Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8490731" data-attributes="member: 18">I think there are a couple of issues here.1) Not all RPGs will materially benefit from a degree in statistics. Most of the the math you need to design RPGs is relatively straightforward. Videogames will benefit more, particularly loot-centric ones where characters have a lot of different numbers (stats) to track.2) Having such a degree doesn't indicate anything about your ability to design logical, easy-to-follow, or fun-to-engage-with rules, nor to design rules which are reasonably solid (i.e. not full of holes/issues). If anything a law degree might be more helpful here.3) Hundreds of hours of experience, like having designed your own game, would certainly be good. However, we've seen a few times that a person can design a great game by themselves, and then not add very much or even be unhelpful on a project with multiple designers, and we've seen even within 5E some really trash-tier rules (in one case so bad they don't even do what they say they do, like literally) appear at least as optional rules in the core rulebooks (the Sanity mechanic for example literally doesn't do what it says it does, but I refuse to have the entire multi-page argument with the one guy who thought it did again lol so that's all I'll say!).I'm not saying that you "need less qualifications", but I am saying that it's harder to assess what the right qualifications actually are. Like, does Vincent Baker have a degree in statistics? If not would you ignore the guy who designed Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World in favour of someone who did? Or Meguey Baker? (I'm genuinely asking because I can't find out - none of his bios list any degrees. I assume he has at least one but I have no idea what.) I think if we look at lot of people who have designed some really great RPGs, we'd find very few of them had specifically RPG-relevant degrees.With art, it's likely you either will have a degree or even a masters, but the real test is creating art of suitable quality. And that's going to be a lot easier to show. I certainly wouldn't require a degree for someone doing art for an RPG, for example, not if they had a portfolio.</blockquote>

Verification