Weekly Review Apr. 30th to May 6th

This week has seen a variety of different ways to ask similar questions.

A Deeper Look

Joshua BishopRoby brings up the question of what types of character experiences different people find engaging. He separates people who want to feel their character fall apart, from those who want a return to hope after the struggle. He presents this as a way that a two similar styles of play can be quite different.

Elsewhere, Jere Genest presents his procedure for evaluating and refining RPGs as you play, summative evaluation. By continual conscious refinement, he proposes that many problems in play can be identified and designed away.

Communities of Practice

Over at Story Games, Jonathan Walton began an introduction to the community of practice as a model of RPG groups. These communities have a similar type of social interaction as RPGs. Namely, communities of practice consist of a shared enterprise, as well as an engagement in that shared enterprise, and lastly, from working together a collection of skills and understandings are reached which enhances that enterprise. In this there is a sense of growing into a more capable and cooperative group. Jonathan suggests that this growth can be observed to better understand how RPG groups come together.

Design Virus

Guy Shalev suggests that RPG design is something not unlike a viral disease. He describes the process where each design acts to make the next easier and more tempting. The result is a building desire to design more and more.