Disorder in the CourtI have a great deal of other stuff to be working on. The concept of turning Phoenix Wright - a series of brilliant visual novel/puzzle zany courtroom melodramas - into a competitive tactical tabletop RPG has me by the throat, though, and won't let go. I will definitely run this at Unicon. I may do more with it, I don't know ( Read more... )

Last night we played Cold City, and it worked out quite well. We managed to fit character creation and a complete story into 3 hours; for what I intended to be an extended demo of the game, that was perfect ( Read more... )

My Conquest game, Hyaku Hachi, was a success. It hit its goals of having a LOT of absolutely nuts high-level d20 combat within a 2.5 hour session (actually pretty easy) and making antihero characters fun while still keeping them on a heroic adventure arc (tougher, but it worked). It could definitely have been better, and I'd like to post a more ( Read more... )

My Amazon order arrived, and I've already devoured Don't Make Me Think and A Theory of Fun. The first deals with UI design, the second with game design; one with reducing cognitive load, and the other with how fun arises from grokking (that is, using your brain to master a pattern, which definitely takes cognitive load ( Read more... )

Listening to Sons of Kryos today, I heard a wonderful segment in show #36 about player engagement, in which Jeff, Judd and Storn said really nice things about Auspicious Beginnings. That made my day ( Read more... )

Two new phones across my desk ( Read more... )

On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
William K. Zinsser;

"Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals"
Katie Salen; Hardcover;

"Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition)"
Steve Krug;

"A Theory of Fun for Game Design"Raph Koster; Paperback ( Read more... )

Here's something that a single-player videogame can trivially do that's hard in a tabletop RPG ( Read more... )

Learning is fun.

In fact, grokking something can be like a drugThis is why continuous-character-building games - like D&D 3.5, Exalted and Weapons of the Gods - are enormously appealing to a lot of players. Once the game gets rolling, play is a continuous series of learning and mastery. I'm hazarding a guess that this isn't well understood by the ( Read more... )

I relearned how to build a computer - and I only needed to sacrifice one perfectly good PC to obtain the dark knowledge!

I Burned Solars into Mu.

I...well, I got nothing done on Ancient Skies. Bad Jye.