My design philosophy has long been rooted in the idea of permissive and cooperative design – the idea that a game’s text and rules should serve to help the players. However,...

Hey everyone! This mini-blog is from when I was posting on cohost (coposting), talking about the Dallas RPG which I think was real neat! I’m going to preserving my other...

Rules by their inherent nature are restrictive. If you’re playing a game, everyone agrees to play by those rules, and break them only via consensus. We accept these...

Last time, we delved into the idea of multiple sources of uncertainty in order to begin our exploration of how TTRPGs can function without randomness. Now, we will take a...

Randomness has long been considered part and parcel of the TTRPG experience. Polyhedral dice and the d20 in particular are used frequently as emblems of TTRPGs (though...

Index Mechanic: Worker PlacementWorker placement is a mechanic where players have a limited ability to do actions in a given turn. This limit is represented by “workers” which...

Index Board games have a bad reputation in the TTRPG community. Whenever a game with formal rules that are considered too binding comes out, the common complaint is that the...

In my last blog post, I discussed taking a formalist approach to The Rule Book. One of the ideas that I derived from the text was that of the Minimal and Maximal player, which...

The Rule Book by Jaako Strenros and Markus Montola is a key text in understanding the relationship between games and rules. After reading an intriguing article from Jay Dragon...

Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) are an transitional medium. They stand between a large number of other media, which they borrow from and interact with in varying ways...