RPG Publisher Spotlight: Target Role

Oh dear, how… inconvenient? Embarrassing? Timely?

The winner of the 2020 November Publisher Spotlight poll is Target Role.

However, Target Role is no more. The group of friends who got together RPG products are still in the hobby, but they’re not working together under the title of Target Role any more.

However, I was able to get in touch with Julio Tassinari who modestly describes their role as “mostly a graphic designer” even though they absolutely did more with some questions. Julio was able to pop the same questions around to the team, but we didn’t get any responses.

Please note, English is not Julio’s first language.

What do you think Target Role was best known for?

For what I could tell people best noticed us for our One Page games (even though we do a few more complex items like scenarios for FATE and even a full published PbtA game) but especially for our One Page Tools, which were basically quick addons for any kind of game, like for example “Travelling Through The Wild” which is a tool for handling travels in games that got pretty popular.

What will you be working on next?

I’m currently focusing on improving my programming skills to somehow use it in my main job (teaching physics for high schoolers), so I don’t really have many plans for TTRPGs for now.
However everyone from Target Role not only me is still part of the hobby, so whenever we have an idea, we’ll definitely put it in action and publish through TR’s publishing page at DriveThruRPG, which is still active. We just won’t be focusing on sharing it through social media and advertisement like we were before (which the workload of doing so is the main reason for us to ending the group as a whole).

Where do fans of your RPG material go to get more of it?

Well, DriveThruRPG still hosts our publishing page and every item we’ve published so far is still available there, also anything that is yet to be published will be available there.
DTRPG is soon going to change its entire design, so I’m also expecting the publishers’ pages to get a revamp in user experience to make it more usable as a single platform like itch.io.

Why do you think the one-page format has become so popular?

TTRPGs have changed a lot in the last decade, and one of the main changes that appeared out of it is this specific public getting a lot closer to the Board Gaming feeling of being quick and easy to play. For that One Page RPGs have contributed a lot, they are easy to learn, play and run, making it very accessible to anyone who just wants to play RPGs as party games, for example.
This sort of party game feeling that comes with One Page RPGs make it very attractive to me at least and a lot less scary for new players.

In your opinion, what makes a good RPG or RPG accessory?

I still have a lot to learn on RPG design, but the topics I’ve always tried to achieve specifically were: Being self-comprehensive and smooth readability.
Self-comprehensive in the means of not needing previous knowledge of any sort of niche culture (like most TTRPG were for a long time) and being as a whole something that can be played, so anyone can take that accessory and just play it.
Smooth readability, on the other hand, is mostly something I believe, that most people nowadays read PDFs more than actual printed books, so the way we design the layouts for our items must take this into consideration.
Since I was responsible for the layouts at TR, I very often got myself thinking about that, and for me designing something for the A5 paper size, for example, was a good way of leading with it because it’s a very readable size in print or digital, even in phones.