[RPG] Age of Legends

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought D&D 4e and Earthdawn were a good match:

Earthdawn Age of Legend Announced for D&D 4E

Best of luck to the RedBrick guys with the project; I’m very curious to see what they do with it.

[RPG Theory] The Mechanics of Excitement

At the gym this morning (I do a fair amount of thinking and wool-gathering while doing mindless cardio), I wondered about how D&D 4e designers chose to tackle the “issue” of martial-type characters (i.e., fighters) having more options in combat to presumably remove the constant “I attack again!” litany and thereby make D&D combat more exciting.

It seems to me a potentially significant element of RPG design is “how do you make somewhat predictable events exciting”? That is, when you’re dealing in fairly established fictional tropes, how do you make your game something other than “going through the motions”? Like most things in RPGs, it seems there are both mechanical and story-based (narrative) solutions:

( ruminations after the cut... )