This guy seems to be having fun - interview with Aaron Lim 林家丰
I chatted with Aaron Lim 林家丰, game designer and facilitator of Playtest Zero. We talked about moving, the tyranny of time, and about how creating and playtesting games can itself be a playful act.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Adapted from conversation on June 7/8, 2025
Alex: Thanks for talking with me today. How would you describe your role in the TTRPG space?
Aaron: Thanks for having me! I make games, I’m a game maker and playtest organizer. One of the big things I do is I run a fortnightly playtest meetup with a group of people.
Alex: Playtest Zero.
Aaron: Yeah. We meet up every other week, and we do a bunch of other things throughout the year as well. We have the showcase at the start of the year, which is just a compilation of what’s been happening in the past year of Playtest Zero. We get people to do a little showcase of what they’ve been working on and do things like a quick presentation talking about a game that they’ve playtested, or insights or learnings from playtesting that game, or about game design in general. And then at the end of the year, we have a social, a no playtesting allowed social, just so that, as part of the community, it’s not just about playing and playtesting games, but also we talk about games and hang out with each other. We spend time with each other, so it’s good to build those social ties as well.
Aaron: So we do a social at the end of the year, the showcase, and we’ve started something new this year. It’s just like a weekend for playtesting games, right? Instead of just doing our regular — our regular meetups are on weeknights. So we tend to run shorter playtest sessions so that we can actually get through multiple games in the night. So we try and limit things to around an hour. It doesn’t always work out. Sometimes if we’re really into it and there’s not a lot of games on the docket, we might playtest one game for an hour and a half, two hours if everyone’s up for it. But we do try to just keep it fairly short. We’re going to try and do a weekend session so that we have time to playtest some more games for a bit longer. And also rather than just playtest games, [we will] play games with each other, run games that we’re excited to run. So we’re just calling it the weekend bonanza, giving that a try this year. And the main issues with Playtest Zero are mainly logistical. I think most of our members are from all over the world, mainly Southeast Asia and the US. So we just have to juggle a few different types of things. But that’s pretty much what I do.
Alex: Is that largely the same people every two weeks?
Aaron: It ebbs and flows. We have people who were very regular for a time and then, you know, are not as regular anymore. And then sometimes they might come back. We do have some people who are more regular than not. But even that is seasonal, right? It depends.
Alex: And are you playing the same game every time, or do people bring different games?
Aaron: We do have some games that have shown up consistently, especially if someone has been working on something for a while. I’ve definitely playtested versions of my own games in there multiple times through different iterations of it. But more often than not, people bring in new stuff. Our motto is no draft too rough. Arisia Santiago came up with that, which is basically like we playtest anything. We will playtest two sentences and a vibe.
Because one of the things that I do want to try and do with Playtest Zero is to be a place that is welcoming to people who are just starting out with playtesting their games and playtesting in public with other people. Just to get comfortable with that. And also just to have a place where you can bring in really early stage prototypes, especially because of our limitations. The format of the regular meetups is for roughly an hour. You don’t get through that much in an hour, right? So one of the things that compensates for that is bring in all your early stage ideas and early prototypes and we’ll work through those in an hour. Sometimes, if everyone who’s showed up is tired or no one got their prototype ready in time, we will just read each other’s games or discuss things that we’ve been working on or general game design stuff.
Aaron: One of the things that I find really important about having various playtest events is that consistency is key. We try never to cancel or push off or delay events, postpone events. It runs every two weeks, whether it’s one person or two people, four people, ten people, we run every two weeks if we can.I think the only time we’ve done postponements or cancellations is sometimes we inadvertently realize — this one of the other reasons why I wanted to try a mid-year, bigger playtesting [event] was also to shift our schedule a little bit. Because what happened was our U.S timing is usually on Thursday evenings and that would have fallen straight on U.S Thanksgiving this year, which happened one year because I’m in Malaysia so I’m not very on the ball when it comes to U.S. public holidays. No one showed up because obviously everyone’s busy. Okay, maybe I should be a little bit more aware of these timings!
Alex: How did you get started organizing this?
Aaron: For Playtest Zero specifically, it came out of the Session Zero online convention, which is a great online convention. It was leadership from the Philippines who put on an online convention back in 2021. It was one of my first times getting to spend a lot of time meeting and chatting with other game designers from all over the world. There was a group of us, I think the initial group was myself, Sam Mui (BabblegumSam) —
Alex: Of Capitalites!
Aaron: Yes, Capitalites. Harry Mohamed, and Thomas Manuel, the four of us who decided to play a game during the convention. I think we playtested one of mine. After the convention, we said, “Hey, since we playtested one of my games, I’ll playtest one of yours.” So we just traded off playtests with each other. And there’s still a lot of energy going on after the convention, so we continued using the discord that was set up for that convention, and we kind of hermit crabbed our way into that [server]. A lot of other people were still there, they hadn’t left the server or turned notifications off. So we managed to pull some other people in to playtest.
Alex: I love that, and I love how you describe it as hermit crabbing.
Aaron: It ended up being a regular thing, and we’ve been doing it since then, 4 years now.
Alex: Have you seen anyone else try to emulate that or do the same thing?
Aaron: A few people have spoken to me, [asking] hey how does this thing run? I’d like to do my own play test thing. I don’t know if anyone has done it in the specific format that we do, which is short one hour playtest mostly online. I suspect a lot of people do their playtesting in their own dedicated groups. I know a bunch of playtesting gets done in like the Magpie Games server and the Blades in the Dark server. It’s all usually formed around specific communities.
Alex: I playtest my games in my own Discord server, but it’s not regularly scheduled, just creating groups as needed.
Aaron: I assume it might be happening elsewhere I know on the board game side of things — one of my experiences running playtest events actually started from board game playtesting events. Back in 2015 we started a monthly board game playtesting meetup in Melbourne where I was back then, and then during the pandemic that shifted online as well and that was a regular occurrence. I had moved away from Melbourne, and had handed over the reins to a few other people to continue running that. And at this point in time, they have mostly handed it off to another group of people who were in the community. We’ve traded as the community has moved away. One former admin moved away, another one has a young family so can’t dedicate as much time to it. It means I think about how to make events sustainable and having a path to hand it off to other people to carry on.
Alex: How does it feel to be able to walk away and know that the event is still continuing, almost like leaving a legacy?
Aaron: Yeah, I’m happy that it’s continuing. The reason I brought it up is that regular playtesting meetups are more widespread in the board gaming community. There’s.. Is it Roll, Play Test?FOOTNOTE Which is mainly online, but the organizers are based in the UK, and they playtest regularly, but it’s focused on board games. They still do have some RPG playtests, so that style [of regularly meeting up] at a particular time every week, every month, whatever, it’s very common in the board game scene. So I wanted to have a similar thing with RPGs as well.
Alex: Let’s talk about the games that you design. I first encountered you when we were both doing ZineQuest at the same time. I was doing a horror game, I think you were doing An Altogether Different River. What were your inspirations for that?
Aarron: Oh yeah, back in 2021. An Altogether Different River came about because of another project. I had a compilation of games called Homebound. There’s three games about home and going away. There was How To Say Goodbye, Far From Home, and an early version of Ithaca in Cards, actually. I gave that anthology away to friends as I was moving from Melbourne as I was moving away.
Alex: You gave your friends copies?
Aaron: Yeah, I printed out… I can’t remember how many copies, 15? And gave them to friends, mostly people that I played RPGs with, and also to other people who were influential to me, on the game design side of things, like making indie RPGs, and more generally making indie games. At that time, my focus was on making card games and board games, before shifting to tabletop RPG design. But I was still talking to a lot of the same people, we were supporting each other, playtesting each others’ games, as well as people from the indie video game design scene in Melbourne. One of my former roommates is a video game designer. It’s all connected. All the nerds overlap. We play Netrunner, and you get a mix of indie video game designers and tabletop RPG designers. I was really inspired, those were really important parts of my journey making my own games. So leaving Melbourne, I made that anthology to give away.
Aaron: I originally wanted a fourth game in that anthology, which is what became An Altogether Different River, because all those games were about living away from home, or returning home, which was thematically appropriate for a farewell gift. And then I wanted one that was about arriving and reaching home and grappling with moving back home. So the other games [are] about saying goodbye and moving away, but then I wanted one that was about arriving home and trying to deal with that. But I couldn’t finish that game in time.
Alex: Before you moved away?
Aaron: Yeah.I had an early draft of it, but it wasn’t ready and the anthology was big enough as it is. I think it was like 50 pages, so I said, “Okay, fine, I’m not gonna finish it for this.” And after moving back home, I worked it again and it felt appropriate, that the game about moving back home is finished after moving back home. You have to do the thing before you respond to the thing. So that was the context in which An Altogether Different River was made. I drew a lot on town building and map building games that I love. I did make a version of Homebound available through the [Kickstarter] campaign for an Altogether Different River. You could maybe still get some copies, I don’t know.
Alex: Spectres of Brocken is one of your more recent games. What is it, and what were your inspirations for making it?
Aaron: Spectres of Brocken is a GM-less storygame about getting to know young mech trainee pilots as they figure out what they want from the world, what they want from each other, and then you do a time skip and you realize that all of them are now on different sides of a war, and you all have to fight each other.
Alex: That’s a very clever gimmick. When I saw that, I was like, this is brilliant.
Aaron: I love time skips but funnily enough Spectres of Brocken was not initially a time skip game. It came about because of the Emotional Mecha Jam back in 2019. I think that [jam] was a flashpoint, a pretty important event for the indie RPG design history. That hit in the period of time after Google+ shut down. A lot of indie game designers were trying to figure out where else [they could] build community. Discord was popular, but still picking up. People were posting on Twitter, trying to find each other. There were tabletop RPGs on Itch, but the Emotional Mecha Jam was a big confluence point for people getting used to using Itch for game jams. The connections building out of those, people discovering other designers through the jam submissions was really important. I originally made Spectres for that. Actually, you should go back and look through the Emotional Mecha Jam participants. It’s a list of all the incredible RPG game designers.
Alex: A who’s who of superstars today?
Aaron: Yeah, to me at least! It’s a really interesting slice-in-time cohort of game designers. I’m sure there are other similar flashpoints for younger designers, that was 5 years ago, which is an age in indie game design. So Spectres came out of that, mainly the second part, which is about fighting each other in your mechs. And through playtesting, I realized, okay, fighting each other is cool, but why? Who are these people that we’re fighting? And rather than spend a lot of time in character creation, why don’t we play character creation? That was why the time skip happened, and that came in late. It was like, “Okay I know I need to put in a little bit more effort into the character creation so that you’re more invested in these characters and why they’re fighting each other.”
Alex: That’s really clever!
Aaron: I was quite influenced by Masks as well in the sense that if you’re playing young characters, their stats are fluid, you don’t have locked in stats, you change your stats all the time. Whereas the way I expressed that idea of young pilots in Spectres was that you start with very few stats, and then you fill those in as you go. So you have four main traits that each character is made up of but you only start character creation with one, you fill the rest in as you play.
Alex: I have one last question. If someone is picking up a game that you have made, what should they expect?
Aaron: I don’t know man! (laughter)
Alex: That can be your whole answer!
Aaron: It’s not that I’m trying to be iconoclastic, right? Like I don’t say, “Oh I don’t want to be pigeonholed.” It’s just that I’m interested in different things at different times, and that will come through. I’m sure someone on the outside looking in at my work might find themes and commonalities between them. Like I definitely love time skips, right? The big commonality between An Altogether Different River and Spectres of the Brocken is about the tyranny and distance of time, and how time changes people and places. That’s a big theme that I work with. But in the upcoming games that I’m working on, that’s less of a theme. That might have been me working through things after living in one place and moving to another, thinking a lot about how time and change affects things. But that’s one period in time.
> You have to do the thing before you respond to the thing.
Aaron: For stuff I’m working on, I’m trying to go back to my board game design roots, things that are a little more crunchy mechanically. I’ve been mainly releasing GMless games recently, but I love GM games! I like playing GM games, I just haven’t had a chance to finish one. I’ve released a lot of GM drafts and ashcans, but none that I’ve put on Kickstarter or a physical release, so most people don’t know about those designs that I’ve done.
Alex: That’s a great answer!
Aaron: A key philosophy for me is that design and playtesting is fun to do, and it’s a playful act. Whenever I put something in a game, I feel like I am playing with the players. I am writing something into the game in a playful manner in the hope that it elicits a reaction from them, like, “Ha ha, you idiot! What did you do?” It’s like writing a joke for a friend, hiding little things in there for them. I don’t know if it comes true at all, but that’s the approach that I have. If I make a game, I want you to look at it and think, this guy seems to be having fun!
Find Aaron’s games on itch.
FOOTNOTE: Aaron was conflating the Virtual Playtesting group, which is still active, board-game focused, and online with Roll, Play, Test, which is based out of Birmingham, and went dormant in 2024.