The Role of RPGs

A friend asked me what aspects and themes I liked about RPGs, and I responded with a word vomit. It is not clear, concise or even likely representative of my opinions, but it includes some, if not most of them and it is from the perspective of a designers, a GM and a player, so it is worth including here.

Game Design: Keeping the Spoon on the Nose

To me, as a designer, balance means a couple different things. In a single player game, it means that the player has interesting and valid choices available to them. For multi-player, it means that given equal skill, from the beginning of the game, each player has an equal chance to win. Its a bit more complicated than that however, so let's dive in.

How Guns Work (in Mass Effect)

The following is an article I wrote and posted a year or two back, talking about the then-upcomming Mass Effect 3. Its mostly a rant on the various ways to set up and design ammunition in a game. Without further ado, the original post: