In this interview, we sit down with James Hutt, senior designer at R. Talsorian Games. We discuss his experience developing Cyberpunk: RED and the Witcher TTRPG, as well as his insights and advice for both new and established designers.

Hi James, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us. I want to start by asking you about your job. A lot of our audience is interested in game design - can you tell us how you built your career, and how aspiring designers might do the same?

This is a very interesting question, and there are a few different levels to my answer. The first is, if you want to get into a creative career, you have to be creative every day. This is the, ‘if you want to draw for a living, draw every day’ answer, and it’s the same for game design. It takes a lot of dedication to get the ball rolling in this field - something inside you has to drive you to work at it every day. If you have that drive, and love for the craft, then it’s just about skill, and honestly, business sense. There are a lot of people who are great at design, but who never try or shoot their shot to make it their career. That would be the second level of the answer. Hopefully this can motivate your readers who are asking themselves those questions. If you have that passion for creativity, and the drive to make that passion a career, then you can make it.

As for how I built my career - from a very young age I had been playing and thinking about games. When I got out of college, I was looking to do something creative in games, and sort of bounced around for a bit. I was writing a ‘zine with my buddy Eugene Fasano - who I’m pretty sure is still kicking it at Arcana Games, you guys should check him out - and I was just doing bits of freelance writing here and there for a long time. I went to college for Economics and did some game theory stuff while I was there, which importantly allowed me a lot of electives for things like world cultures and writing. I wanted to write genre fiction and they wanted the great postmodern American novel, but I still gained a lot from those experiences.

So for a long time I was just trying to get any work anywhere in the industry. I got a contract with Big Fish Games that didn’t really go anywhere, but it got my foot in the door. I worked on a board game, then a video game - I really was just trying to do anything in games. I loved games, and wanted to make them.

I benefited a lot from what I’ll call a warm basement owned by my parents - the starving artist thing is real, and I feel like I have to mention the support network that got me where I am. It could have not worked, but it did, and that’s thanks to my hard work and the people who supported me. If you’re just starting out, keep at it - once you start making money with creative work, and you keep working, in five years you’ll have a career. Getting paid and persevering isn’t the answer that people want to hear, but that’s how you do it. I hope that answer isn’t too depressing.

I think there’s optimism in it - if you know in your heart what you want to do, work towards it and you can find success.

Absolutely. The great optimism is, if you find yourself doing it every day, and loving it any day, if you can find a way to make money doing it then you have a career.

There’s a great quote I like which is, “success is where preparation meets opportunity.” It’s on us to lay the groundwork now so when good fortune hits, we’re equipped to take advantage of it.

Of course. It’s a hard work thing, it’s a job too. Anway, I promise the rest of this interview will be fun, and awesome.

I wanted to follow up briefly - you mentioned business sense is an aspect of this. Can you speak to that?

Yes. What I mean is you have to be willing to get paid for your work. It’s different for every person, but at the end of the day there are bills to pay. If you have this creative force inside you, you do have to channel that effort into a profitable avenue. You can put a lot of work into something that will make you no money - that’s a lot of what I love to do now, but I can only afford to because I’ve laid the groundwork by working on projects that will make money. They may not be the most glamorous or the most exciting, but it’s part of making a career in our field.

It’s not that I don’t love both of them by the way - just because you take the profitable route doesn’t mean you're sacrificing your creative integrity or something. You just have to be able to provide for yourself and your loved ones while, and ideally by, pursuing your passion.

When you get to talk about dragons all day and get paid for it, you feel like you’ve found a cheat code for life. There are many paths to this. Get a day job, sure, and be creative on your own time. But if you want to go all in and have it be your only job, then work your ass off, and make decisions around what will make you revenue.

In your opinion, what is the main priority of a game designer? What is the ideal relationship between a designer and their audience?

Man, that’s a big question. There’s a weasel answer, which is: it depends on the project. Every project is going to have its own set of defined goals and priorities. But speaking in the general sense - a lot of people would say that the main priority of a game designer is fun. You’re trying to increase the amount of fun that your player has at all times. I would say that you can massage that concept a little bit - fun is awesome, and is certainly very high in my list of priorities, but ‘fun’ to me is a filler word with little practical value from a design standpoint.

So my answer goes back to the ‘business sense’ concept from before. My biggest priority is using fun to underscore what makes my product stand out from the others. There are a million and one RPG systems out there, why should people buy mine? That’s what I try to focus on with design.

As for the ideal relationship between the designer and the player - I guess this depends on the designer. I think that we as designers have very little say over how our audiences choose to interact with our content, and we shouldn’t let ego or our own ideas of right and wrong get in the way of our players’ fun.

Would you say it’s accurate that you believe a role of a game designer should be to guide rather than dictate, because the experience of a player is so individual?

I’d say there’s an uber-rule in game design: “Even If I tell them not to, they may.” If they don’t like a certain rule, and I make it thoroughly integral to the system, then they’ll pick a different system. It’s on us to make a system that is modular enough that your players are given the freedom to forego rules that are not to their preference.

What are the challenges and advantages specific to tabletop design, as opposed to other gaming mediums?

Oh, this is a real softball for me man. One word: Homebrew. It is prolific in our industry, and so much much more accessible than in other kinds of games. In video games you have modding, sure, but not everybody can make a mod. With tabletop games, the modding scene is totally accessible. If you design a game around the idea of modularity, it becomes inherently homebrewable. In RED, I’ve kind of lifted this up as a showcase mechanic. The tech is very important to the game, because the tech exists over the ruleset as a general homebrew idea. This world is alive, and you’re part of that life. You can make it evolve and change, even in a homebrew way. That’s also your power as your role. I would say that’s one of the most unique features of tabletop games, and it’s one of the reasons I love working on them.

Going back to the last question - would you say that it’s accurate that you believe the house rule/homebrewing experience to be an integral part of tabletop gaming, and that you have to take it into account when designing a game to ensure its success?

You don’t have to, but I want to. Like I said, it’s one of the reasons tech exists as a tentpole rule of the game. To use the parlance of D&D, it’d be like if the Fighter class allowed you to change the rules of the game as you were playing it.

From what I’ve read and experienced from your work, it seems to me like the themes and tones of your games’ settings are reflected in and even directly influence their mechanics. Would you say that’s accurate, and can you speak to that process?

I think that’s highly accurate. I almost present naked mechanics on the page sometimes - it’s a bad habit, I’m trying to work them into the story as much as I can, but I do like mechanical answers.

Could you define what you mean by ‘naked’ mechanics?

What I mean is showing the backend of the game’s statistics in a place where the players can see it. Like the range table, presenting all of the numbers. It’s just begging you to go “what’s my percentage to hit with this weapon from this distance,” or even reverse-engineer the system itself. If you start reverse-engineering CPR, it’ll be very apparent how mechanics inform and determine each other and why certain design decisions were made. That’s what I mean by ‘naked,’ and I think it adds to the modularity we discussed earlier.

But back to your main question - yes, the atmosphere absolutely influences the mechanics. There are so many good cyberpunk-genre games out there, and what sets us apart is the capital-c in Cyberpunk. You play our game because you want to play in the world we’ve built. The goal is to have the mechanics reflect that specific world when you play that specific game. In the couple of Witcher things I’ve worked on, there’s definitely mechanically-focused content that works in the same way.

Mechanics are there to draw you into a world that we want to show you and invite you to explore.

Follow-up to that: Cyberpunk and the Witcher are setting-based systems, as opposed to a setting-agnostic system like Dungeons & Dragons, where they publish different settings that operate in the same core system (if you want to read more about that process, check out or recent interview with Eberron creator Keith Baker). Do you have any experience working in a setting-agnostic system like that?

So most of the benefit of a setting-agnostic game is the inherent modularity of the experience. I think that, to an extent, because of the way the design works in CPR for example, it could easily be setting-agnostic. You could take out the rules that anchor you to the world - you don’t have to play in Night City, you can play anywhere - but the setting is often what makes a system special. There really aren’t a lot of setting-agnostic books coming out these days, I don’t think. I think the ground has shifted.

What you spoke to before about “Why my system?” - I think the personality inherent in an established setting is a big factor in that.

Definitely. You can really enhance your book with a cool setting, and if you set out to make a system divorced from any setting then you completely miss out on that opportunity. The setting can’t inform the gameplay, it has to be the other way around. And from a more cynical place, you can’t sell action figures or leverage your established intellectual property. Harder to market and monetize for sure. Not that you can’t do that, but I think if you’re setting out to make a game you should at least give setting design a shot. What’s the harm in adding in a little bit of personality?

Speaking more about designing with constraints - I know that Cyberpunk was made by Mike Ponsdmith and R. Talsorian. This also applies to Cyberpunk because you have other properties under the broader, established canon - 2077 or the animated show, for example. The Witcher is also an established universe that has been passed through many creative hands. How do you approach creating in a space where so much of it is predetermined and where changes can have ramifications on other properties?

That’s a very hard question - and I’d say if anyone out there is dealing with this exact problem, feel free to reach out and tell me the answer. My general advice is that you have to use extreme care, and know your lore bible. We’re constantly looking stuff up to make sure, and a lot of times you have to go run it past the person giving you the license and make sure everything’s kosher. You just have to try your best to be a good lorekeeper for the property you’re working on. Really you just have to be a big fan of the material when you’re working in an established space like this, but I think that goes without saying.

It’s hard, because not only do you have constraints, you also have what I’ll call a ‘shounen anime issue’ - take Dragon Ball: Z for example. They start by making 5 foot craters in the ground, then 30 feet, then they’re blowing up mountains, then planets - and at some point you can no longer sustain this process. You need an outlet valve for the ‘energy’ generated by stories so that you can avoid what’s called ‘scope creep’. When you work in an established, long-running IP, you have to give your stories room to breathe so they don’t keep building and building until they completely strain suspension of disbelief.

I think there’s a really easy solution to this, by the way. It’s a totally fixable issue, but it requires a level of lore knowledge. Big events are super awesome and interesting, but I think you have to have enough of an understanding of the material to go ‘yeah, but in another unrelated part of the world, this awesome and interesting thing was happening.’ My point is, not every Cyberpunk adventure has to be the full-on assault on Arasaka Tower. It’s a great, big world, and you don’t have to keep raising the stakes with the same set of established characters to keep things interesting.

So you’d say that you could go wide, but you can also go deep?

Definitely. Finding this cool side thing to go deep on is an excellent way to expand an existing canon.

You touched on this before, but I assume that the people who give you the license keep constant correspondence to keep things accurate?

100%. We fully cooperate with CDPR on all this stuff, and we’re very lucky that they’re so great to work with. I hear other people have trouble with their license-holders, and we don’t! I’m very grateful for that.

I imagine an advantage of working in these popular and established worlds is that you have a very robust wiki to work with.

Very true! You always have to be vigilant because fan content can start creeping into community-managed wiki’s. They’re not 100% trustworthy, but they are 90% trustworthy, and they can be very handy when you need them.

I don’t remember if it was in the RED source book or somewhere else, but one of my favorite random lore bits about Cyberpunk is a ‘poser gang’ called the ‘Kennedys’, which are just a bunch of goons who get surgery and implants to all look exactly like JFK.

Yeah, one of the coolest parts about the Cyberpunk world is that there’s a cutoff for when history is exactly like our world, and you get to play with what came before and re-interpret what came after in really fun and creative ways. Another great example of that is that the Wizard of Oz just fully exists in the Cyberpunk universe, and there’s a gang in one of our books called the Yellow Brick Road gang who just kind of cosplay as characters from the film.

I know one of the main stated goals behind the creation of Cyberpunk RED was to streamline the experience. Would you say that was the driving ethos behind the game? If not, what was?

I would say that the ethos behind designing Cyberpunk RED was transplanting the ‘soul’ of Cyberpunk 2022 into the future of 2045. We wanted to maintain the spirit of the original setting while progressing the world in a meaningful way. There are a lot of sci-fi settings where time seems to stand still - these large, sweeping stories pop up every once in a while but other than that nothing really seems to happen. I think it’s rather refreshing to get to move the Cyberpunk timeline in a meaningful and granular way, and that’s why it’s my stated goal.

But beyond that high-brow 'ethos' stuff, yes. Streamlining the mechanics was absolutely necessary. It had been thirty-something years since the original game came out, and so much has changed in the space since then. I wanted to make something that was in line with other games coming out right now, while still keeping the jagged, crunchy spirit of the original. In many ways, it’s only ‘streamlined’ in comparison to older, extremely crunchy simulationist games where you’d measure momentum and stuff. There’s this spectrum between simulationist ideas, and narrative concepts. This one is still in the simulationist area, but is much closer to the middle compared to 2020.

I hope because of that, anyone can pick up and play it. Certainly, if you’ve picked up any other game from the last ten years, you can play CPR. It could be your first game, even. It’s accessible, but still deep and complex like 2020.

Cyberpunk has never shied away from social commentary, especially when it comes to the perils of unchecked capitalism and technological advancement. How has your team’s approach to tackling the themes of this “dark future” changed since the game’s inception in the 80’s?

I think that we’ve done so very organically. Unchecked capitalism and technological advancement are part of the DNA of cyberpunk, and the game has always been a very progressive, Punk take on being unhappy with the authorities in charge. Cyberpunk has always been commentary based on the context of its time. In our world, in 2023, we have new authorities that are doing the same stuff as in the 80s, just with a different flavor. I think it’s important that we meet the new ‘man’, as with the old one, and respond to them in kind. It’s what being Punk is all about.

One personal question to bring us home: when you are dealing with burnout, or otherwise creatively drained, what is a vice, passion, or source of entertainment that helps you reinvigorate yourself?

That’s a great question. I like to make a pilgrimage, I guess, to a place of quiet. Somewhere I just like being, where I can take some deep breaths and recharge. There’s a particular corner of a mall near where I live, which for some reason is just the quietest place on earth. Something about the way the walls come together where it’s like you’re inside a silencer, and no sound goes there. There’s a couch, and it’s great. Sometimes I’ll go to that mall just to sit on that couch. It’s better than my house, because when I’m in my house, I’m thinking about work. Or watching TV, and watching TV isn’t a way to deal with burnout.

Otherwise, walking to Half Price Books, looking at a bunch of cool books I’ve never seen before, that works great for me. These things work for fatigue, and maybe the early stages of burnout, but let’s be honest - in this job you can get really burnt out, to the point that that doesn’t even work.

For the hardcore burnout, you need to just stop doing things the way you’ve been doing them, at least for a short period of time. Break the routine that’s causing the problem. I know that answer comes from a place of privilege, because there are people out there who can’t do that, or can’t afford to. But if you have it available to you, break the routine - just take a day off, man. Do something that not only has nothing to do with your work, but something you’ve never done before. A place you’ve never been before. Experience the new, right? Just be there instead of where you were, and then when you come back, it gives you the distance between you and your burnout. Maybe you recontextualize, get some energy and try it again.

I have a more difficult solution, too, but it’s important to remember. If you’re experiencing big burnout, keep in mind that not every project is a project you should finish. In fact, if you’ve gotten what you needed out of a project, if you’ve failed and are able to grow a little bit, maybe move onto the next project instead of bashing every shred of passion out of this one. And when you think about it, if you learned something or improved in some way, you didn’t really fail. Anyway, sometimes burnout is a sign that you’re working on the wrong project. Listen to your burnout - it’s not always a demon to be slain.

Here’s my favorite point of advice: if you’re 18-22, working on your first game, it’s so important to remember that this isn’t going to be your last game. If you finish it, you’ll have to make another one. There’s this dread that can creep in when you’re doing a thing, where it is hard, or hurts, to imagine yourself doing it again. But know that you’re neck-deep in something you’re getting better at - keep your head up, kid.

James, thank you so much for your time. Before we let you go, is there anything you’d like to shout out?

Yes! A couple things, in order: First, Black Chrome and Interface RED volume 2 are out now for Cyberpunk. They’re fantastic and full of art, with hundreds of tables and exotics and other much-loved features. Second, we have free DLC that I write and design every month, and they have new, canon content on our website, rtalsoriangames.com. If you don’t read them, it’s like you’re only watching the big Marvel movies, and missing all the shows and comics. You’re gonna miss stuff that you don’t want to miss. If you’re a CP:R fan, you always have something to look forward to every month, and we don’t charge you for it. Third, if you’re just a die-hard fan of my work, I have my own website, jameshuttgames.com, there’s a newsletter there in case you want to keep in touch with my indie stuff.

If you want to find James Hutt online, you can find him on Linkedin or at his website, jameshuttgames.com. As always, stay posted for our next LegendKeeper newsletter!