powerful as possible at the lowest levels possible. It felt kind of like the TTRPG of speedrunning. I did a lot to nullify some of those efforts, partially out of fear of losing balance; I think there's limits to everything, but I'd consider myself a bit heavy-handed on that facet. With the Adventurer's Guide expansion on its way towards releasing, I'm hoping to offer some ways to have that fun min-max interaction, while giving GMs the tools to thwart it should it become an issue at a casual group.

How do you playtest and balance a system this big? How much of that comes from the community?

Before its release, playtesting was mostly between me and friends. No huge team, no proper documentation, just fixing things as we caught it. It wasn't until Utopia got its first wave of audience that I realized just how short-handed we were. There were tons of people coming in, stress testing the system into oblivion, showcasing all of the crazy things you could do, and just how broken it could be if you pushed. That's all to say, the community was a massive part of the game's playtesting and balancing. Utopia was kind of weird in the fact that its entire prototype was free to access, so people had a pretty intrinsic knowledge of what was going on. Honestly, I'd like to keep the community-lead pattern going.

How did you grow The Oriverse to around 4,000 members? What worked, and what turned out to be a waste of time?

This was mostly from Utopia. There's a role in the Discord called the "First 100" and another called the "First 1,000" and some of those people, especially the former, may remember the months and months that it was just a quiet little hangout space. When Utopia released, a lot of new people flooded in and the space expanded quite rapidly. Successful YouTube videos usually did a lot of the legwork, which is also true for Utopia's initial release. I originally used this platform for streaming, of which I still do very regularly, and it still hasn't even equated to a quarter of the Discord's size after years. Twitch is not amazing in this aspect, but I'm still having fun, personally.

Your server has mysteries, Investigators and things to unlock. Where did that idea come from, and how does it change how people behave on the server?

It started from a single event known as the "Who Is It" event, which was on a server prior to the current one. Basically, the community had to figure out the names of some upcoming content creators that we were going to be collaborating with. It was stressful, planned terribly, and a total wreck; and yet, it was probably one of the most-fun things I had done in my content creation history, so it stuck. There became this ever-shifting wall of lore and literature that, instead of requiring cold hard cash to unlock, would come with time and investment, problem solving, mysteries, all that good stuff. I would definitely say that there's a dedicated audience for the mysteries, and an audience that just likes to play the game, and I'm here for it. I do my best to not force the mysteries on everybody, but give cute little prizes and rewards that money can't buy to those who invest the time into solving.

Elf Mage told me that for a West Marches it’s “not about the count, it’s about player engagement.” What, in your experience, keeps people active between sessions, and what makes a server go quiet?

I think one of the coolest things I've watched the Utopia West March do is drive the roleplay and between-session interactions by building this huge bustling city ran by players. There's channels and spaces dedicated to being your character when there's no battle to face; just to interact, barter, trade, and commune with fellow players and their characters. Sometimes on stream, we work on this little "official homebrew" known as the Slice of Life module, where you can spend levels on citizen-style trades, like dancing and tailoring and cooking. Those types of between-the-adventure bits of flavor, to me, make a single session or character immortal.

Where do new players come from: streams, word of mouth, Discord, somewhere else? Has that changed over time?

There's a lot of lovely people who don't actively chat or interact in the community but still play and own Utopia; or, at least I assume they do, given the numbers. There's a lot more people who own Utopia than people who are chatting on a day-to-day basis. That is to say, I don't know the full ins and outs, but from what I've gathered, YouTube is by far the most bountiful place for Utopia's growth. It's offered the most exposure and introduced the most players by orders of magnitude. Utopia, in fact, actually historically tanked my Twitch audience a few times (often to my own fault), given that platform is much more dedicated to a live gaming audience whereas it can be difficult to make a TTRPG session riveting and visually sensational. We still do it weekly, regardless; now, it just turns into a podcast after the VODs are edited. Even with that, though, still YouTube video essays.

How does the West Marches in your world work, and who runs it day to day?

The West March is very much under its own umbrella; I don't control what happens, but I technically control the lore-premise of the world. Though, if ElfMage said "There's a giant typhoon that leveled several cities in Chimeros and thousands of people perished," I would accept that and call it canon. Myramyth is based on community writing and collaboration. There's rules in place, usually about grandios concepts like time travel and spatial manipulation, things that may break everybody's story, but beyond those idea, I do my best to let people write real stories that matter and mean something in the grand scheme of it all, while still keeping the stories structured and interesting. On the Myramyth website, there's stories written by the community about canon Utopia (and Myramyth) characters, or characters they built in the Utopian world, that get canonized over time, while credit and authorship is kept to its original writer.

Your community built a big spreadsheet for Utopia characters. What other tools have players built on their own, and what do you wish existed but doesn’t yet?

This answer changed between you sending me this document and me writing this answer (apologies for the long wait). The community has done so much for this game, including automated Google Sheets documents that calculated item crafting, spell crafting, custom creatures, custom species, and of course the famous automated character sheet that became ubiquitous amongst chat-active Utopia players. A week ago, I would have said that I wished for an official module for these features, but that exists now! We're working with the West March to see what features would help them in their endevors, hoping to make this the stomping grounds and home for many new Utopia characters. I think it's important to clarify though: this game would not be where it is today if it wasn't for its community putting the amount of legwork that it did to keep it playable, convenient, and reasonable to get into with tools like those.

What’s your current stack for running everything (Discord, VTTs, sheets, bots)? What is the most annoying part to manage?

We have a hidden channel in the Discord called "Volt's Problems" that we keep as a little joke; VoltaicGRiD is Myramyth's web developer and a very close friend of mine. If it weren't for him, the interactive website, the automated character sheet, several Discord bots and functions, and countless other things would not exist. When I was running on my own time, I would hack together a good handful of bots, but they'd take me dozens of hours to proudce and maintain, and usually a good chunk of monthly change would go to things like server hosting. Since he's come around, however, he's cut that workload into fractions and mostly shouldered it himself. The most annoying part to manage is getting him to admit that he's really cool, honestly.

How does streaming feed into your game design? Do ideas from streams end up in the games?

Stream has become something of a comfy space to let new ideas fly and to brainstorm lore, mechanics, and features with a tight-knit community. Once upon a time, I focused very heavily on trying to accelerate stream growth; I still want to grow as a streamer, but there's something very humble and quaint about a little stream with some people who know these systems very well. I'll actively proudce expansions, homebrew modules, and virtually every product before it comes out live on stream and ask chat what their thoughts are. When somebody adds something really meaningful, or something that changes the scope of the game in some way, they'll usually land themselves on a credits page. To me, streaming is a really important part of involving the community in this projects and building on that collaborative-storytelling motif.

How do you make this sustainable? Patreon, sales, something else? What would you tell a creator who wants to do this full-time?

It's a bit of a mix of everything; I'm sustained on Patreon and things like Twitch and YouTube, but it's full time work for less than full-time pay in my current position. I don't make money from Utopia sales or other Myramyth products. With it being the starter company that it is, Myramyth is very hungry and needs a lot of resources to sustain itself, so I'll put money in long before I'll take money out. I think the message I would want to hear, if I could go back and tell my starry-eyed self about this, is that it's genuinely and honestly really hard to sustain. I feel like these rampant success stories pop up all the time about over-night millionaires, and in my time I've come to realize, if that did happen to me, I'd be a wreck. I don't have the resources to sustain millions of purchases, or millions of viewers, or what have you; it takes time and effort to facilitate this growth in a meaingful way. I wanted for so long to rush this process and jump up to stardome, but I've grown very fond of the long, steady growth.

How do you avoid burnout while running a system, a community, streams and several games at once?

Honestly, I kind of don't. I get burnt out somewhat often. That's not advice, just the truth; I'm usually somebody who will write half a book in a weekend fueled purely on potato chips and spite, then go into a productive hybernation for a week. Unfortunately, that's not often very conducive to a content schedule, so I have to work in batches. My quotas come in month-long spans, so if I get a motivational burst, I can sink all of that into a month's worth of projects that release over time, and I can freely burn out and relax while the work I already did sustains. It's not a perfect system by any means, but it sure is my system.

What’s next for Utopia and The Oriverse in the coming year?

The Adventurer's Guide expansion to Utopia is our next big thing right now, and I'm pushing really hard to get it out as soon as possible. Of course, we can't drop big products without it being superceded by some large event, so there's a mystery-esc event that is being planned and worked on in the background. In fact, this is the first time I've stated it publicly, but it's going to happen, I promise. Following that, VoltaicGRiD has been slowly building up another system in the background; one thematically partnered to Utopia, but mechanically very distinct; a roguelike TTRPG. That'll be our next focus, and I'm very excited about that.

One piece of advice for a creator who’s just published their first system and has a Discord server with 30 people on it.

This is a tough market to crack; it's a hard place to get started in, but please, please, do not give up. Decide your niche, figure out what makes your game distinct, and find that thing that somebody goes, "Goodness, I really love how this system does this, it's unlike any other system." Build yourself a playable product before getting into the content engine. A million views will be wasted if there's nothing for people to sink their teeth into, somewhere to go, somewhere to enter the funnel. Keep building, find the finish line even if the game isn't perfect, and then show people it's most impressive feature.

Thank you so much for the interview! This was a ton of fun!