Purple Pawn is a fantastic site. Purple Pawn is a lot of fun. But Purple Pawn has also turned out to be a lot of work. And so, this personal game blog has been ignored. Now though, I’m getting the hang of the amateur journalism involved in that site, and the things I wanted to do with this one have been nagging at me again. So, I’m back.

I’ll see you in a couple of days with an update on where I am with the game design concepts…

1. A science fiction roleplaying game.
2. A regional history-themed strategy board game.
3. A campaign world for a fantasy roleplaying game.

But first some background that will help explain my interests and some of my design choices…

I’m 40 years old, male, married, and have two young daughters (ages 8 and 11). I live in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. and have a job as what you might call a bureaucrat. That is, I work for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, trying to prevent blackouts by monitoring electric companies’ conformance with reliability standards.

I game primarily with a group of similarly situated friends in my neighborhood (www.kempmillgamers.org). We play boardgames—Euro-type strategy games and war games. There is a core group of gamers, among whom there is a game most weekends, and an expanded group of occasional gamers, some of whom join us for our officially scheduled game sessions about once a month. Among the core group, nearly all were roleplayers in their high school and college days. Most also played Avalon Hill war games. Now, however, time and scheduling limits are significant factors in determining what we play.

All of the core gamers and most of the occasional gamers are men. All of the core gamers and most of the occasional gamers are married and have young children. Some participants’ families are more supportive than others for the time we spend gaming. My wife games with us occasionally and was also a roleplayer in high school. She encourages me to game. But other of the gamers, including members of the core group, are more limited in the time they can spend and the frequency with which they can attend.

Sci–fi Game

This is where most of my thinking has been concentrated recently and where I’ll focus most of my posts at the beginning. While I haven’t been involved in any roleplaying in over 15 years, I used to be very dedicated. Recently, I’ve listened to a number of podcasts and read a lot about recent innovations in roleplaying game design, and that’s piqued my interest in getting back into it. I figure my best chance at convincing a group of my friends to give roleplaying a chance is with a science fiction game. Most are already science fiction fans to some degree, and the other big staple genre of roleplaying, fantasy, may seem too juvenile for people who haven’t done this in 15-20 years.

For some reason I haven’t figured out yet, when it comes to fantasy roleplaying, I’d prefer to use a published rule set and spend my preparation time on a custom campaign setting. However for science fiction roleplaying, I can’t seem to help fiddling with mechanics. So, for this sci-fi roleplaying game, I’m currently focused on mechanics. I have an idea to use the universe from a particular board game as the campaign setting, but I’ll wait until I’ve heard back from the publisher before I post the name.

Strategy Board Game

Another game design idea I’ve spent some time thinking about is a Euro-style strategy board game about the early development of South Florida. Basically, I was reading The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas and thought that the history of Florida and conflict between development and environmental protection would make a good game. I’ve read that most accomplished Euro-game designers start with mechanics in the abstract and figure out an appropriate theme later. Nevertheless, I think that my approach is feasible because the theme suggests some interesting mechanics. For now, I’ll mention just one—a real estate market that promotes volatility—not randomness, but rather, a push-your-luck type mechanism where players bid up the price of land but may send it crashing down when they try to cash out their profits.

I had made some significant progress on this project around a year ago, until I hit a snag and put it aside. Perhaps after having left it alone for some time, something new will occur to me that solves the problem.

Fantasy Campaign World

I’ve been brewing ideas for a campaign world for a fantasy roleplaying game on-and-off for a number of years. But why bother with so many published settings available? Heck, back when I was playing first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, I was a huge fan of Greyhawk. These days however, when I imagine what I’d like to play if I had the chance, it’s something different than you typically see in a commercial product. I don’t like outlandish settings. I’m not interested in high fantasy. I’d like a setting where, number one, magic is rare enough to still be something special, and number two, there is no pantheon of gods.

Though I haven’t spent much focused time on this project, the thought I have given to it over the years has yielded some interesting results. Perhaps it’s time to organize my notes and start filling in the details.

In fact, the most difficult part for me is taking the next step to turn into something tangible the things I imagine while riding the train to work, or reading or playing other people’s games. Again, like others, I’m sure, the demands of family and career make it difficult for me to find time when I feel like sitting down to write. Thinking up new stories and new game mechanics is fun; writing full sentences when you’ve already developed the basic idea is not fun.

This is made worse by my natural approach to writing, which is to work the material over and over in my head until I have it just the way I want it, and then put it down on paper. I know this is a particularly bad habit for game design but it’s worked okay for me professionally. As previously a consultant and now a government regulator, I do a lot of business and policy writing. With this approach, I tend to be quite slow. However, I’ve seen many others who lose interest after their first draft and never bother bringing the level of quality for a document up to where it needs to be.

By taking my work public—that is, where at least there is the possibility that it may be seen by others—I’m hoping to embarrass myself into making regular and material progress. I’m also hoping that through regular writing I can practice at producing more material faster with the expectation that I will go back to revise and improve it later. And I’m hoping that by finally producing something more formal than notes, I can eventually turn my game design outlines into finished works.

As for your role is this… I’ve no idea if anyone will actually follow what I do here. But if you’re out there reading this, feel free to stick around, comment, and propose your own ideas. I’d welcome the company.