rootring
rooted in blogs, linked in a ringWritings
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On the ring since 2026-03-24
Latest activity 2y ago
72 posts
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Mechanism Design and Theory
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Old School EssentialsLinked by the ring
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Old School EssentialsLinked by the ring
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Much of TTRPG design is based around randomness.
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Early Design TheoryLinked by the ring
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In which I argue against a excerpt from Between Two CairnsLinked by the ring
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Old School EssentialsLinked by the ring
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Roll Unification
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A Procedure For Finding Rare Item BuyersLinked by the ring
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Vickrey Auctions AboundLinked by the ring
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One of the most influential writings I’ve read with regards to game design is Chris McDowall’s Information, Choice, Impact. The article is worth a read, I’d summarize it as:Linked by the ring
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GURPS Dungeon Fantasy RPG
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Here Be Monte-CarloLinked by the ring
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Say you're designing a game, and you want to have some sort of mechanical representation of power.
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Part 1: Rewriting Isfjall
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Part 1: Rewriting Isfjall
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Part 1: Rewriting Isfjall
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Part 2: Rewriting Travel
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If you read discussions critiquing retail World of Warcraft, especially in relation to vanilla WoW, I find that the dialog is mostly around the following concepts:
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If a boss is sufficiently difficult enough to challenging when your group is uncontested, it will be borderline impossible when your group is contested, even if you're...
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First, a brief history of RPGs and how they used randomness.
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As a game ages and the developers iterate on it, they tend to lose touch with the players actually playing it.
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One of the hallmarks of MMOs is players having to invest time in character progression in particular character differentiators.
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I still maintain that the biggest design failure in World of Warcraft is the two-faction system.
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I'll start with a physical metaphor: a kitchen sink.
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In their 2008 gamasutra article, Andrew Doull writes a foundational article about progression in RPGs and how the concept is abused at large in game design.
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People (salaried professionals aside) play games for fun.
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In what is difficulty, I talked about how there's three forms of difficulty:
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Creating a MMO leveling experience where players have to slog through boring or needlessly repetitive content in order to unlock the "fun" part is bad design.
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On a physical level, games show us stuff on screens and send sound to our headphones.