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“Player agency” refers to the player being allowed by the game to do things in the game that have real consequences to the long-term course, and especially the result, not just for succeeding or failing. Some campaigns offer a lot, some only a little. Are players just following the script or do...

I’m a categorizer and always have been. Categorization leads to illumination, but the danger in categorizing is that every play style might seem to fit only the extremes of each category. In this article, I try to categorize the various RPG styles of play in a logical manner. Picture courtesy...

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Silmarilion set a fashion for fictional civilizations lasting many millennia without much technological or social change. This worked for the literature, but rarely makes sense for games. Photo courtesy of Pixabay. “It is all a matter of time scale. An...

Yes, it is a way of looking at competitive play, not story-oriented or other types. It was devised long ago to explain play of opposed board games (not parallel competitions). For RPGs, YMMV a lot.

I'm going to have to disagree. Playtesting, often widespread playtesting, was common in board games long before that became common in the video game industry. And when the video game industry playtested, it tested for bugs, for ways that the softrware didn't work as intended, rather than for...

Had not heard of Five Room Dungeons (no, not anything of mine). After some reading: it seems more like a limited version of The Hero's Journey than like core adventures: how to organize a dungeon crawl, not "what adventures arise from." Certainly interesting, though.

I was editing an old (1984) adventure I’d written, in order to include it in reprints of my articles from back then, when it occurred to me that adventures often have particular cores, a particular “something” that makes them go. The idea is to build the adventure around the core. It’s “the...

We might by old courtesy call GenCon a tabletop game convention, but with film, writing, comics, cosplay, video games, it's really a "story convention", not a game convention. The others have little that isn't tabletop games.

In the early 1980s I wrote a column in Dragon Magazine called “The Role of Books.” I described nonfiction books so that Dragon readers could decide whether to read them as a source of ideas. But people have changed how they their ideas and inspiration. Keep in mind this was only a decade...

I suspect Jeffro thinks of it as six things you need to put together an adventure, not six categories or six essential aspects of the setting. Yes, six words is a versatile way to think of things, because there are so many ways to use it. I was trying to narrow it down to description.

Thanks, folks. My wife and I enjoyed many of the amusing attempts.

How much detail do you need to know to run a particular setting in FRPG? Some settings have about the detail level of comic books, some are more detailed such as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels or Lord of the Rings (LOTR), some have settings as detailed as the Game of Thrones show. Can you...

Commercial RPGs have existed for some 45 years. Where RPG ideas are concerned, there's not much new under the sun. Then why do people keep writing new RPGs? It's a LOT of work, even if you don't do it well. I think of composer Sir William Walton's remark after writing his only opera: "don't...

I've seen people suggest you look for student artists on large college campuses. They're not quite professionals yet, and need the credits. (But please, don't try to persuade them to do it for free "for the exposure".) I understand that actually getting freelance artists to deliver what they've...

An interesting calculation: according to what I've read, pulp writers (who wrote in VOLUME) in the thirties made 1 to 2 cents a word. But with inflation of 2453.3% since 1935, 1.5 cents a word becomes 25.5 cents. (Inflation Calculator). Yet several years ago, freelancers I talked with said 5...

You may benefit, as a GM, from understanding where your players stand in the spectrum from Romantic to Classical game player. The terms derive from music and philosophy. I discussed one point of view about game playing styles in an earlier column ("Different look at playing styles"). This one is...

It is virtually impossible to protect game ideas, but virtually no idea is new. On rare occasions someone deliberately copies someone else’s game, but game designers cannot worry about this: they have to talk to publishers, funding sources, and other people about their games. Photo courtesy...

Now that we've established the four stages of magic, here are some questions to ask yourself as you design your campaign world. You can read parts 1 here and 2 here. Art, Craft, or Science? First, is magic an art, a craft, or a science? If an art, there may be few practitioners, but some few...

The idea that there are natural stages that derive from use of magic is not new. Laying out the stages can help a lot when you’re creating a fantasy setting. Part 2. You can read Part 1 here. Sourced from Pixabay. Senility The fourth stage, Senility or Decadence, is depicted in Larry...