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The most widespread (by far) RPG has been Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), though in quite different forms. And Dungeons & Dragons tends to be dominated by magic users, or more broadly, spell casters. Why is that? (I’m going to ignore that the original players of D&D were wargamers and they were used...

This is a misunderstanding of agency: "The wider the field of choices, the harder to make those choices it becomes for the players. The rule system itself is a constraint on both player and GM agency... and it works because it reduces near-infinite choices to a manageable few." Agency isn't...

Lanchester’s Power [Linear and Square] Laws mean that combat in science fiction RPGs will usually be fundamentally different than combat in fantasy RPGs. Or the designer will have to somehow compensate, as in Star Wars. Image by Andrea Wierer from Pixabay F. W. Lanchester, a polymath...

“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.