A few thoughts on procedures and experience in TTRPGs (thanks to Rob Donoghue) A little over a week ago, TTRPG designer Rob Donoghue wrote a thread on Mastodon that struck a real chord with me, a...
Exploration is one of the great things in gaming. I am tempted to proclaim it the difference between gamer’s games and casual games, but there are enough games on the “wrong” (Settlers of C...
Design is the process of suiting an item to a task (or a set of closely related tasks). Details like shaping a handle to fit a hand seem obvious, but they get overlooked all the time. Anyone that...
https://linnaeus.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/rules-text-as-a-design-artifact/
In the comments to my last post, Ben Draper asked me if I knew of any board games with (by my definition) bad reward mechanics to match the RPG example of the old World of Darkness games. I knew ...
https://linnaeus.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/craft-trias-scoring/
Over the last couple months I’ve developed a new view of what makes a reward mechanic good. It’s arisen from viewing, in close proximity, and thinking about this excellent Extra Credits vi...
https://linnaeus.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/good-reward-mechanics/
Like your humble authour, my friend, Ryan Macklin (from the internet) has perfectionist’s disease. One result of this is that he’s been working on his roleplaying game, Mythender, for several...
https://linnaeus.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/gudlaugur-mythender/
Like most people in my generation of gamers, I love rolling dice; big handfuls of them when possible. Unfortunately, this clashes with a lot of other elements of my taste in games, and there are ...
https://linnaeus.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/linnaeuss-four-principles-of-dice-game-design/
WARNING: An uncharacteristic amount of namedropping occurs in the following anecdote. I’ve done my best to keep it to a minimum, but some is necessary for context. I was fortunate enough to att...
https://linnaeus.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/supers-rpgs-and-comic-book-rpgs/
I want to let my readers know about a new project that’s just come up on Kickstarter. Quinn “Gamefiend” Murphy is starting a new line of Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition PDF products, and...
https://linnaeus.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/kickstarting-worldbreakers/
One reason why I love Race for the Galaxy so much is the strong exploration element. You find new combinations of cards and powers regularly – even after hundreds of plays – which keeps it a ...
https://linnaeus.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/strategic-bricolage/