#105: Teaching Games 2
I. Dear Reader,
Hope you’re doing well! Before we get started, first, here are some follow-ups to last week’s post about teaching games:
Dr Evan Torner talks about systemic reasons why GMs teaching games isn’t valued
Deeper in the Game talks about some games that do a good job as teaching guides
Takuma Okada talks about solo games as teaching tools.
Secondly, I want to put up a general disclaimer that thinking about this stuff can be overwhelming if you’re a solo designer. I don’t talk about this to give you more work. I’m talking about this mostly as a player of games and I’m really only thinking about publishers that have the money and resources as the target for improvement.
So that said, let me get into the unspoken question of “Why we should care about how games are learned and taught?”. The way my friend Yohann would put is probably that people don’t usually buy things because they want to buy things. They buy things because they want to achieve a specific experiences.
In this hobby, one of the main reasons to buy games is to play them. (There are others, but lets focus on this one) So whatever a games or publisher can do to help you get that experience of playing the game would be extremely beneficial. I think this is the logic behind Magpie Games’ Curated Play program where you can sign up for paid sessions with handpicked GMs. They get that people buy the game and then kind of stagnate. If you can help them with the next steps, that’s great. Lots of people are willing to pay for it.
This isn’t anything new. Most designers would agree that their game actually being played is the single biggest factor deciding whether it’s a long-term success. And being easy to teach is one of those things that can increase the actually-getting-to-the-table-ness of a game. Again, there are others! But learning and teaching is a big one!
Yours basically,
Thomas
II. Listen of the Week
There’s been a couple of great interviews over at Yes Indie’d Pod: Alex Roberts, designer of For The Queen and Starcrossed, talks design RPGs and larps and Ben Wallis, designer of Broken which is based on Ten Candles, talks about his game that talks about a breaking relationship by actually breaking ten things.
I also just found the Inside The Table podcast which is an informal chat show about games. The latest episode, which was very pleasant listening, went over video game journalism, Ryne, Bloodclotte, Songs for the Dusk and the Quiet Year.
III. Links of the Week
On Technical Grimoire, an interesting review of a new adventure module called The Isle by Luke Gearing. Sample statements include:
“The Isle is the first time since 2014 that I have ever questioned the need for artwork in a module.”
“I enjoyed it in the same way I would enjoy a novel.”
A review of Flying Circus from the long running It Came From The Bookshelf blog that I just discovered through the Indie Game Reading Club. There’s a huge backlog of reviews of various books including random D&D sourcebooks from the 90s, basically everything in the reviewer’s shelf.
Reading game prep notes on Githyanki Diaspora is helping me get over how rusty I’ve gotten because I haven’t run a game in months. I started again recently and I basically forgot to ask questions (!?) even though that used to be the bedrock of my playstyle.
Some tips on starting a new campaign from the Burn After Running blog.
IV. Small Ads
All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.
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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.
My latest game: Faction Turn, a 3 page PbtA game where you switch between playing a faction and a character.
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