Last night was election night, which means that it was a pretty late night for me. Luckily, I still managed to finish up a pretty massive article I’d been working on concerning the uses and abuses of randomization as a way to create unpredictability in turn-based RPG combat systems. Here is a snippet: A cunning […]

Games writer and RPG enthusiast Eric Schwarz has come out with another opinion piece on Gamasutra, this time concerning the use of ability cooldowns in RPGs. In practice, my biggest complaint against cooldown-oriented design is that it tends to take a way a lot of the tactical depth in a situation.  As a brute-force stopgap […]

Another year, another Independent Games Festival; another Independent Games Festival, another group of finalists; another group of finalists, another army of aggrieved developers who didn’t make the cut. There has arisen something of a tradition among indie developers of complaining about the Independent Games Festival. There are reasons for that. For one thing, the stakes […]

Eric Scwarz has posted an opinion piece on Gamasutra arguing that RPGs are not about story or decision-making so much as they are about rulesets: As narrative elements began to creep into RPGs, as players began to get attached to the characters they played as and the universes they inhabited, RPGs began to become associated […]

Today I scored an interview with Jeff Vogel, one of the great-grandaddies of the indie RPG world.Vogel has been developing indie RPGs for a whopping 15 years, and by all accounts, he’s been quite successful at it. We discussed the reaction to Avadon (his latest game), what his next move will be as a game […]