I grow food and I make stuff (games, drawing, writing, tools, craft). Experimenter. Getting better.
Into gamedev, art, music, kink, sexuality, mutual aid, kindness, truth, nature.
he/they/null, b/q, and more.
I grow food and I make stuff (games, drawing, writing, tools, craft). Experimenter. Getting better.
Into gamedev, art, music, kink, sexuality, mutual aid, kindness, truth, nature.
he/they/null, b/q, and more.
I *love* when games don't explain themselves.
I've seen a lot of game design discourse saying games ought to be self-contained. If you have to google it, the game isn't providing you the information you need!
e.g. Minecraft without the wiki and armies of video guides would be nearly unplayable. Similarly, the Dark Soulses are exceedingly cryptic and generally demand research in order to play effectively.
That this is a flaw seems to be taken as self-evident. But I don't think it is.
@lee_quadkorps If you wanted to just use the dungeons from the book, that would work fine. Or use the cards in a non-prescribed way. The DM would just have to decide how to string different locations together. Mörk Borg already invites a lot of creativity in application of the rules.
With cards I can do deck operations to manage game state, instead of just using random tables - add/remove cards, shuffle, peek, etc. And rules can be situational, presented only when they're relevant.
@lee_quadkorps I'm designing a Mörk Borg mod which uses a deck of cards for the DM to manage encounters, which circumvents this challenge to some degree. The cards can contain a good amount of info on their own, expanding mechanics as needed. Some cards reference pages from the book with a more detailed dungeon.
The flow is more challenging for the core of the booklet that discusses how to use the card deck, but that should be only a page or two if I do it right.
Hello, fellow game designers!
I highly dislike "per X" resource based design, e.g. per rest / per encounter. I prefer resources with a variety of ways that can raise/loser, but mostly just lower, to band those—and let resource regen tie to time/rest/etc.
How do you avoid it in your designs, or how do you embrace if it you enjoy that sort of design?