It’s up! High Difficulty is the sonic screwdriver of RPG design. While not technically necessary, it does SO many things, comes with SO many advantages to make your games extremely difficult that I can barely imagine a running a game without it. You can listen to it here. Or subscribe on iTunes. Subscribing makes the […]

A surge of crunch time at work unfortunately prevented me from recording Episode 6 of the GM’s Guide until today. After I run an errand or two I’m going to sit down and get podcasting. Sorry for the delay. I’ll be recording episodes in advance this weekend to prevent this happening in the future.

The people have spoken, they desireth the DM’s guide podcast on iTunes. As a kind and merciful dungeonmaster, I have provided. However, I did have to change the name to “The GM’s Guide” for two reasons. First, because this podcast really is applicable to any RPG and even a lot of games beyond it. GM […]

I’ve lost count of how often I hear people respond to a design problem with, “just design it better”. One example is the detective vision mode in the Batman Arkham series, which has been used in many similar titles, entering a special vision mode that shows you the items you can interact with more clearly […]

Remaking Magic is back with a great fan-made card to analyze and a wickedly interesting discussion of how player archetypes actually work in game design. We also tackle the controversial censorship of a major magic site by the wizards that live along the coast themselves. Youc can check it out here.

Why are enemies we breezed past in the first level so hard here?! No more waiting around, in this stage you’ve got to MOVE to survive. Today we dive into the ingenious design of Castlevania’s first momentum-based stage.  

Yes, I really did spend a year and over 100 adventures, each with about 5-7 hours of content, testing and experimenting with combat desing principles. We kicked things off last episode, now click here for the conclusion. Speaking of experimenting, I decided to try a much shorter format to see if I could still deliver […]

It seems a lot of RPGs are trying to avoid the classic low level enemies. I’ve heard even Richard Garriott has a sign in his office that reads, “No rat killing”. Games like Guild Wars 2 try to blow players away with an awe-inspiring giant boss battle in the tutorial. While this approach has advantages, […]