Category: Game Design

  • You Are The Hero

    Recently, there has been a lot of discussion of the importance of having diverse characters in fiction, so that everyone has someone to identify with. It is possible, nay, easy, to make this discussion sound really, really stupid. “I can identify with an immortal, magic-wielding elf in an entirely fictional world, but only if it…

  • “Diversity” and American Dominance in RPGs

    The US dominance of both the pen-and-paper RPG industry and the diversity debate is a real problem, one that, I think, is actively hindering attempts to address the problems created by a lack of diversity. Let’s take an example I’m intimately familiar with: Japan. (For people who don’t know, I’ve lived here for 12 years,…

  • Inclusivity in Roleplaying Games

    Recently (over the last year or so) there has been a lot of talk in gaming of the need to make products more inclusive, to provide options who are not straight white cis-men. This campaign seems to have started in computer gaming, where my limited experience suggests that it is really needed, but it has…

  • Persistence Ain’t All That

    This post may come across as something of a rant, and possibly also as a humble brag. I have to concede that I’m ranting a bit, but I would like to emphasise that there is nothing humble about the bragging parts, and that I am entirely serious about the humble parts. This rant was inspired…

  • Choosing the World

    Although I will, of course, develop the detailed design of the game world while I’m working on the game, I do need to choose the basic type of world I want to create. Since we are focusing on things I’m personally interested in, there are four options: “classic” fantasy, modern fantasy, science fiction, and historical.…

  • Setting the Scene

    Introducing the game world is, like character creation, a major problem for role-playing games. Most games end up with several volumes of world information, running to thousands of pages; Ars Magica is certainly no exception to that. Reading this information and discovering the game world is part of the fun for a lot of people.…

  • Revising Creation

    My suggestion in the last post that we could generate characters during play created the problem that it would work better if the basic rules relied on simply beating a difficulty, not on the amount by which you beat it. However, the rules I designed for creating something relied on the final total. Can I…

  • Creating Characters

    Character creation is an essential part of any role-playing game, even if it just consists of choosing a character from a list. Indeed, it’s a part that a lot of role-players really enjoy, including me; I’ve created quite a lot of characters that I’ve never played, and knew I never had any chance of playing.…

  • Creating Projects

    So, how do we stitch creative actions together into a story? Here, I think I do want to model things on the classic RPG pattern. It’s classic for a reason, after all. The pattern is to have a number of encounters, which go together to form an adventure. Adventures are then strung together into campaigns.…

  • Executive Abilities

    The abilities needed to execute an idea are very likely to be different from those needed to come up with it (a possible exception is knowledge of genres), but what about the talents? Do they have to be different as well? I think that we can have some overlap, which is a good thing; characters…