Dev blogs, design theory, and other musings
The last few posts have been something of a series, all inspired by a single argument: “Storytelling Games are Not Roleplaying Games.” If you haven’t read any of these, the third is the most useful. The second can be skipped entirely…
The Easiest Thing in the World is to Criticize Without Contributing… What isn’t a role-playing game? The last couple posts have been prompted by this question. In the first post, I briefly discussed some history around the topic and made an argument as…
Don’t Write Theory While Hungry In my last post, I commented on attempts to redefine the term “role-playing game,” both recently and in the not-so-distant past. While I stand firm in my believe that this is an unreachable goal regardless of…
It was just over nine years ago that I started blogging about role-playing games. My initial entry into this new domain? A six-post, seven-thousand word series in response to John Wick’s Chess is Not an RPG. His was ostensibly a…
Wealth is a deceptively complicated subject when it comes to role-playing game design. While it seems like it should be a relatively straightforward affair, it can quickly become… messy in use. As a result, a number of approaches have been…
One of the things about designing a big project like this is that so much of the process is invisible. There will be a thousand little elements over which you have absolutely agonized, about which no one will have ever…
“The entire history of our hobby consists of a series of footnotes to OD&D.” Some years ago I realized that I’d crossed a threshold: roleplaying games had gone from something I’d been doing for a long time to something I’d…