As a software developer by day, Mike’s latest post where he gives us a peek at the very earliest D&D Next design docs warms my heart a little. It’s cool to see something like this not just for the insight into what they’re trying to do, but also for the insight into how they have to do it. How many game designers out there are collaborating with enough other people that they have to lay down a design doc on what their game is going to be? Not many. So a short document like this that gets everyone on the same page is a great thing. And sharing it with the community is even smarter. It cuts short a lot of critiques...

This week Mike’s got two topics with one theme: what does level advancement mean? We’ve touched on this topic before, with Monte, but this week there’s a focus on high levels and how a game might end. The surveys this week actually have some of the most interesting information, at least by inference. Let’s look at the first survey: Assuming you start at level 1, at what level do you feel that you’re ready to leave behind your character and start a new one? The interesting bit here is the implication that when you leave your character is a function of level. Not character death, not resolved issues, but...

I think Mike is titling his posts just to make it easy for me to choose an image for my thoughts: this week it’s These Are Not the Rules You’re Looking For on Legends and Lore. When I read the first paragraph I knew I was going to have a lot to say on this topic. The idea that a designer wants you to ignore part of the game speaks to a certain style of design, one that I am rather opinionated about. Any rule that can be ignored while still producing what the game is intended to produce is a rule that doesn’t need to be there. A quick note on the word “ignored:” I’m using the usage implied by Mike’s...

This week in Legends and Lore Mike talks about the idea of a one-hour adventure: an entire adventure, including character creation, fit into one hour of play time. This is exactly what D&D needs. A while ago when I talked about how tabletop gaming isn’t dead I mentioned that tabletop games have to be able to compete with videogames. In the early days of D&D “videogame” competition couldn’t compete in terms of depth and interaction. You had Pong and Adventure or Keep on the Borderlands, those are clearly different things. You go on a few years to 4E and videogames have outpaced tabletop. Modern games have...