Assume the role of questing knights in an archetypal Grail Quest of your own making.
I am bringing out a redesigned version of City of Birds that is easier to read and also shorter, with a slightly lower cost to match ($6 in PDF). CoB is my story-centric, semi-historical role-playing game that does without many traditional RPG elements.
Jan 06, 2010 | Filed in news
Spore’s problems can be reduced to one fundamental flaw. It is not EA’s aggressive DRM, the game’s failure to be meet impossible hype, or a mainstream target audience. The flaw is simpler and far more egregious: player decisions that have no consequences.
Nov 27, 2009 | Filed in reviews
I’m late to play Spore, the computer game by Will Wright in which you control a species through its long history, from cell to intergalactic power. I followed news of Spore through its design and release but my work-load stopped me from buying it…until now.
Nov 25, 2009 | Filed in reviews
Serious competition around an idea of simple winning is problematic. Players want to have their success determined in a non-arbitrary way: not by anyone’s subjective decisions. So victory is then logically tracked, made dependent on mechanics. This reasoning cascades from the final victory conditions to every other aspect of the game, leaving something that is primarily about strategy, little about role-playing. Even where joins are suggested by the game text, they will — very logically — be ignored, because they are tangential to the real goal of the game. I see but two solutions.
Nov 24, 2009 | Filed in design | Tagged: play, structures
In my previous essay, I introduced what I see as the two major “structures” of role-playing, mechanisms and imaginings. Here I’ll explore them further: their components, their interaction, and their use.
Nov 03, 2009 | Filed in design | Tagged: analysis, indie, nouns_verbs, play, structures
While working on one of my space wargames, I became interested in historical ships, especially their classification and relative characteristics. (Were most classes small while only a few were large? Or was there some other distribution?) Trauling the Web I assembled some data.
“Accumulating advantage” is a general term, describing the tendency of the rich to get richer though positive feedback. This happens in many strategy games, in two slightly different ways. First, the rewards of success, like money, can be turned into an engine for later success, like the purchase of factories. This is positive feedback through accrual. Second, there can be positive feedback through loss, where reductions in initial resources create disadvantage. Many naval wargames show this behavior. They demonstrate classic attrition warfare: nothing like terrain or morale complicates a relatively straightforward game of inevitable resource degradation.
Oct 13, 2009 | Filed in design | Tagged: mechanics, strategy
I’ve often struggled with the definition of games. What is it that makes role-playing role-playing? How is it different from board-gaming or wargaming? These terms may be useful but the boundaries they set are fairly arbitrary, and they could be abandoned.
Sep 20, 2009 | Filed in design | Tagged: analysis, indie, play, structures
RPGs have generally organized things into nouns and verbs. This is the distinction Chris Crawford makes regarding computer games—and I’ve written about applying this framework to RPGs—but it is tacitly done already.
Sep 07, 2009 | Filed in design | Tagged: nouns_verbs
Here are the bare-bones ideas for a fantasy set-up, with one central idea and many consequences that might follow from it.
