Vincent Baker recently shared an annecdote about how designers from different corners of RPG-land publicly advocated against GMs planning outcomes in their games.

Commenter CC (I don't know his name) replied with an excellent example of a planned outcome that paid off, with the PCs deceived a second time by their hated arch-nemesis.

Here's my ( Read more... )

Vincent Baker has designed a bunch of RPGs, including two I quite like in Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World.  Currently, the amount of money he's making off selling his RPGs would be enough for me to live on.  So I'm extremely interested to find out how he's achieved what he has.  One part of that is understanding how he thinks about what ( Read more... )

Perhaps ( Read more... )

Some guys on the Forge were making a case for a particular source of fun in RPGs, basically called "adbuctive failure".  It's where players make assumptions about the gameworld that are appropriate and logical but also boringly predicatable, and then the GM will occasionally say, "Aha!  In this case, your expectations are incorrect!  There's ( Read more... )