Thursday 10 July 2014

What Does a Strategy Designer Think About?

I do more reading than writing lately, but this Eurogame article by Chirstian Donlan on the development of strategy games by Firaxis does briefly look at the past of roleplaying games (wargame simulators) and issues we may run into in the future (housekeeping nightmares brought on by complexity).

I will not lie, I am currently running a Vampire the Requiem game using some modified Primacy game play rules from Damnation City, Block by Bloody Block, and Vampire: Prince of the City. I need a spreadsheet and a custom Google map overlay to run this, but I designed the spreadsheet myself and it allows me to rather easily keep track of relative prestige for all the characters involved. This is not a direct that I can see myself going with the megadungeon design.

Sometimes we tend to forget that these games are abstractions more than simulations, and that a dice roll can help determine an entire set of outcomes, rather than going through a flow chat worth of rolls just to determine whether you have successfully picked the lock on a door.

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