Topics regarding design and game theory.
This process owes its genesis to ideas I had while reading Justin Alexander’s Node-Based Scenario Design essay. This essay formalized processes I had been applying and helped focus my mind on them… and led to me to some abstractions I hadn’t considered before. An adventure, a scenario, can ultimately be …
I’ve been looking through some older D&D materials. I know I’ve seen something in at least one of them about non-linear adventure design, but haven’t been able to put my hands (or eyes) on the one I want. I remember a section in a book that talks about trying to …
As part of my research for these articles, I’ve been reviewing published guidelines for adventure design. In the last couple days I have reviewed DMG 3.5, DMG II, Green Ronin’s Advanced Gamemaster’s Guide, and the Pathfinder GameMastery Guide. They have all had much the same advice for developing adventures: devise …
This is a quick addendum to my last post, particularly the section on scope levels. I wrote how scope levels describe how broad an impact or influence entities can have. However, I didn’t write about how big I expect game elements of each scope level to be in play. This …
This article is a follow-up to my earlier Campaign Setting Design article. It expands somewhat on the idea of entities (there called ‘features’; I have formalized the structures somewhat). I will be providing some greater description of the techniques I use to develop settings and scenarios. In order to do …
I’m starting to come to the conclusion that there’s probably no real harm in easing the limitations of armor use on arcane spell casters. It is already fairly easy to build an arcane caster who can use armor without significantly impacting their casting ability. There are a fair number of …
After reading most of The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, I stumbled on The Dresden Files RPG, and clearly it had to be mine. I’m only about fifty pages in, and I’ve read a campaign design technique hadn’t really thought about. I’ve been doing something similar for a while, but …
A friend of mind is running a D&D 4e campaign and was unhappy with one of the maps he was using. In order to get a complete view of the Vale he was using several maps butted together. They had differences in color and style (which never looks good) and …
Some more experimentation. I’m generally happy with it but there are some things I’m dissatisfied with. Mountains, I’m mostly happy. A little artifacting still visible, but applying a bit more (or a different?) displacement map to it could solve that. Hills (the brownish-green bits) could do with a bit more …
I was doing some more experiments with my mapping techniques. I’m becoming happier with them. I do need to improve the sequencing. Work out where I want the map elements (mountains, rivers, forests, etc.), then finalize river and shoreline before trying to tackle the elements. I screwed up this time …
