Statement of Purpose

Recently Wizards of the Coast released the fourth edition of D&D. I bought the core rulebooks immediately and what I found was very different than the 3.5 edition that I am currently DMing. I made the decision to keep my campaign using 3.5 and I suspect my campaign is going to go at least another year. Fourth edition took many drastic steps some of which are laudible while others... not so much. In general the game design appears to have been heavily influenced by MMORPGs. Since pen & paper RPGs and computer RPGs are fundementally different I think some of these changes are questionable. In response to unhappiness with fourth edition the company Paizo released what they called 3.75. This edition was essentially 3.5 with a lot of fixes.

I am an avid gamer and enjoy both pen & paper and computer RPGs of both the solo and online multiplayer variety. My first major game was D&D and I played both 1st and 2nd edition. Disatisfaction with the rulesets of D&D and a love of the superhero genre led me to the Hero systems game Champions. I GMed and played Champions for many years. But I also continued to play D&D because it was still very popular and easy to find people for. Eventually Wizards of the Coast released a 3rd edition of D&D and it was a vast improvement. It was soon followed by 3.5 which cleaned up many design mistakes that crept into 3.0. I have been both playing and GMing 3.5 for many years. I also tried the world of MMORPGs and ended up being a World of Warcraft player.

So the recent release of new D&D editions in combination with my own gaming background and my current DMing duties has gotten me thinking about game design. The purpose of this blog will be to jot down some of my ideas about game design. I will try and examine most issues from five perspectives: 3.5 D&D, 4 D&D, Hero System, World of Warcraft, and also from a fiction modeling perspective. Which gaming mechanism models books, movies, comics and so on well.