What a busy year it’s been! From Powerhouse Late, to the Festival of Creativity, to PAX, we’ve been up to a lot this year. On our way, we’ve had the privilege to deliver two talks on game design that we wanted to share with you. Hopefully they will give you useful ideas you can apply to your game. You can also find lots more game design content from us on this playlist on our youtube channel.

Creating Narrative in Roleplaying Gaming | Powerhouse Talk

This talk was originally created and delivered for the Powerhouse Museum Ultimo. We were asked to write a short talk exploring how to create narrative in roleplaying gaming by using a case study of one of our games. It was for a general audience of folks interested in video games, board games, and ttrpgs.

This talk tackles the problem of how do you get players to tell a rich and meaningful story in just a few hours? Particularly it focuses on the questions: how can you restrict a player’s choices, yet still make those same choices feel broad, open and expansive? How can we make that decision feel more meaningful, and more interesting? Watch the talk below and see what you think.

Designing with Who Says What When | Talk for Festival of Creativity @ USYD

This talk was originally created for Sutekh at Usyd as part of the festival of creativity. It explores the framework we use in many games of “who says what when.”

In our view, “who says what when” is a fundamental part of any rpg game, whether you are hacking an existing game system, or building something entirely new. You’ve all heard that a roleplaying game is a conversation, right? Well, as game designers, what we are doing is providing a framework for that conversation to occur, to progress, to delight, such that how that conversation goes ends up providing a specific play experience that makes your game, your game. From that point of view, everything that happens on your game table is a version of who says what when.

Check out the talk below.