Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Add this Project: Make Complicated RPGs easier to run

There is that love hate relationship between complexity and convenience in science, business and life. Some of the best things in life are truly complicated, but people naturally and intuitively grasp these things.

The way I run my games and the level of detail can be annoying to some. I cannot fault anyone for not liking the same things, everyone has their own intrinsic value for everything. The same reason I cannot fault them for liking what they like, that individuality is what makes people very human and very interesting.

What I can do is bring down the Information Overload barrier, I can create charts, spreadsheets, and detailed explanations... which appears to add to the detail, the primary purpose of my extensive notes and calculations is to find a simplifying set of rules of thumb. Rules of thumb that make the complex RPG as simple as a Board Game. My goal is to make into a board-game-like situation, then embed all those interesting notes into the Board Game rules so that they grasp the economics, logistics and the infra intuitively.

Only the min-maxer will go into the details, and Gamers are encouraged to min-max something that can be used as exercises in real world problem solving.

Added in my list of projects is to make board game equivalents of them. to make board-games Mass Combat, Ancient Era Imperialism or Feudalism, and Space era System Colonization. Using open source tools, printing services and a well documented and priced set of tools as well as the Time it takes for a DIY GM can make their own settings into Board Games for casual fun. Use their terrain map to recreate a time of war and intrigue, use their IMTU for a strategic space battle and colonization, etc.. activities that can have a lot of embedded context to create the premise of their next RPG.


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