The other system I sketched out to use cards as the resolution mechanism is based off ‘Stud’ poker. It’s definitely not poker, but it borrows some elements of the risk/reward system. Otherwise, I still like the basic success/mixed/failure model of the last iteration, though there are tweaks that could be made. Stealing from Poker The […]
Author Archives: Daniel
Conflict Resolution, Part 3: Blackjack
Let’s revisit the parts of our system. First, we set the initiative – the order of play (if it can’t be determined purely by storytelling). Next, we resolve the action – determining the outcome and judging if there’s any modifier at play from character based skill or another player helping (or hindering). Ideally the player […]
Conflict resolution, Part 2: Randomness
First, go watch White, Brown, and Pink: The Flavors of Tabletop Game Randomness from GDC 2018. I’ll summarize a few points below, but in far less detail than that video. In designing games, a degree of uncertainty is essential. – Greg Costikyan, “Uncertainty in Games” (2013) According to the video, there are 4 main types […]
Game Design – The Story of a Session, Part 1
While this doesn’t directly effect the conflict resolution system itself, one thing I’d like to come out of this game design is a game that can tell a story in a single session, with minimal prep – or carry itself over a multiple sessions. Yes, you can run a pre-generated one-shot adventure in Dungeons and […]
Why conflict resolution first?
The simple fact is, once the setting has been laid and the characters created, 90% of an RPG session is spent resolving conflict in one form or another. Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, and its various hacks/remixes have an interesting take on this. Yes, it’s a dice-based game (you roll 2 6-sided die), but the resolution […]
Conflict Resolution in RPGs, Part 1
Imagine, for a moment, you’re an adventurer, creeping down a hallway towards a treasure just out of reach. Or, imagine you’re defending the last remnants of humanity from an alien onslaught. The only thing in the way is you and your BFG-401K. Perhaps you’re a hacker, preparing to reveal the misdeeds of a corporation who […]
Redesign + 2
Almost exactly 2 months after launching the new and improved danielboyle.net, I wanted to talk about how I feel about what I’ve done. First, I still feel good about the structure and design direction. My primary goal of better representing my eBay work has been mostly met. I need to continue iterating on my content, […]
Inspired by a terrible commute
For a decade, I took NJ Transit trains into NYC, and I grew to loathe the nearly 4 hours I spent on a train every day. To celebrate 1 year of freedom (though I now drive to work in the Seattle area) I am revisiting a pet peeve: the terrible doors on those terrible trains. […]
2 Years Later
On the evening of Tuesday, June 12, 2018, I released the first update to my website since sometime in 2012. This has been in progress, according to this blog, since February 2015. Let’s talk about what has changed since then. First, my last update happened shortly after joining eBay, after being laid off from Critical […]
Innovation by the numbers
I think the hardest thing for many people to understand about device upgrade cycles is that, at a certain point, the devices we use constantly are pretty well optimized for their form factors. We get minor updates to cameras, or screens, or processors, but very few true changes to what we consider the core device […]