Great interview on game design

There's a terrific interview on game design for DnD up on the Wizards of the Coast website.  At a few point it discusses how a single role could kill a character at full health, either because a monster got a critical hit or because of a failed saving throw.  They largely have done away with that in 4e, much to my pleasure.  As the piece acknowledges, that's appropriate for some systems.  I don't doubt many old school DnD players prefer that.  Their right certainly.  It certainly happens in real life, but for me it just isn't that fun. 

There's also a good discussion about the nerfing of wizards in an attempt to implement the principle "all classes must rock."  This is a nigh universal system, although the Buffy system in some ways incorporates inequality in character abilities.  The way it does it is to give some really good bonuses and abilities that can be used rarely as well as powers to force plot twists.  I don't think Buffy is quite there yet though.  Rare bonuses are effectively just a different power setup that's more oriented towards dailies than at-wills to use 4e terminology.  Going a bit off the ideas of my friend Matt L., it's really about sharing storytelling responsibility.  For something like Buffy to really work, I think you need to get more into the theory of having half-players half-game masters.  The half-storytellers also should probably have a range of different options, from controlling specific NPCs to influencing world building.

A final interesting point from the article is a peek at design ideas 4e abandoned.  I'm paraphrasing a bit in the descriptions where I think elaboration is useful.

• Power Keywords: Classify powers by key words and allow variable access to key words.
• Powers Every Level.
• Condition Tracks: Consistently requiring lesser conditions on the way to nastier ones.
• A Weird Damage System: Difficult to summarize.
• Too Many Renewable Powers, Not Enough Attrition.
• Multiple Power Acquisition Schemes.
• The 'Traveller-style' Character Generation System: Difficult to summarize.

I love these discussions because it both provides good ideas that might work for different systems and notes tricky ideas that perhaps should be avoided.