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We were blown away by how well the audience accepted the changes! High-level play was a real challenge for us in my 3E campaign. For 13th Age, Rob Heinsoo and I went "old school" and packed then level-up benefits into 10 levels.

Thanks for that. That's exactly what we were trying for.

The multiclassing system was promising, and prestige classes are cool, but overall the multiclassing system was impossible to balance. 13th Age has a multiclassing system in a supplement, and it puts a lot more work into balancing multiclassing.

Not many. In my experience, home-brew hacks often added complexity or they replaced systems rather than streamlining them.

The D&D 3rd Ed project was part big-picture vision and part a collection of individual decisions about rules, terms, and characters. In terms of rules, a lot of what we did amounted to streamlining. We removed absolute limits in favor of consequences, removed unnecessary distinctions in favor of...

Yeah, Ars Magica is about wizards, not about the actual 12th century.

Here we were comparing RPG wizards to wizards in fantasy literature, not to wizards in European society or folk belief. You're right that fantasy magic spells are way flashier than spells in folk tales or superstitious beliefs.

Specifically, we up-gunned low-level wizards. High-level spellcasters didn't need any improvement, and in fact we should have reined them in.

It was geeky fun to explore the history of Europe to develop those supplements.

Ars Magica had an obscure origin, but it had long-lasting effects. We did a number of influential support products that influenced 1990s game design, and it launched the careers of five of us who were part of the Ars Magica crew. Over the years, I had bought a ton of roleplaying games, and I...

Ars Magica had a lot of influence on other game designers, both directly and through World of Darkness, so I'm happy with how it turned out.

I was pretty amused when I saw Mage roll out.

Hard to imagine that anyone would even try to create a better magic system. Only a game devoted to wizards and to campaign play could even try.

Thanks. The one thing we were trying to be was evocative, so I'm glad people noticed.

By the time I started college in 1987, I was a die-hard Chaosium fan, and I taught my new college friends RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu. These friends and I talked a lot about roleplaying games and game design, and we tried to figure out how to create the best possible games. I had already been...

That's the way to do it. You can get any die range you want.

Indeed. Ryan Dancey deserves a medal or something.