Every day or so I come up with an idea for a story and hold it underwater while it thrashes. After 101 words, most of them stop kicking and go away. Sometimes they don’t, and my life gets a little more interesting (and, hopefully, so does yours).
I’m interested in writing fiction. But I’m already pretty good at that, for certain values of “good.” I’m also interested, really interested, in game design. I don’t think I’m good at that for any value of “good,” largely because I’ve never finished a game design. I think it’s harder to design games than it is to write fiction; you don’t need more information, but you do need more people. I want to get better at designing games.
It is for these reasons that I’m launching Dispatching the Dungeon Master, a place to hold game ideas underwater and see whether they fight back. I’ve turned on both the comments and public draft submission on that notebook (both xorph.com firsts). I’m hoping that there will be other people who are interested enough by this to talk about it with me and each other. Idea springboards, isolated mechanics, design goals–I want to stick my hands in and splash around and see what floats, and I’d be very happy if you’d get your hands wet too.
