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When someone says a game is "fun," you probably don’t really know what they mean, and maybe they don’t, either. Until you recognize that what's fun for you isn't necessarily fun for every game player, you cannot be a good GM. It’s obvious that what’s fun to a serious Chess player is not the...

Back when Dungeons & Dragons was new, the designers and most of the players were wargamers. Typical adventures involved threats to the player character's lives and possessions - their money and magic items. As the hobby has grown, more of the participants are not wargamers, and many campaigns...

In puzzles such as chess (and any other so-called "game" that is two player and perfect information), you can assume your opponent is a perfect player, and play accordingly. If the opponent is not perfect, you'll gain. This is maximizing your minimum gain, which is the basis of the...

Yes, there are many ways to introduce uncertainty in games. I've had a Stratego-like game published, and a block game on preorder at Worthington Publishing, for example. I didn't say you cannot introduce uncertainty into commercial games, I said that many hard-core gamers want to feel that...

As pointed out by DerekSTheRed, there's nothing inherent in magic that doesn't allow mass production. It's just not the norm, because we want and expect magic in stories and games to be Mysterious, not mundane. Eltab: Yes, war (as opposed to many wargames) is dominated by uncertainty: "War...

If you run a big RPG campaign, with a lot happening other than the adventures of the characters, often there will be a war on. I had to create a list of fundamental patterns of warfare for an online class I'm teaching, and thought the list might benefit GMs. One side is destined to win the...

This bottom-up method, as opposed to the more common top-down, certainly raises some interesting questions. At the other extreme is Jeffro's method of setting, that you only need to know about six things to get the game going.

Given that I treat D&D as a game, not a story (I have a story in the game, the game doesn't have a story it imposes on me), there is rarely a conflict between my character's motivations and traits and the game. My character is me, though it may be a me that's different from the real-world me...

Role-playing has existed for a century, if not longer. Some role-playing exercises (for education or business) are games with active human opposition, others are puzzles. You play a "role" even in Monopoly, and in many other board games, especially wargames ("you are the commander" said Avalon...

Video game designers use two terms worth understanding for all game and adventure designers, "atoms" and "loops". This time I'll talk about loops. "In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again. And so, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you...

Monopoly: People rarely actually remember *Monopoly* fondly, they remember doing something together with their family (often at holidays) when they were kids, where Monopoly happened to be what they were doing. It's the active togetherness, not the game, that counts. I have often discussed this...

"Lifestyle games," games that are hobbies in themselves for players who rarely play anything else, are almost always great games: Diplomacy, Bridge, Chess, Magic: the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons. But not all great games become lifestyle games. What makes a game "great"? Not good, not a...

Shidaku, there's a big difference between "harder" and "let's kill some people" in old D&D. I never used nor played in those "meat-grinder" modules. I don't believe in human sacrifice. The problem isn't whether combat is nasty or nice, it's more practical: if the players lose at anything like...

There are two different extremes in arranging fights. One is like war and the other is like a sporting event. Sporting events are supposed to be fair contests between roughly equal forces. On the other hand, war is the epitome of unfair competition. Jeffro Johnson introduced me to this...

I was reading about the level cap increasing from 60 to 70 in an online game, with many new possibilities/abilities. "How do people keep track of so many abilities at such high levels?" I thought. Then I realized yet another reason why I prefer simple games: "A designer knows he has achieved...

If you're going to design games, or GM RPGs, it helps to understand a little bit about what makes games enjoyable. Game publishers often say in their guidelines for designers "game must be fun," but I've always found this to be useless because fun means different things to different people...

Cloning In video games, cloning (making mirror copies) is a serious problem, and has led to lawsuits. I don't think we have much of it in tabletop games, though there are cases of parallel development that leave two games much alike.

Some people have identified an attitude nowadays called "the cult of the new". Something is necessarily better because it's new, in this view. New is often equated with "innovative", rightly or wrongly (I think wrongly). Certainly, makers of general-market retail products seem to think "new"...

Why is pure innovation regarded as important in games and adventures, even as it turns out that it hardly ever happens? People like to be surprised when they play games, and some of the most famous game designers such as Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario, Zelda, etc.) look for ways to surprise players. A...

Thanks This is a good substitute for reading the books, gives some idea of the context in connection with all stories Thanks for the reference.