Design

Ordinal Fallbacks

Jan 1, 2023 · 1 min read · Design

Game designers often lecture (or bemoan) that nobody can possibly make a realistic game. But in the words of Queen Victoria, I am not interested in the possibility of failure. Instead of looking at 'is this showing what would happen if you really mounted a dragon while wearing armour', I prefer to look simply at the …

Word Game: Ghost

Dec 21, 2022 · 1 min read · Design

My favourite word-game is Ghost. You go round in a circle, each person stating a letter, which builds to a word. If someone completes a word of four or more letters, they lose. If someone receives a set of letters which cannot complete a word, they can challenge the person before them. If the person before states a …

An Automatic Dungeon Generator

Oct 2, 2022 · 2 min read · Design

Automatic dungeon generators are rubbish. Some are pretty, but all of them are completely unusable. You enter a room, it has a goblin, or treasure, or nothing. Next room. It makes no sense. Why was the goblin sitting there? Why was there treasure in the next room, and why didn't the goblin take it? Everything looks …

Systems and Genre Representation

Jul 12, 2022 · 3 min read · Theory Design

Systems should represent genres, and some do this better than others. System Excellence Dr Who One Dr Who RPG (I forget which) contained an absolutely genius initiative system. The initiative turn-order was: Speak Run Use an item Attack This clearly produces unrealistic results. The system cannot allow anyone to shoot …

Fate Points in BIND

Apr 12, 2022 · 8 min read · BIND Design

Remember that book or film where the protagonist received a nasty wound, then persevered, and won the day? Well that can't happen in RPGs, and that's a shame. So my solution is Fate Points (FP). Reasons People Created Hit Points Hit Points make sense as a standard game abstraction, until they apply to PCs. If PCs …

The OGL is not Open

Mar 22, 2022 · 4 min read · BIND Design FOSS

The Open Gaming Licence (OGL) does not in fact produce terribly open games, so I wish people would stop referring to such RPGs as 'open source'. No Real Books The OGL specifically excludes Product Identity. "Product Identity" means product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; …

If You Want to Understand an RPG System, Remove the Dice

Mar 5, 2022 · 6 min read · Theory Design

Reading over systems with all of those 'Add this, roll that' can give someone the appearance of a massive RPG engine, churning out all sorts of details and replicating various interesting minutiae of the gaming world. But sometimes what's really happening is pointless plastic tapping noises, and once the plastic's …