Home » Category: Game Design

ttRPG System Choice

Punchier than previous attempts, here are some high-level thoughts about the distinctiveness of ttRPG systems. I hope these will help me get my head around what I want to run next, but they might also be useful if you are thinking of designing a tabletop RPG.

Whose fault is this?

Last time I wrote about reducing frustration in tabletop RPGs, including a lengthy suggestion for resetting the baseline of combat so that the minimum result of a combat action is still a little bit of progress. Near the end of that discussion I hinted at why it is better to be dodged than to miss, Continue Reading

Players Shouldn’t Miss…

It’s been another two years since I posted anything, and apparently I had made the blog private, so nobody has been reading it anyway. Never mind. Today, a game design post, in tabletop roleplaying games but with underlying principles equally valuable (if not more) in video games.

Post Mortem – Wizard Tower Defence

This post was rescued from my drafts in July 2018 and backdated to its current published date.Wizard Tower Defence is available on itch.io, free for Windows (and probably also Linux and OSX, but I daren’t say so because I haven’t tested that).This post is a retrospective for the game. At some point I should separately Continue Reading

Tutorial, or not Tutorial

Inspired by the discussion I got into this morning on Twitter, where there simply aren’t enough characters, my strong feelings on tutorial design.