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Rob Donoghue Profile picture
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25 Jan, 8 tweets, 2 min read
If you make something that is good and interesting, then there MUST be people who it is NOT for. If you strive to understand WHY this is so, and celebrate it (rather than resent it) it makes *every* game better.
To unpack on this, I use the example of PBTA.

PBTA is not as intuitive to me as Fate (surprise), but because I recognize that's a matter of taste, not quality, that lets me analyze several things.
Top of head:
1) What works well in PBTA. Can I learn from that?
2) What gaps does PBTA have? Can I fill those?
3) What can I learn from how PBTA presents information?
4) What in PBTA *excites* people? Do i think it's unique?
4) Are there things I could do for fans of both?
Any one of those questions (and the many more that come from respecting another game) can lead directly to a better, more interesting, more fun product.
FOR EXAMPLE

Playbooks have almost nothing to do with rules. They work well *with* the PBTA rules because of the specific compactness of PBTA moves, but the idea is flexible and expandable.

Building on that? Pure opportunity.
If I viewed PBTA as "competition", or as "crap" because it's not my bag, I would be robbing myself of opportunity.

Dislike things usefully. It opens the world to you.
And while I used an example of something I mostly like (PBTA) as an example, I promise you this works equally well with things you like a lot less.
If you want to work this muscle, there is nothing that I can recommend more strongly than RIFTS. :)

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Rob Donoghue Profile picture
26 Jan
Re-mentioning: @affinitybyserif has a 50% off deal going at the moment, which means Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher are available for something like 25 bucks each. If you are an RPG publisher, you should at least look at this. affinity.serif.com/en-us/
These applications are functionally comparable to Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, and not in a "watered down knock off" sort of way, but in a "fully functional and super powerful" sort of way, but do not require a subscription.
They're not perfect. They're power apps, so there is a learning curve. And there are definitely benefits of buying into the adobesphere which you are passing up (especially on the photoshop side) but they are a reasonable, solid alternative, and I personally use them a lot.
Read 5 tweets
Rob Donoghue Profile picture
26 Jan
This is a good thread, and I am not criticizing it in saying my experience is a bit different, in large part because I'm aware my experience is the anomalous one. :)

That said, there are reasons for this: some are good, some aren't, and by their nature they point to alternatives
The two most critical points of this are as follows:
* This problem mirrors fiction
* There is a structural information load issue at work

Let's dive in.
Fictional protagonists are usually reactive. Antagonists (villains!) drive events and push for change, and protagonists stop them. This is not universally true, but it's so common as so be expected. It's one of the reasons playing villains is fun for reasons other than EEEVIL.
Read 32 tweets
Rob Donoghue Profile picture
26 Jan
Strikes me that a great political issue in a cyberpunk setting is the "Right to patch". If you have cyberware installed in your body, are you entitled to security updates? If no, then you're signing up for extortion, which seems like it would make the obvious answer "no", but!
That's evil you could explain to a 5 year old, and megacorps are at least a little sophisticated. They get your money by making you WANT to spend it, and conceding on this gives the government (such as it is) a "win", which is great optics.
And, critically, the details are in the fine print. Yes, security and stability patches are mandatory for a "reasonable period" after release. Which means that rather than nickel and diming you with service fees on your heart, they mandate a replacement when it goes EOL.
Read 12 tweets
Rob Donoghue Profile picture
25 Jan
I am hard pressed to think of an anime I have enjoyed more than The Great Pretender. Cowboy Bebop, I suppose, but it kind of has a lifetime exemption. Beyond that, it gets hard.
And because this is the internet, I point out that I did not say I can't think of a *better* anime. That would be meaningless and foolish.

But The Great Pretender really zooms in on my sweet spots.
* Team of Grifters conning bad guys? Check.
* Consistently amazing visual? Check
* Excellent but not-bombastic character design? Check
* Great music, used well? Check
* Diverse, deep, complex cast? Check
* Clever, long-view writing? Check
* Respects but uses the tropes? Check
Read 4 tweets
Rob Donoghue Profile picture
25 Jan
The heart of this article is this: "Give me a massive world full of waypoint markers and I will just go to those markers without thinking."

For me, I LOVE exploration, and it's not the waypoints that get in the way. I don't use them until I need them, but I WANT them when I do.
I find waypoints to be FAR less of a problem than the question of how much/what there is to discover in the spaces in between. This is hard (probably not impossible, but hard) to automate, because that tends to produce very banal rewards, or it otherwise bollixes the game.
Rewarding explorers without hosing everyone else is definitely tricky, but possible, because we're so inclined to make our own (often non-completionist) fun. Trick is just to realize that collectors and explorers overlap, but are not the same group.
Read 24 tweets
Rob Donoghue Profile picture
24 Jan
Related to the other tweet, I am currently looking very hard at Gumshoe and going "Ok, what if it's ALL investigative skills and nothing else?".

It introduces challenges, yes, but if you're already deep down the diceless rabbithole, very few of them are novel.
To get very nerdy - the thing that *I* find necessary to make Gumshoe fun is to have a robust *cycle* of currency. That is, points are spent, but they are also redeemed, and that back and forth is dynamic. Without it, the engine chokes (again, for me, not in a universal sense).
So, given that, the refund rules are important. But they reveal a weird split - If you think ONLY in terms of bonuses, an investigative spend can get you +3, and a non-investigative spend gets you +1. This *seems* like its offset by non-investigative pools being bigger. But!
Read 17 tweets

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