I published this on the 7th of April. I try to translate it faithfully. My reason to write this document was because I felt that most of the RPGs are defined by their difference from the oldschool RPGS, more specifically post-wargame RPGs. I was trying to define what an RPG is not based upon its history, but based upon the act of roleplaying itself. I hope, it will make possible to make RPGs that can be defined as "an RPGs wich is" instead of "it is different from D&D in regards".

This isn't the canaan, this is only an experiment. There is yet another important condition: this document tries to define only classic "one almighty GM, more players one character each" games. It contains many of my personal tastes that I would want to incorporate, but maybe aren't part of a baseline RPG.

I'm going to edit Social Skills to be useful in a real testing session. Maybe that's going to break through my designers block.

While waiting for the next playtest session of Social Skills, I start to "upload" another idea, called Battle Heroes. It is a battle mechanic for LotRish fantasy battles.

Sorry, I realized, I can't delete book pages. This is the playtest document move from Social Skills:

After some card playing on my own I decided to rationalize the components of the NPCs. If you have a deck of playing cards, you can try making an NPC and fighting against it even on your own.

I would like to talk about two things here: what do the players see from an adventure and why is there no need for a relationship map to have a good adventure.

First of all let's accept this axiom: "The purpose of all RPG play is learning." Wich leads to "this excludes as a valid purpose, namely aesthetics" (Mendel Schmiedekamp, PCon3).

Okay. Role-playing isn't about aesthetics. What does this mean? Lately I decided to introduce into the adventure a brother of one of the PCs whom about he never knew, but the scene was that obvious, that all the players knew at once, the he is the "lost brother". If we look at it as a story hook, it is rather lame, primitive etc. But the presence of this character made it for a better session. Why?

I was thinking about Vladimir Propp's functions regarding role-playing games.

First it is needed to understand what Vladimir Propp discovered researching Russian folk tales. All of them belong to one type of tale, wich has 31 "functions". These functions have always the same order (except threesomes and repetitions etc.), but every tale has different functions in it.

These functions are nothing else, than deeds of the characters of a tale. As Propp discovered, the deeds remain the same, although the characters are always changing. For example the character that gives the hero a companion and/or a gift after testing him, can be a protagonist (a test is needed to know if the hero is ready for the gift) or an antagonist (after defeating him the hero aquires his/her possession).

The core pages of the Social Skills RPG are completed. Please have a look at it.

The next step is going to be specification for the next playtest. This young game had already one playtest, it helped much, but it was only the core mechanics, simple attack without any funny things. This time I would like to test the rules for social battle. The scenario and the NPCs have to wait yet.

I myself plan to test it live with friends, but if you like the rules and you think you would have fun trying them, I would appreciate a small report about it.

Maybe "Rants" is not the best category, but I think it will work, if I use it consequently for this kind of posts.

I am writing an RPG blog since 2006 august and I was thinking about translating some of my own theoretical or technical posts into English. I decided that it is easier to write some posts in Engilsh based upon earlier of my posts. So, here it is my first thinkabout: The secret mechanics.

Be prepared that here will be stated common knowledge things, because they are needed to derive the technique presented at the end of the post.

I was thinking lately about what an RPG really is. I always see that some people start to put together rules and worlds and they admittedly don't have any idea what are they good for, they just do it. My opinion is, that a role-playing game is a hybrid: it is part a "parlour game" (people are playing together, like playing cards or boardgames) and it is part a "role-playing game" in the original sense (maybe there is a better term: dramagame, dramaplay or some perturbation of the words drama, game and play). (There is a third part containing story-writing, but that's not the issue now, because it doesn't regard "actual play" in the classical sense, only conceptwriting etc.)

It is my first post here. I'm a Hungarian wannabe gamedesigner. I have yet to try the features of this lab. I hope I can get some feedbacks here. Well, to be sincer, this is actually a test post.