Game Ideas Un limited: Amazed
Some thoughts on variations on an ancient puzzle as a game technique are presented.
Game Ideas Un limited: Anniversary
The author marks a personal holiday by talking about personal holidays.
Game Ideas Un limited: Antagonists
This hopes to be the first of a new sporadic series of looks at designing the core of an adventure. This first approach focuses on the enemy, building the adventure around what he is expected to do, rather than around…
Game Ideas Un limited: Architecture
What do the buildings in our imagined cities and towns look like? There were practical reasons why ancient places looked like they did, and understanding some of these can give character to different parts of the world.
Game Ideas Un limited: Bands
Our character parties are often the best of the best. That might not be so realistic as it seems at first glance.
Game Ideas Un limited: Blanks
What do you do when you don't have any ideas, and you have to have them now?
Game Ideas Un limited: Catch
Not all enemies will kill you outright; some will take you alive. How can they do this, and why, and what happens after that?
Game Ideas Un limited: Character
Let's talk about that piece of paper with that odd name, impossible biographical data, and strange numbers on it. Why do we call that a character ?
Game Ideas Un limited: Conflicts
The miniseries on alignment wraps up with some summary and a look at the corners not as the clear statements of position they are usually taken to be, but as the true places of tension between competing values.
Game Ideas Un limited: Copying Ravel
An anecdote in the lives of two composers may help us come to understand how we become better game referees.
Game Ideas Un limited: Credibility
In a theory-intensive article, we consider exactly what it is we're really doing when we role play that is different from most other activities, and how we do it.
Game Ideas Un limited: Darkness
The lack of light conceals problems within problems; this article considers a few solutions to a problem that is often overlooked.
Game Ideas Un limited: Dedication
Returning to the discussion of alignment, we consider the impact of so-called side alignments.
Game Ideas Un limited: Designs
How do you help someone else with his world designs without trying to impose your view of how worlds work?
Game Ideas Un limited: Disabilities
What a character cannot do so easily will be the basis for what he does to compensate, and this in turn can enrich the game.
Game Ideas Un limited: Dreams
The thirteenth quarter of the series wraps up with a look at the connection between dreams and memories, in addition to providing a free look back at the previous dozen articles.
Game Ideas Un limited: du Jour
From soup to nuts, randomness is sometimes a matter of perspective.
Game Ideas Un limited: Fish Pond
Some thoughts on human interactions and social perceptions are offered in the context of better understanding character relationships and decisions.
Game Ideas Un limited: Flag Captures
Our exploration of scenario design draws on a popular action game to show some of the important features of one approach to The Quest as an adventure model.
Game Ideas Un limited: Fog
Would the game be more interesting, at least sometimes, if the players had less clear an idea of what was really happening?
Game Ideas Un limited: Foreshadowed
Ideas are considered related to giving the impression that something is going to happen before it does, whether or not you know what it will be.
Game Ideas Un limited: Freedom
The intermittent examination of alignment looks at another badly misunderstood aspect, and discovers again that there is something here near and dear.
Game Ideas Un limited: Haunting
Here's an idea for a game scenario you might find useful--a few thoughts on a haunted house.
Game Ideas Un limited: Home
A few musings on going home, and what that means, provide this week's thoughts about games.
Game Ideas Un limited: Hordes
Practical methods of creating armies for use in play make the dream of a great, grand, and glorious battle a bit more attainable.
Game Ideas Un limited: Hospitality
In some worlds and some cultures, the traveler can expect others to provide a safe place to stay. Does that happen in our game worlds, and what impact does that have?
Game Ideas Un limited: Idiomatic
Misunderstandings arising from the nuances in how we use language are the subject this week, with a few real-world examples and some ideas of how to involve such cultural and linguistic confusions in play.
Game Ideas Un limited: Impressions
Realistically, the people our characters meet are going to judge them by what they see at that first meeting, and after that everything will be filtered through those first impressions.
Game Ideas Un limited: McGuffin
In designing quest-style adventures, one of the critical questions to be addressed is for what we are questing. More to the point, why do we want this?
Game Ideas Un limited: Memories
In our free quarterly wrap-up, we think about the randomness of memory, and how that can be used in play, as we also glance back at the past quarter of articles.