Kobold Guide to Game Design, Volume III

My philosophy as a gamemaster has always been that to run a good game you need to understand the rules, and to understand the rules you need to have a good idea of what the designer’s goals were. What does this game do, and how does it do it? We’ve all run across rules we don’t like, don’t work (for us, at least), or don’t make sense. A good designer put those things in there for a reason; a bad designer probably did, too, but their reasoning may have been faulty, or merely incomprehensible. I’m an unapologetic and inveterate rules hacker; I change things and make house rules to suit the tenor of the campaign I’m running, to make systems easier for me to gamemaster, and in some cases to accommodate the desires of players. To do this, I really, really need to know why things work the way they do.

The third volume in this series, titled Tools & Techniques, is all about game design. How to do it. The authors are all veteran game designers, including Ed Greenwood, Rob Heinsoo, Monte Cook, Wolfgang Baur, and even Colin McComb (who designed the Planescape: Torment video game). As with the first two volumes, if you’re an aspiring pro this book is a must. If you’re a rules hacker like me, this stuff is solid gold. If you’re just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill gamemaster who just runs a game for his regular group and has no such lofty ambitions, this volume is still useful but you’ll have to cherry-pick the bits that might pertain to you. I’d argue that, for a typical GM, Greenwood’s essay “Crafting a Dastardly Plot” alone is worth the price of admission. Wolfgang’s “Location as a Fulcrum of Superior Design” tosses out some conventional wisdom that a good villain or a solid plot is the starting point of a good story and goes straight to the setting; food for thought, there, juxtaposing worldbuilding and storytelling. Monte’s “Myth and Realities of Game Balance” made me cheer, because he articulates so many things I’ve said about game balance over the years, far better than I could have said it. I’m keeping a copy of Monte’s essay in my game bag, for no other reason than to club people over the head with it as the occasion arises.

I dug this volume a lot, and I think it has some of the strongest pieces in the entire series. It’s got more page flags, highlighter marks and notes scribbled in the margins than Volume II, but not as many as Volume I. It’s the volume I’m most likely to re-read as I write my own games, and quote from when arguing game design with others. Good stuff.