Defining RPG’s
by Andre on Aug.07, 2010, under games
I rediscovered an old post by Josh Bishop Roby called Games, The Standard, and Spoons, mainly discussing the efficacy of the Big Three questions (and the Power 19 in general) for triggering a Eureka! moment in potential game designers—when they realize that all the standard assumptions they have about how RPG’s ought to work are merely that. It’s a pretty awesome read, in the vein of “Zen and the art of Game Design.”
Anyway, in that post he says:
“Roleplaying is people collaboratively imagining events. Everything else is optional. No really, everything else. Designing a game is directing that activity towards a specific purpose. You, as the designer, choose that purpose. Everything else that you add needs to serve that purpose.”
Damn. It doesn’t get much clearer than that.
