Shortly after we had started our initial work on the Cosmere RPG, we sat down with Brandon in his epic “secret lair” to talk with him about his vision for the game and how it fit into his books. Sitting at the massive wooden table, surrounded by curios, tropical fish, and beautiful stained-glass windows, I could imagine myself as some explorer of the Cosmere. As part of a wide-ranging discussion about RPGs, Brandon told us stories of the characters he would create when he used to roleplay with his friends

I was very interested in including a limited format in Hubworld: Aidalon. “Limited” is a term from Magic the Gathering referring to a format where players don’t bring preconstructed decks. Instead, they follow a set of rules to construct decks from a limited pool of cards and then play those decks against each other.

To those of you new to Earthborne Rangers, the “mechanical ecology” is a term we use to refer to the dynamics created between the various beings and features you encounter in the game. Inspired by the interactions of a natural ecology in the real world, the interactions between path cards create emergent moments and make the world feel alive as you play

We started expansion development by creating the lore and general layout of the underground sections. The new areas simply expanded the original map, creating one giant world for the Rangers to explore. This seemed like a slam dunk, and we felt it would provide players with the maximum amount of freedom. Unfortunately, however, it didn’t work as well as we had hoped.

Earthborne Rangers can look a bit intimidating when you first sit down to play it. There are a lot of words on each individual card. Taken as a whole, a collection of cards like the picture above can seem like a lot. Based on that, I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people asking how complex the game is, and a lot of raised eyebrows when I answer “pretty simple actually.”

"Hey guys, do you know what's even cooler than those Pokemon? Stocks!" My middle-school friend's dad was pulling open a purple and yellow box that rattled with the sound of dozens of plastic pieces. "Don't worry, I'll go easy on you."

He did not.

Elegance is a term that can elicit groans from game designers and reviewers alike when it is invoked. It is thrown around often, and with many different meanings in discussions about mechanical systems. It is often conflated with the subjective quality of a game's systems or sometimes with their simplicity. This scattershot use of the term means that some people view it as an empty piece of praise or a relatively meaningless descriptor.

Tension in game systems is created by the players be unaware of the outcome of the game. The moment they know how things are going to play out, the game loses almost all of its interest.

When designing a game system then, a designer needs to build in systems to obfuscate the potential outcomes from the player for as long as possible.

Some objects or environments are better suited for certain uses than for others. A steep slope with stairs built into it is better suited to a human's climbing than one with a smooth surface, a round wheel is better suited to rolling than a square one, or a door with a protruding handle is better suited to being pulled than one with a flat metal plate. These objects' physical properties make them more convenient for people to perform these actions, and their properties can even imply these actions to an observer simply through their physical form.

Disco Elysium is a beautiful and bizarre game that puts you into the boots (or stolen ceramic military sabatons) of a complete trainwreck of a human being and amnesiac who claims to be a cop. It sees you bumbling around the fictitious city of Revachol, solving a murder, hunting cryptids, opening dance clubs, and becoming entangled with the political forces at work in the city. It is a game with a lot of lessons, and left me thinking about what it had to say for days.

If you playtest your game with twelve different people, you’ll get twelve different opinions. This kind of qualitative feedback can be invaluable, but sometimes you need to step back from the tangled web of personal opinion and get a broader view of how your game will be interacting with a player community overall. To do this, most designers (and other professionals analyzing large communities) use a categorization system to break the community down into different categories based on their motivations.

If you’re interested in learning about game development through YouTube, there are some amazing resources available to you with intelligent commentary and high production value. But, as is the nature of the platform, you will have to wade through a sea of people ranting at their webcams to find the good stuff. So, to get you started, here are the top five YouTube channels that I recommend game devs check out.

This framework was originally taught as part of a workshop at the Game Developer’s Conference, and was later published in a paper in conjunction with researchers from Northwestern. It introduces a fundamental way of deconstructing game systems to give a shared vocabulary and methodology for people of all disciplines working with games.

Players constantly cycle through a loop as they play games, and each cycle starts with that player’s current mental model of the game. This mental model includes everything they know about the game and its systems—their understanding of the story, of the rules, of their final goal, of other players’ strategies etc.

The magic circle is a state of mind. It is a buy-in to the conceit of a game. It is a social contract between players mutually interested in having a shared experience. It is the bubble in which the normal rules and realities of the world are replaced by those of the game to everyone playing.