Specificity

Here’s an extremely good, short article about game design.

http://www.20by20room.com/2005/10/agency_a_brief_.html

The final line:

And telling people, “Do whatever you want!” is (almost always) extremely
unhelpful. Too many choices is no choice at all.

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Shouldn’t there be goals in games? Have we gotten too far away from that, that there are no new metrics to use to benchmark progress in a game? D&D had experience points, and you knew how well you were doing by your XP total, or by the level of your character. Not that these are absolute goals, but they serve to indicate how well you are doing.

On the other hand, do we need to have artificical and external rewards? Can’t the realization of in-game goals serve as the best metric for success?

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Cover Art?

I thought this might make a good cover for a game supplement or something. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the source, so I don’t know whose work it is to even ask if they’d allow it to be used.

The original title for it was corridor.jpg

Design Patterns of Successful RPGs

I downloaded it and filed it in my RPG library. I’ll try to print a dead-tree
version I can read at some point.

Scanning through quickly it looks like it might be useful to go through it as a
starting point for identifying mechanics you want to use (or avoid) though I’m
not sure if it will really produce better design.

Link

Quoting Thor Hansen :

> http://www.20by20room.com/
> at the top there is a link to the text of a book called *Design Patterns of
> Successful Role Playing Games *It is too many pages to be printed at the
> library but it is a PDF so read it all you want