anyway.

4. I figure that a game where how long it takes to load a musket really, really matters is still out of our reach.

1. More modular design. I'd like games where you can collapse and expand the mechanical systems based upon the social system's functioning at that moment. So, like, if you're playing and everyone really wants the GM to just decide you can totally GM fiat the thing without derailing the other mechanisms, but when everyone wants things to be more emergent you can roll it out without that disrupting the flow of power and status in the game.

2. Underground had this mechanic that linked character success directly to social justice in their neighborhood. Judd recently toke a stab at something vaguely similar with his "Changing the Century" hack for Spirit of the Century. All in all, however, I think this has been a very overlooked spot of development—ways in which mechanized elements track change in the world based on specific criteria.

3. A good history game. That is, not a game about a specific historical story (which we've got a few of), but a game about history unfolding through the actions of individuals. This game would take into consideration the real history of a place and time, and put the players into consequential positions within that history, and then see what pressures they struggle with and how their struggles effect the world to come. Oh, it'd also do this without getting bogged down in crap, or having the players need to be subject matter experts.

4. The game I listed in number 3.

I want to see more games with an integrated story structure. I want the mechanics and setup to create a story rather than "merely" creating a series of events that have characters and theme that we identify strongly with.

I want more games that tell me how to structure a session.

I want more games with a GM that don't rely upon the GM to provide all of the moving-forward-oomph for a session. Primetime Adventures does this perfectly. It's got a GM, the GM has an important role, but the GM is not constantly required to push the story forward. All the players are required by the rules to participate in chugging things along. This is something I'm struggling with in Misspent Youth.

One answer to the above conundrum might just be "ask the other players to do it." The thing is, though, when it's part of the game rules it happens far more reliably than if it's an informal play practice thing.

Oh, a survey. That'll solve everything.

1) So I have set up a rock that's going to crash down on your head when you open the door. Games where that matters more than anything else.

4) A game which will fulfill my desire for fantasy / horror.

Ben, Steve Jackson published that game way back when. It's called Killer. :)

1. Better incorporation of board game elements and insights from board game design into RPGs.

2. The way that Engle Matrix Games explicity incorporate the judgment call as the crux of resolution.

3. Vincent, your musket game sounds good to me! But instead I'll say a highly simulationist game about American politics.

4. The game where what happens to the culture is at the center and what happens to the character is a side effect.

1. I'd like to see more games that automatically leave some kind of document, map, or other viewable thing behind. Something that's really fun to look at when other people do.

2. I like how in Poker, picking up on the tells of your fellow players over time makes a big difference.

3. I'm ready for a truly interesting set of minigames that make up a larger game. Lots of little pieces, each one with simple but distinct mechanics that are easy to learn and fun to play with, and that complement eachother in newfound ways. Like, this week the protagonist(s) are involved in an election, so you get to play the little, self-contained community organizer rules! They're fun! Almost as fun as the little, self-contained musket-loading rules we used last week when that was what mattered most. When I think about this idea I remember when the Durham 3 were talking about doing a game where they would play a Memoir '44 battle first to see how the battle went, then some other game to play the Band of Brothers type characters involved in it. Those are big complex rulesystems, more complex than I'm talking about, but being able to seamlessly combine them in that kind of way is the thing I'm ready for. I'm not talking about "Rules for Aquatic Combat!" that build off a core mechanic but make it even uglier to actually deal with.

4. Hopefully not my #3, but maybe. I think a game that really spurs people to describe fantastic scenes like you see in the best fantasy concept art is still beyond reach.

The game where what happens to the culture is at the center and what happens to the character is a side effect.

I think that might be what's happening with Human Contact. Arguably this happens a lot in shock:.

Rereading, I see how similar my #3 is to Brand's modular #1.

Reign also deals with Brand's #2, and Tony's #4 to a certain extent.

1. Less story and more character. Or more use of counters and tokens to move around between players and pools.

2. Box sets with lots of cool stuff.

3. See 4#. I'm not sure it can be done at the moment. I'm not sure we have the marriage of drama and tactics.

4. Heroic fantasy, the Conan kind of thing that has exciting combat with meaningful tactical choices that doesn't take too long to run and isn't feat based (i.e. based on limiting choices) but still gives the heroic feel in which characters also make dramatic decisions. In particular what I'd like is the marriage of exciting combat that's lighter than say Burning Empire but just as tactical as 4e.

Tony Dowler quoth:

"1. Better incorporation of board game elements and insights from board game design into RPGs."

Yes! And I'll also direct folks' attention to Android from Fantasy Flight Games. Uh, I babble a bit about it here. It's definitely a board game, but it manages to be a somewhat immersive experience. I think that it is worth further attention in developing what Tony is saying.

1. More with less fiddly.  Can we use less bits (cues, written material, whatever) more elegantly?  I'm thinking of Falling Leaves and the elegance of it as a whole and whether we can see more of it and move away from the cruft.

2. The intuitiveness of narration trading- playing with the subtleties.  Narration trading is super easy for most people to grasp, because, it's, "I say it and it happens".  And several games used it, but few bothered to play with it in subtle ways, more than I say/you say, I mean, play with constraints over it, trading limitations, breaking limitations. etc.

3.  Forum games.  No really.  The amount of time we spend on forums and no one has come up with a fun, workable system yet.  Fuck that mess.

4.  A game across multiple mediums- tabletop, irc, email, text messaging, etc., done in a unified manner.  Maybe the ARG folks might come up with something, but so far they're just playing clue-trail.

1. More games with a complete procedure outlined. No more games where theres like some monster stats here, and some combat rules there and...when do they interact, if at all? Fuck knows! So yeah, more games which are complete procedures and not just like bits of scattered lego in a box. Which of course probably spoils it for all the lego RPG lovers.

Anyway, I've lightly read through escape from tentacle city, and that seems to have complete procedure listed.

2. Extreme Vengence had a lovely little compact reward system, that rewarded all dice spent.

3. The author of the 'Prince of Nothing' series, to write the RPG for his books (they are derived from an intricate world that spawned from D&D play). Though sadly I suspect he'd probably write stats for rolling to hit, rather than wrenching the heart. I've idly considered writing a short draft for him and sending it to him...I babble now...

Anyway, read the book, know the qualities. I know that's a cheap reply, but you don't want me taking up tons of space here.

4. After traits, with their full ramifications, seem to be out of reach of roleplay culture. Sure if its a before trait, 'boba fett is my dad' might not fit. But if it's an after trait, you have to fit it into your narration. And that'll stick sideways in many a roleplayers throat, even as it gives the game the zing that draws them. As does any notion that their beloved fiction was written with a deliberate effort to set up moral situations, rather than them just happening. The latter is more for designers.

Since I have the memory of an ant, and hate scrolling up to read the questions, and assume that everyone's like me, I'm re-posting the questions together with my answer.

1. What's something you'd like to see a lot more of in new game designs?

Structured freeform.

2. What's a game design point from an older game that you think has been unfortunately overlooked?

Theatrix' flow charts, perhaps?

3. What's a game that you wish somebody would just hurry up and design already? (Not what specific game, but a game with what qualities?)

A simple and fun distributed-authority game for a large crowd of people - sort of like Shock: for 100 players.

4. What's a game that you figure is still just plain out of our reach? (Again, not what specific game, a game with what qualities?)

A game that will help us put an end to war.

1.  A game that isn't designed for a larger group, to be more accessible to those of us with only one or two others to play with.

Mechanics that don't involve random modifiers.  No dice rolling or card dealing.  Something off the wall, like acting or drawing.

2.  Dread's use of outside props that cause the mechanics to better simulate the mood of the game.

3.  A game about business, finance, and politics.  Sounds boring as hell, doesn't it?  I want a game that makes business intrigue interesting and exciting.  I want to roleplay the CEO of some mega sci-fi corp in outer space or something crazy like that.

4.  Something that makes storytelling transcend mediums, like Chris said.  The possibilities to that are very exciting.

1. What's something you'd like to see a lot more of in new game designs?

I want to be inspired to play as soon as I can.  That is really all I have ever asked.

2. What's a game design point from an older game that you think has been unfortunately overlooked?

I loved preludes from the original Vampire game and when I talk to folks about Vampire, no one seems to remember it.

3. What's a game that you wish somebody would just hurry up and design already? (Not what specific game, but a game with what qualities?)

There are so many games on my shelf that I am dying to play and have not yet or have not in a while (Nine Worlds, With Great Power..., Dust Devils, Dogs, Darkpages, Legends of Alyria, etc.) that it feels silly to want new games at all.

4. What's a game that you figure is still just plain out of our reach? (Again, not what specific game, a game with what qualities?)

Nothing is out of reach.  Eff that in the ear.

Vincent, I kinda think the stuff Jason's doing with Medical Hospital could get at your musket-loading thing.  Like, what if you had to perform a series of physical tasks that represented each stage of reloading the gun.  And, in the meantime, other players could do other things in real time.

1. What's something you'd like to see a lot more of in new game designs?

Just one thing? Structured freeform. Real time resolution.  A focus on social design.  Syncretism between different kinds of analog games.

2. What's a game design point from an older game that you think has been unfortunately overlooked?

Lighting the candle in Polaris.

3. What's a game that you wish somebody would just hurry up and design already? (Not what specific game, but a game with what qualities?)

I want a game where the different players are explicitly playing by completely different rules that are sometimes complementary and sometimes create interesting tensions between them.

Also, yeah, I want that game that takes the form of a bunch of mini-games strung together. I was struggling to design one of those when I joined the Forge and still haven't seen one.

4. What's a game that you figure is still just plain out of our reach? (Again, not what specific game, a game with what qualities?)

I feel like there are games that we could play (in a collaborative freeform fashion with the right group) that are still impossible for us to design in a structured way.  I also feel like we could design almost anything, so it's more a question of what would people actually design that would gain some traction in the current community.

I don't think, in the next couple of years, that we'll yet see any non-narrative games (games that mimic non-fiction, for example, or are largely abstract like classical music). I also feel like the costs of producing fancy game boards and tokens and cards will go down, but will continue to be high enough to prevent the rise of board and card game inspired hybrids. Some will trickle in, but we have to wait a bit longer for the real flood.

I'm also not sure we can create a game that makes one feel alone.

Brand, I've been working on a game that does your 2 and 3 for a long time now.  Dave's 1 as well, for that matter.  If you've got any insight, I'd love to hear it!

I really, really miss marginalia right now.

1. Trans-people. Crystal Clear Designs. Diagrams. Simpler resolution systems. More complex everything else.

2. Rock solid reward cycles (I'm espically thinking of Riddle of Steel.) The attitude of Play The Game Right or Die.

3. The Online persistant roleplaying game that isn't crap.

4. A 1 player dramatic roleplaying game with lasting interest.

1 & 3) I think a huge amount of attention has been paid to narrative as the model for game play.  Novels, television shows, etc.  And it seems like anyone who's resisting that is only saying "wait, games are games, the process not the product matters."  So this may be along the lines of stuff that Jonathan's #4 and Dave's #1 mentions, but I'd like to see games that explicitly model other forms of expression.  I'm not entirely even sure what I mean, but what is an RPG that's based on still-life or invention or abstract collage or memory quilts?  What if the game, instead of caring about the narrative that is produced in the end (y'know if you were to record and massage the result of the gmae) actually produces one of these other things?  I'd like a game that produces a collage through the shared semi-structured play.

4) It appears that games that teach us how to feel differently are still out of reach.  Most games don't really even teach you how to play very well.  But I think that any serious answer to this question is merely 'for now.'

I want to see a lot more of games where the stats (or whatever) aren't mechanically interchangeable - where the mechanical details of resolution depend materially on the arena of conflict, instead resolution handling all arenas of conflict identically. (Big surprise that this is the kind of game I'm designing right now.)

1. Game rules, the length of a term essay. I'm very hesitant to read, run or play any game where the rules cannot be sufficently laid out on 15-20 pages.

2. Random character creation. Because it's fast and forces you to hit the ground running (creatively speaking) and you usually know right away if you've got a winner or not. WFRPs character creation is brilliant that way.

3. A good one-shot game with a reliable, though not repetitive, intesity arc - for lack of a better word. I just picked up BSG the Board Game and it's got this great way of ratcheting up the tension and paranoia between the players until the one final blow that ends the game. I want a one-shot RPG that can do that.

4. An RPG that incorporates musical elements, not unlike Guitar Hero does. I've been working on one, but cannot seem to get it to work right. And I'm arrogant enough to assume, that if I cannot do it.. it is impossible. ;)

I want to see games that put enough explanation around the rules, and in the right way - game texts written with the expectations of a mainstream nonfiction-reading audience in mind. Everyone else seems to want game texts that are reference only, so I don't expect I'll get it soon.

I want to see more direct constraints on status play - whether your next input into the fiction plays "up" or "down" relative to that of others. I tried to put this into a contest game I did recently, but like the rest of that design, this element wasn't all that easy to use.

1)  I'd like to see more games where the texts focus on the processes of play as well as the rules of play.  (i.e. Not just how to roll, but when and why).

I'd like to see more RPGs draw upon the proven techniques of board games...concise procedures, absolutely clarity on who gets to do what when, a number of moving parts that can be independently manipulated but which produce good play strategy emergently through their interactions.

I'd like to see more games with explicit procedures for what to do when players honestly disagree (i.e. "I don't like what you just said, what can I do about it...")

Georgios wrote:
4. An RPG that incorporates musical elements, not unlike Guitar Hero does. I've been working on one, but cannot seem to get it to work right. And I'm arrogant enough to assume, that if I cannot do it.. it is impossible. ;)

This is not quite the same thing, but I played in a spontaneous, free-form round-robin narration game where we did monologues inspired by and spoken over numbers from an Elvis best-of album, with the other players singing along as back up.  It was amazing.

1. More free play. More of people falling in love with the world and their characters.

Also, games where people play multiple characters, have complex, interwoven multiple strands of storyline, and long, long-building story arcs that rise and fall on character actions and player choice.

2.  The heroic and tragic stones from Runecasting in Wyrd. Putting forward dice to say what you are curious about in the story, in 1,001 Nights.

3. A mixed drama and comedy, long-term improv/jeepform hybrid.

4. A truly gmless, long-term game. Well, not impossible maybe, but still on the cusp of our reach. And it should be so simple.

Em,

I think that your number 4 may be possible in play, if imperfectly. But designing such a game deliberately, or making it repeatable, does seem to be just past us.

I thought the problem there is that the primary goal is for it to be long term, while being enjoyable is a secondary goal.

I think certainly weve been conditioned in many games to think long term play == awesome. But when you aim for it as a primary goal...well, clearly its somehow hard to design for? The leveling mechanics of D&D, etc, may have conditioned us to a false conclusion that size/length does matter >:)

1. More ideas from eurogames, particularly WRT how economics, resource and risk management are used. Also mini-games and modular rules are a must, particularly if we have different modes of play (e.g. using a boardgame for a module) instead of just rolling different kinds of dice and I would love if all character creation processes were mini-games instead of a kind of solitary writing process/homework/chore thingy.

2. The idea of Kult that the character can become awesome by more than one axis, paying different prices and having different mechanical benefits.

3. Games that can be played like light/medium boardgames: taking between 1h to 2h to play (including explaining rules), low preparation cost and able to play an episodic campaign with different players in different episodes or not as the whims of the players dictate (much like how boardgames are played).

4. Out of reach in the near future: a mechanic to incorporate past and future concerns when narrating a scene. Currently we state things in the story that are valid only in the present, being invalidated as quickly as a few scenes later and any expectations about the future are ignored. We use spatial mechanics to distribute authority on the game elements but this doesn't really solve this issue. I'm thinking about character promises that stick, future possible scenes having an explicit impact in current scenes (e.g. player A invests X tokens on Bob the NPC not dying until he graduates college, so to kill Bob before that someone must pay for this investment, or something like that).

———
Vincent: I started toying with a mechanic that makes time to reload weapons significant and tactically relevant.

Dave: Do Amber diaries and trump cards fit in that document need?

Matthijs: I have a distributed authority mechanic that works reasonably well with up to ten people and I think could scale up to 50 or so, requiring nothing more than distinct tokens per player and a large sheet of paper to map the setting and who owns what parts of the story. The only issue I see is that I think it would require some bookkeeping to not derail. Right now it has no theme, just a mechanic, that's the primary reason why I'm not working on it.

Brand, that's what I feel like I keep hitting up against. I've played the d@mn things but designing one? Tall order.

Also, your history game? That is something I am craving, too. Complexity and drawing connections from the micro to macro are the design features I guess I'm looking for.

Enjoyable is definitely top priority no matter what!

1. What's something you'd like to see a lot more of in new game designs?

Oracles.  (Yeah, yeah.  Oracles on V's blog. I prefer the term 'blowing smoke' over that of 'brown-nosing' thank you very much.  Also, Bite me.) So we've got oracles at the beginning. And someone over at SG showed how easy it'd be to do oracles for NPCs, kind of a color reinforcer in the middle.  But what about oracles as a kind of response to actions?  Like, I dunno, "you failed a combat role, pick from the WAR oracle"  that'd be neat.

2. What's a game design point from an older game that you think has been unfortunately overlooked?

Custom card deck/ RPG crossovers.  I think DnD tried and failed at one of those some years back.  Not pulling the right cards and sitting on them until it hurts can be better (read: hurt good) than getting a bad roll "in the moment".  You get a chance to build up to the suck you know has to happen.

3. What's a game that you wish somebody would just hurry up and design already? (Not what specific game, but a game with what qualities?)

I'm enjoying the fruits of this years crop too much to be bitter about what I don't have!

4. What's a game that you figure is still just plain out of our reach? (Again, not what specific game, a game with what qualities?)

Something where character actions influence their loved ones, far away, without the fates befalling their families feeling contrived or taking much much too long.

Vincent's Red Sky AM feels like it might scratch your #4.

1. What's something you'd like to see a lot more of in new game designs?

I'd just like people to design games they'd like to play, rather than games they think are good.

2. What's a game design point from an older game that you think has been unfortunately overlooked?

Discovering a plot as you go along.

3. What's a game that you wish somebody would just hurry up and design already? (Not what specific game, but a game with what qualities?)

A sci-fi game where I can explore different cultures. And that shows the nasty side of humanity.

4. What's a game that you figure is still just plain out of our reach? (Again, not what specific game, a game with what qualities?)

A game that ordinary people could sit down and enjoy.

Graham

Robert, (or heck, you know, Vincent.)

What is Red Sky AM? Is it anything more than an idea at this point?  I googled it, and the only relevant result pointed back at a post on this blog about an idea for space marines.  Is there something more that I am missing?

When I played it it was a game about space marines and the people they left back home. It used those people as a resource, and there were alternating battle and connection scenes. It was a lot of fun though, as with any playtest, it's a work in progress.

Georgios, I agree with your No. 2 (random character creation).  I'd actually point to Traveller (Mongoose edition).  Though I'd beef it up by a lot.  Some of the events or mishaps that happen to characters require choices; e.g., you can do something criminal or immoral for a bonus, or you can stand up for what's right and get kicked out of the military, etc.  I would make ALL random character creation events into character choices, so that by the end of character creation, you don't only know what your character can do, you know who she is.

Christian, even without building a whole system like that it would be a great technique to combine with Spione Transgressions.  Everyone could draw on situations from their past create a dilema out of them where choice #1 gives you these bonuses and choice #2 give you different bonuses (or none, or penalties) but says something different about your character.  Everyone draws a couple out of a hat, makes the choice and modifies their character accordingly...establishing a little history in the process.

Like:  Join the school bullies and become popular, gain +1 Strength and +1 Charisma, or stand up to the bullies gain +1 Wisdom and -1 Charisma but at least you're not a twit.

You could put that in just about any game.