Archive for January, 2012

Atlas Games is doing this thing called “Reverb Gamers 2012″, with 31 question prompts to kick off 2012. I’m going to post one up each day, including weekends, throughout January. I invite you to do the same! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #31: How would your life be different if you’d never gotten into gaming?

Gaming has influenced my life so much that it’s hard to say. At minimum, I doubt anyone before friends, family & random coworkers would know my name. I wouldn’t be invited as guests to places and all that jazz.

More than that, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be alive today. That I’m typing this is right now is no small deal.

But I’m not ready to explain that in more detail. At least, not yet.

- Ryan

Atlas Games is doing this thing called “Reverb Gamers 2012″, with 31 question prompts to kick off 2012. I’m going to post one up each day, including weekends, throughout January. I invite you to do the same! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #30: What lessons have you taken from gaming that you can apply to your real life?

That’s a tough question. I have been gaming sine late high school. My friends, social life, and now business prospects all involve gaming. Narrowing it down to one set of lessons? I don’t think I can.

But rather than try to iterate many lessons, I’ll name just one. One I have mentioned before: we make our own win conditions.

Gaming & being a game designer over the years has taught me about the value, power, and limits of amateur psychology.

- Ryan

Atlas Games is doing this thing called “Reverb Gamers 2012″, with 31 question prompts to kick off 2012. I’m going to post one up each day, including weekends, throughout January. I invite you to do the same! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #29: What does the word “gamer” mean to you? Is that different than what other people seem to think it means?

Self-identifying game enthusiast.

Granted, these days “gamer” covers so much ground. Do you play Call of Duty? World of Warcraft? iOS games? Board games? RPGs? The word does not even pretend to mean a tribe anymore, as it did once when gaming was a thing to apparently be shameful about.

- Ryan

Atlas Games is doing this thing called “Reverb Gamers 2012″, with 31 question prompts to kick off 2012. I’m going to post one up each day, including weekends, throughout January. I invite you to do the same! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #28: Do you have any house rules when you game? What are they, and why do you use them? If not, why not?

There’s a theory that all gaming is influenced by house rules, and that’s one of the formative elements of roleplaying. I find that idea interesting and feels like it fits with 90% of what we do.

Anyone following my blow knows I talk about game hacks, which is what game designers call “house rules”. :)

- Ryan

As I take a momentary break from working on Mythender, after hitting a couple of epiphanies about presentation & content, I am reminded of something that, frankly, I could use more reminding of: there is no replacement for just doing the work.[1]

Thinking about the work will help you answer questions you know, so it’s good to chill and think outside of the actual moment of working. But in doing the work, writing or designing or whatever, something interesting happens: you discover questions you didn’t expect, and — more importantly — you discover answers you didn’t expect.

I’m changing Mythender’s character creation up a bit, to make it faster for convention play. If you’ve seen the character creation from before, you’ll see that there are different questions for your Heart and for your History (now called Past). They were open-ended questions. Some people dug them. Some people stalled. So I decided to just have three stock answers to chose from for each.[2]

Which, by the way, is a fuckton of content to make up.

The other thing you had to make up before, which I’m now putting on as choices, are what your Weapons are. I wasn’t sure how to do that; a couple months of mild thinking about this didn’t answer the question, and since I’m running this in a couple days, I had to just sit down and do it wrong just to have it done.

In doing that, the solution presented itself: the Weapons you choose come from the choices you pick for those questions. Now, that seems obvious, but it wasn’t obvious when I wasn’t sitting down and actually doing the work.

(Why I wasn’t doing the work? Making up 108 answers felt daunting, even though I know the way I should have done it is to do a little at a time. Sometimes, I’m a damned moron. :)

I’ve felt that way project after project, and if I need reminding of it, I’m sure others do to. So, if you’re stuck, and taking a moment hasn’t unstuck you, sit down and just be willing to do it wrong. You’ll discover unexpected answers in that path.

- Ryan

[1] I stumbled upon this old post recently, which I never followed up on with Part II. Or my blog is an ongoing Part II. I’ll go with the latter.

[2] For those who liked filling in the blank, that still exists. It’s now called “Advanced Character Creation,” and the text for that is pretty much “The questions are there. Pick your own answers & Weapons.”