Tell me if this is familiar: you’re playing an RPG, it’s the first session, and you’ve just wrapped up all the background stuff—who your characters are, how they’re related, where they fit in the world. You are ready to really start playing. The GM (maybe that’s you!) opens their mouth and… wait a minute. How do […]
So, in Arcadia, characters have a social role. Each role has three conditions that, when triggered, give the character tokens that they can use in social conflicts to maybe get what they want. The lowest status characters start with three such tokens, the highest five. That’s not a lot of range for what was a very […]
I’ve been thinking about this post from Chuck Wendig. In it, he talks about making the reader care about the characters you’ve written. It pertains to RPGs, too. Rather than the reader, though, both the other people you’re playing with and you yourself need to care about the character, though perhaps in different ways. I feel very […]
A couple days ago, I did a design chat with Ryan. One of the things we discussed was how to organize playtests. The particular kinds of playtest opportunities available to you will inevitably shape the game you can make. A consistent group with a regular schedule will allow you to produce a different game than […]
The most recent playtest verified my suspicion that the rules I needed were not “crunchy” but “soft”. I spent some time working out contexts in which the GM might want to say “that might not be so easy” and present some opposition, coupled with principles for the GM to use to push forward and provoke […]
What follows is rambly. You’ve been warned. I’ve been thinking about another result of the most recent playtest. It was implicit, between the lines of what John said, but I think the lesson was that the game needs a bit more space to breathe. The game has two economies, cards and tokens, that interact. It’s […]
I’ve been continuing to playtest Arcadia. It’s been going well, but the most recent playtest was that particular kind of frustrating and unsatisfying that a game designer sometimes seeks. Clearly, some of the gears were slipping. This mechanic here wasn’t quite interacting right with that mechanic there, as the GM I had a hard time […]
So, we played Night Witches recently, and the experience has really bolstered my confidence in AW hacks. Night Witches is a game made by this big-name indie designer about something they find cool, and while not everything in it jives with me personally, it works. AW is like the new D20 in that respect, it […]
Or really, ask? How about this: the players are engaged in improv, with the general topic as the premise of your game. You’re kind of observing, sitting back and throwing a wrench in the works every time they get too comfortable, and nudging them back into the theme every time they drift too far. What […]
I ran a little playstorm of Et in Arcadia Ego this weekend. It was very informative! One of the best things to come out of it was that, while there are many changes to make, I did not have to rip everything down and start from the ground up again, which is a sign of […]
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