2010-01-28 : Compiling
Most of a year's worth of rpg theorizing:
"Designing a roleplaying game means more than designing rules that we can all agree to play by, and that are playable. It means designing rules that capture us - rules that become a vital part of our experience of play."
Causes, effects, fictional, real-world. Adequate fictional causes. Of IIEE, initiation and execution.
Players' jobs. GM's job. Responsibilities and the tools to fulfill them. Lazy play.
Authority, no; instead, responsibility and assent. "Assigning authority is just one way of many to go about soliciting assent."
Resolving players' conflicts of interest by promoting one above the other, no. Resolve players' conflicts of interests by reconciling them.
Subsystems: the meat of your game design is in the interactions of its subsystems, not in the subsystems themselves. Your real design is emergent.
Naked rpg theory makes a very poor game. "RPG designs manipulate social interactions, that's all" is the position from which you begin to design, not the goal of your design.
What a game calls for. Your 3 insights: insight into your subject matter, insight into roleplaying as a practice, insight into human nature and human experience.
Seed content.
The game's fiction counts as a subsystem: design it. Set it to interact with the others. It is a full participant in your game's emergent play.
