Can you help me out here. What bits do you think in playing computer games, dabbling in card games and watching films help influence the way you design board games.

I mean, I do all those things for fun, but what bits from those activities do you find most influential?

Sorry, I never replied to this. I will rectify that now. What I mean is when I play computer games, board games etc. I have a tendency to notice cool mechanics and that can influence the design of my RPGs. For instance the LOTR ccg has an interesting mechnic whereby when you play a 'good' card you put points in a pool that your opponent uses to play his 'evil' cards. This has in some ways influenced the design of Reel Adventures.

So with games it is the interplay of mechanics.

Films and books, it may just be cool plot ideas, characters or the influence for games, like Goodfellas and Mob Justice for instance.

I mainly want to get a feel for what games outside RPGs that people play and how it informs their design deciscions.

Cheers

Iain

Mob Justice now available!

'The Giant Brain':Small games, big ideas.

I play more CCGs than board games (of course you know that already), and there have certainly been cool mechanics that I have seen in them that I have wanted to capture in RPG design as well (or, more directly, in designing my own CCG rules).

Some CCGs even feel as much like RP settings as they do card games, Legend of the Burning Sands and Legend of the Five Rings being perfect examples. These games really achieved something that I think many of us want to achieve in our RPGs, having mechanics that embody the themes and spirit of the game at the lowest level. Water tokens in Burning Sands, or the use of personal and family honor as a core currency in L5R are the sorts of mechanics you'd want an RPG to have too. Often CCG rules are a lot more elegant than RPG ones as well.

Computer games, on the other hand, rarely inspire me mechanically. Often I yearn for RPGs that can capture the feeling of baroque and cut-scene worthy magic in Final Fantasy style, but that's more about reproducing the visual style than the gaming experience, and is no different from being inspired by a movie. Sometimes playing computer games makes me want to play a dungeon hack, but that's got little to do with game design.

Beyond CCGs and Computer games I get lots of inspiration, as I am sure we all do, from films and most of all books ... though most fiction makes me want to write fiction rather than games.

Solipsist RPG, on its way ... eventually

Wow! Someone else who has played Legend of the Burning Sands! I thought I was the only one! I think water tokens would make a great mechanic in a game.

Oh yes, and I still have all of my Burning Sands cards. I've gotten rid of my Wheel of Time, Magic and almost all of the Five Rings, but the Burning Sands is going nowhere.

What I liked most about the water tokens was the way they were both your life and your currency, but not your *only* currency. If there had just been water to pay for things with they would have been too much resource and not enough life, but with copper and influence in the mix as well they could be more precious, because you didn't need them for everything.

Solipsist RPG, on its way ... eventually

I have played a load of CCGs in my time - specifically (ie. to some reasonably high level) Magic, Babylon 5 and Raw Deal. I got quite involved in them all - running the Newcastle tournament scene for MtG and running the UK's organised play for the other two. Good times but very time consuming.

One thing that I really draw from my time playing CCGs is the analytical nature it encourages. All of our playtest group are ex-CCG players and it really means that a lot of our rules can be easily stress tested and 'broken' or exploitable rules pointed out very quickly. It gets those little bombs out of the way and gets you into the good stuff quicker.

I don't play a lot of computer games but I do play a lot of WoW. Indeed, inadvertently my move towards story games was probably caused by WoW. When you play D&D after playing WoW it becomes readily apparent that WoW does D&D better than D&D does D&D! With that style of game utterly ruined for you, it's only natural to look elsewhere and that elsewhere was indie games!

Neil