This article originally appeared on DyingEarth.com, between 2004 and 2007. You can find part one here. A column about roleplaying By Robin D. Laws Last month we plundered the gilded halls of improv theory, appropriating for our own roleplaying purposes the “Yes, but” technique. GMs using this technique avoid answering player requests with a categorical […]
Tag Archives: game design
See P. XX a column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws A well-designed modular element for an RPG, whether we’re talking about a GMC, location, conspiracy, or occult tome, does more than extrapolate from an evocative premise. The text you write, explicitly or otherwise, indicates to the GM how it will be used in play. […]
A Column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Many moons ago I encountered a phenomenon I later termed an unrule. A rule, as goes without saying, is text the designer includes into a game to explain how it is played. An unrule is text you have to include to prevent players from making a mistaken […]
by Becky Annison It all started with Fiasco, a game by Jason Morningstar. Until then I’d loved and played many traditional games but nothing like Fiasco. It had no GM, required no pre-game prep and everyone created bits of the world and story. I’d never see anything like it before! The idea of no prep […]
See Page XX A Column About Roleplaying by Robin D. Laws A while back Cat asked me for guidance on an unheralded facet of tabletop RPG production, the gentle art of collating feedback from a group of playtesters into a single document of greatest use to the designer. After writing it up I figured that […]
Like most designers, when I get a stray idea for a game mechanic I try to exercise the discipline to make a note of it. Here’s where I can’t speak for other designers: I almost never use them, because they are misconceived by dint of their very nature as stray ideas. Mechanics for their own […]