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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 2947975" data-attributes="member: 697">At this point in the history of game design as a professional field, we're still at the point of black magic and guesswork. Designing a game is much more like filming a movie than building a chair. You can understand everything that makes a game good, but there's still an X factor in terms of creativity, vision, and implemenation.I think for me RPG products are similar to metal miniatures. I can look at a figure and think it really looks cool, and I usually have enough experience as a painter to know if I have the skill and patience to make it look nice when I paint it. But there are still times when I start a figure and learn that I just don't have the skill to do a good job with the details, or there's just too many fiddly belt buckles for the figure to be fun to paint, and so on.With a lot of experience under my belt, I have a much better chance of determining if a figure will be fun to paint. Yet, my predictions are not perfect. I feel much the same way about RPG design. Hopefully, with more pracitce and study we can keep getting better at it.</blockquote>