I’m a very goal-oriented person.
Present me with a problem, and the first thing my brain does is to identify the goal involved. After all, if I don’t know precisely what my goal is, time and effort spent on the problem stands a good chance of being wasted. So identify the goal, identify the tools you have, and engineer a method of gaining the former using the latter.
And now, I am part of a comapny that designs tabletop roleplaying games. What is my goal?
The answer is both immediate and (ideally) obvious: My goal is to design good games. Of course, this leads to the next, equally immediate and obvious question: What makes a game good? Fun, right? Yeah, the game should be fun - why play it otherwise?
What tools do I have?
I want you to have fun, but I can’t control your GM. I can’t control your fellow players, or your dice. In fact, I ultimately have only two “tools” I can use to maximize the fun you have playing our games. Those are the fluff, flavor, and thematics of the game, and the rules.
Recall, if you will, the movie Dead Poets Society. Specifically, the famous scene where Robin Williams, in his guise as the eccentric teacher, read an essay about graphing artistic value versus technical merit, and trying to maximize the area of the resulting rectangle. I’m sure most of you remember with great fondness his instruction to rip that page out of the book.
Well, I am not a writer of poetry. In fact, I have often been accused of having no soul. And so, in order to design a good game, I walked right into that classroom, plucked that page of the book out of the trashcan, and carefully smoothed out the wrinkles. The essence of that page is page 1 of my hypothetical book on good game design. (Please, hold all booing until the end of the lecture.) The thing is, I really and truly believe that greater art and beauty can be achieved by someone who has mastered the underlying technical details, and I really and truly believe that well-written, quality rules which support and invoke the flavor a game is supposed to have make it a far better game for it.
And so it is that I find myself as the advocate for rules. I don’t support rules for their own sake, of course. What I do support, and in fact insist on, is that every game concept, fluff and mechanic alike, is properly supported by rules. In future blog posts, I plan to go into more detail on how I approach and construct the wonderful chart that Professor Keating hated so much, and how I use it to improve the games we want to sell you.
Present me with a problem, and the first thing my brain does is to identify the goal involved. After all, if I don’t know precisely what my goal is, time and effort spent on the problem stands a good chance of being wasted. So identify the goal, identify the tools you have, and engineer a method of gaining the former using the latter.
And now, I am part of a comapny that designs tabletop roleplaying games. What is my goal?
The answer is both immediate and (ideally) obvious: My goal is to design good games. Of course, this leads to the next, equally immediate and obvious question: What makes a game good? Fun, right? Yeah, the game should be fun - why play it otherwise?
What tools do I have?
I want you to have fun, but I can’t control your GM. I can’t control your fellow players, or your dice. In fact, I ultimately have only two “tools” I can use to maximize the fun you have playing our games. Those are the fluff, flavor, and thematics of the game, and the rules.
Recall, if you will, the movie Dead Poets Society. Specifically, the famous scene where Robin Williams, in his guise as the eccentric teacher, read an essay about graphing artistic value versus technical merit, and trying to maximize the area of the resulting rectangle. I’m sure most of you remember with great fondness his instruction to rip that page out of the book.
Well, I am not a writer of poetry. In fact, I have often been accused of having no soul. And so, in order to design a good game, I walked right into that classroom, plucked that page of the book out of the trashcan, and carefully smoothed out the wrinkles. The essence of that page is page 1 of my hypothetical book on good game design. (Please, hold all booing until the end of the lecture.) The thing is, I really and truly believe that greater art and beauty can be achieved by someone who has mastered the underlying technical details, and I really and truly believe that well-written, quality rules which support and invoke the flavor a game is supposed to have make it a far better game for it.
And so it is that I find myself as the advocate for rules. I don’t support rules for their own sake, of course. What I do support, and in fact insist on, is that every game concept, fluff and mechanic alike, is properly supported by rules. In future blog posts, I plan to go into more detail on how I approach and construct the wonderful chart that Professor Keating hated so much, and how I use it to improve the games we want to sell you.
