My wife likes opera and I have watched several live streams of the Metropolitan Opera with her. The Met has the best musicians, the best singers and the best production crew in the world of opera. My response? Meh. I appreciate the effort that goes into it and I appreciate the amazing skill that everyone …
Category: design theory
Ludic Causality
Terry Pratchett, so far as I can tell, came up with the term "narrative causality." Narrative causality is when an event takes place in a story for the express purpose of driving the story in a particular direction. The hero doesn't have a lucky break because he's lucky. He has a lucky break because if …
What Is a Tabletop Role-Playing Game?
What is a role-playing game? Can't we just go with Potter Stewart's definition of obscenity, "I know it when I see it?" We could and, for most purposes, that definition would be fine. If we are going to design games or adventures for other people, then we need to go a step further. We need …
A Thought About How the Open System Developed
Many people who played with Dave Arneson said he had a lot of the "rules" for Blackmoor in his head. It wasn't written down. The lore of D&D's early creation was that Dave sent Gary eighteen pages of hand written notes which represented the "rules" of Dave's Blackmoor game. By today's standards, OD&D has a …
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What I Learned from Secrets of Blackmoor: Part II
In this post, I'm going to lay out some concepts I picked up, in part, from the documentary . These lessons align with an important observation made by Rob Kunst. That observation is this; Role playing games are a combination of open and closed systems. Role-playing games are games in which players can do things that …
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The Primary Reason I Use Dice
Cavegirl wrote a post about using dice which I agree with, mostly. Her thesis is, "Rolling dice is a tool for when it's hard for the GM to adjudicate the results." (emphasis hers) I can't agree that this is the only or perhaps even the primary use of dice in an RPG. As noted by Brendan …
Games That Don’t Have Rules For Everything You Can Do
Games have rules. They set the boundaries of what can and can not be done. In games like chess, Magic the Gathering and Ticket to Ride; if it isn't in the rules, you can't do it. Dave Arneson and the group of players in the Twin Cities discovered a type of game where you can …
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