Think Like A Game Designer - Jonathan Tweet — Pioneering RPG Design, Innovating Dungeons & Dragons, and Crafting Educational Stories (#69)

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

About Jonathan TweetJonathan Tweet joins us today to share his 25-year journey through the gaming industry. His impressive portfolio includes titles such as Ars Magica, Over the Edge, Everway, and Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. In addition to his work in game design, Jonathan is also a successful children's book author. His book Grandmother Fish is the first designed to teach evolution to preschoolers, blending his game design expertise with educational storytelling. In this episode, Jonathan takes us through his beginnings, from self-publishing Ars Magica in 1987 to freelancing for games like RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu. He provides insights into the development of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, explaining the open gaming license and its impact on the RPG industry. Jonathan also shares a personal story about a live event game he designed that significantly influenced my life. I can’t wait for you to dig into this episode—Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Jonathan Tweet. Jonathan is an acclaimed game designer and a children's author based out of Seattle. He has over 25 years of experience designing innovative tabletop and digital games, including landmark titles like Ars Magica, Over the Edge, Everway, and Dungeons and Dragons third edition. In addition, Jonathan became a children's book author creating his very successful book,

Grandmother Fish, the first book designed to teach evolution to preschoolers, and the story about how his game design skills and the lessons he learned through designing games applied to his process of making a hugely successful children's book come towards the end of the episode. It's really fascinating. a lot about the process of designing Dungeons and Dragons and how the process went from moving from second edition where the game was owned by TSR into third edition where the skills learned from Richard Garfield and Scaf Elias about how to make great games and how to break games down into their individual parts is applied to Dungeons and Dragons third edition. We talk about the counterintuitive

lessons behind the open gaming license for Dungeons and Dragons and why they were so eager to make the game open, but to make the world closed. And you'll understand what that means when you get into the episode. And we also share a personal story about when Jonathan and I met in person over 12 years ago at Burning Man. And there's a specific game that Jonathan designed for playing at live events like that that had a profound impact on my life. It literally changed the way that I structured my life and looked at the world. And I will leave it to you to listen to the episode to hear that because it was a really great moment. And I think it'd actually surprise Jonathan. And he didn't realize how much that story had impacted me until now.

And so you get to hear his genuine reactions to it. So this was a great episode. Jonathan is a legend in the game design industry. We talk about a lot of how he started. There was no real rule book on games. There was no process for making games. There was not a lot of good games in existing. And he was either there directly or adjacent to all of the people that were making the groundwork,

the foundations upon which my teachings and my lessons have built upon around the whole modern game community. So this is an awesome podcast. with one of the legends. So I'll stop the introduction here. And without further ado, here is Jonathan Tweet. Hello and welcome. I am here with Jonathan, it is great to have you here. Yeah, thanks very much for having me.

It's been a long time. Yes, yes, it has. So we're going to get into a little bit of our connection, an interesting backstory eventually. But I always like to start these podcasts by getting into the backstory for my guest. You have a very prestigious career, which people will already know about because I'll have told them in the preamble. But tell me a little bit about how you got started in games, how you got started designing, and we'll dig in from there.

Yeah, so my real entry into professional game design was when my buddy Mark Ryan Hagen and I self-published a role-playing game called Ars Magicka. And I was back in 1987. And before that, though, I had spent years trying to get freelance work published for games like Roon Quest, Call of Cthulhu, Tunnels and Trolls. And so that taught me a little bit about game design. I had a lot of sort of practice before I went into self-publishing. And then before I was trying to do professional freelancing, I spent years creating my own games. You know, when I was 12, after playing Dungeons and Dragons, I couldn't afford the next game, metamorphosis alpha. And so I just read the backcover copy, and I created my own game, sort of inspired by that.

And that really started me on designing games. And that I think it's really important for people who want to be game designers is you've got to be designing games before you go pro. Yeah. So this is like one of the things that's a pretty common thread amongst the, guests here and people who've been successful in the industry is you know you do the job for free and on your own and for a while before you actually end up getting paid for it. Being 12 when you first design your first role-playing game after playing Dungeons and Dragons, you know, that's a bit unusual. What do you think it is about you that kind of got you

going immediately down that path? Like was it where you were you raised to kind of create things? Were you just a storyteller to begin with? I always think it's interesting. People that start quite so young. I made up games when I was 12, but it was mostly my Transformers battling each other. Okay, sure. Very complicated. Well, I guess there are two things, and one is I did come from a creative family. My father was an English professor, and he really encouraged me to be creative and read science fiction. He used to teach classes in science fiction. And so I was kind of steeped in that already and you know

I was one of those kids who tried to make up his own language in grade school and and like secret codes and whatever and so maybe it was kind of natural for me to fall into and the other thing to remember is that back then

the games were not that good like you you know you you read one of the old games and you kind of get the idea that you could do it. Today, you look at something like Dungeons and Dragons,

and it's so glossy and well-edited and well put together and thoroughly thought out that it would be really hard to match. But games back then were mostly designed by people who had not grown up playing role-playing games, and they were experimenting. And it wasn't too hard to feel like you could do it yourself. Yeah, yeah, it's actually one of the things that's really interesting to me, you know, and whatever, one of the reasons why I made this podcast, right, is they start to like make the knowledge more ever present and institutionalized and available and create a common language around design. And even, you know, for my generation, slightly after yours, it was, we already had so many additional tools available, although it was still very formative. The idea of game design is a, you know, as an art form is still pretty formative.

and nowadays are so much available. And you know, you coming at this early on without having any of those principles and tools, were there, you know, some specific lessons or insights that you felt like were kind of big breakthrough moments for you as you started moving from, you know, a 12-year-old designer to, you know, professional designer? Like, where did you turn to for insights or how did you craft those as you went along? Yeah, that's a great question. And so another thing about the really early days is that there were sort of more games than there were game supplements.

And so today, you know, once you've bought your rule books, there's no end of other things you can buy within that same game. But back in the day, there just wasn't much to buy. And TSR was actually, they published Dungeons and Dragons, but they were pretty slow to publish like adventures and world settings. And instead, what they did is they published other games like Metamorphosis Alpha or they had a war game, fight in the skies and whatever. And so it was really natural if you were a gamer back then to spend your money buying other games rather than more products for the same game.

And so I ended up playing Metamorphosis Alpha and GammaWorld and RuneQuest and Traveler. And it was sort of being able to see all these very different ways that you could pull things together to make a rule set. And, you know, very different assumptions, very different approaches. and that, I think, made it easy for me later on. When I was going to create a game system or whatever, I had a lot of examples to go by good examples to emulate, bad things to avoid, and sort of that breadth really helped me out.

And games like RoonQuest had kind of a core system so that there were one or two ways that almost everything worked, unlike Dungeons and Dragons, where you had a different subsystem for each game, or each thing you did in the game. So Caleric's turning undead worked one way, and saving throws worked another way, and attacks worked another way.

And tunnels and trolls, I even hold up as an example. They had a really flexible system for saving throws that I actually ended up kind of emulating in Ars Magicka, which sort of uses the same system that people later saw in third edition Dungeons and Dragons. So it was seeing what everybody else did, good and bad. I don't know if there was a breakthrough moment, but it was sort of, of this broad experience with different ways of doing things.

Yeah, well, I mean, that makes perfect sense. I mean, the, you know, play lots of different games is one of the first pieces of advice I guess people, which is the easiest to follow in a sense. But also play that don't just play it like a player, right? Like don't just play it where you get totally lost in the experience, like zoom out a little bit and say, okay, wait, what systems are moving me here? Where's the emotional impact? Where's the play to space coming from?

How do I? And what could I pull from this? to take, you know, if I were going to make my Frankenstein monster in the future of systems, right? It's a great, it's a great tool. And this, you know, this consolidation, there's a couple different routes I want to go here. One, there's, you know, this, you know, understanding that building systems that can support multiple different modes of play, multiple different expansions, multiple different, you know, adventures, right?

That's like, obviously becomes very, very important as game systems become the dominant mode going forward both in, you know, trading card games and role playing games and even, you know, expandable games, you know, is a huge thing. I wonder, this jumps out of the timeline a little bit, but if you think that there's a, in a sense, more challenge now, right? In the one sense, today, we have more great games to appeal from. But on the other hand, people tend to play one or two main games now more so than they used to. It's a little bit less diversity that creates some potential problems, right? If you're a magic player, you're a magic player. If you're a Dungeons, Dragons player, you're Dutch of dragons player.

Yeah, sure, there's plenty of different worlds you can play in, but you're still playing the same damn rules. Do you think that there's a challenge there for people that are becoming more narrow, either as someone trying to become a designer and learning more, or even as someone creating games to get exposure? And is it worth it to craft a new system in an RPG when you could just be making a module for D&D? Yeah, I think it is harder. For one thing, the games are longer, right?

like games used to be kind of thin. And so you could read them and try to figure out how they worked pretty easily. And they were often a little bit of a mishmash. They were sort of less streamlined or less coherent than games are now. So that meant you might see multiple subsystems within a game that don't necessarily go together, but they give you then in this one game that's only 64 pages long, you see multiple ways of sort of resolving different kinds of conflicts. And so it seemed like, you know, in the old days, there was sort of more fervor and more creative diversity, and partly because people hadn't figured things out that well.

So there were bad ideas and good ideas and things all thrown together. I think these days, there's so much more being offered and there's so much more within a game setting so that, for instance, if you like Apocalypse, world. Now there's, you know, I don't know however many games that are that are powered by the apocalypse. And so you can play all sorts of different settings with sort of the same philosophy, the same game design philosophy behind them. And it also makes it harder to sort of stand out. There's so much more out there now that, you know, if you try to self-publish, you're one of many in an environment where there are tons of different games.

So, yeah, I think on the one hand, it's easier than ever to do something. Like, it's really easy to do, you know, like a fifth edition compatible adventure or product and get it out there. And it can be print on demand or it can be PDF only. and people know they can use it without giving up their game because it's compatible with Fifth Edition. And so it's really easy to get something out there. But I think you're onto something when you say maybe it's harder to get an appreciation for the scope of the games that are out there and to have sort of the breadth of knowledge that you need to, if you want to do something that's really new.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the, you know, for those that are interested in, in a career and design, it's, it's absolutely critical that you push yourself outside of your normal kind of comfort zone of play, right? And that's not just saying, oh, I'm going to play different role playing game systems if you make role playing games, but also like, hey, I'm going to try new trading card games or casino games or whatever. Like, you know, any kinds of things that are out there, party games, like see what things where you could pull interesting different mechanics and create more kind of grist for the mill of creativity, I think is, is, is. is absolutely critical. That's something everybody has control over.

When it comes to the, how do you reach audiences and get people to pay attention to you in a world that's overcrowded with games? It's the exact corollary to games are very easy to make now. Therefore, there are more games. Therefore, it's harder to break through. And so it's just,

that's, I think, the biggest challenge. I think most modern designers face, even those with pedigree and a reasonable audience, it still should be a real problem. That's right. So I want to, I want to speak to innovation here, and I'm going to linger on your game Everway. Oh, great.

Okay. One of the more, this is a game probably people have not heard about. A lot of people haven't heard about. But I found it to be incredibly fascinating. Thank you. It's really pushes the boundaries of design. Yep. And so why don't you, let's talk about that game a little bit.

We'll assume most of the audience doesn't know it. So you kind of talk about what it is and how you got to that kind of design space. Sure. So sort of the core idea of, well, one of the core ideas of Everway is that instead of creating a character by looking at a bunch of words and numbers in a rulebook, you're presented with a bunch of art cards that show fantasy scenes from different worlds and cultures. And you pick some of those out of the pool to create your character. and then you build a story around the character that you've created and what those scenes mean. So you might have, one of the pictures might be of a warrior or a wizard,

and then you say that's your character. Others might be, you know, this is my family, or this is something I see in a vision, or this is my arch enemy. And you sort of pull out of your unconscious a story about this hero. And then since everyone is creating characters from different art cards, you might have somebody who's a warrior from the frozen wastelands, you know, far to the north. And you might be somebody else who's from some highly civilized culture. And the way you bring them all together is you assume that the characters are going to be able to travel from one world to another.

And any sort of culture might be found on any sort of culture. sort of world with any sort of people and so you don't have to even know the game setting sort of in order to create your character you don't have to ask the game master right like you know what's the culture like here what's the religion whatever you you can you can make it up and then that's the world that you came from and even if no one's heard of it before that's fine so that's one of the big founding features of the game. And we wanted the game specifically to be something that non-gamers could appreciate.

And I felt like the simulation value in Dungeons and Dragons and they're like rolling multiple dice and having these combats that last round after round and having subsystems for all the skills you can do was just too heavy. It's just too mathy for people who want to be creative. And so the conflict resolution system or the task resolution or event system is all based on a set of 36 cards that are sort of like the major arcana from the taro. So you have a card of the fish and that represents the soul. and there's the card of the protector, and that represents the powers of fire and air in action.

And you've got eight cards that represent different sorts of deities and are all linked to different elements, and some of them are linked to planets or astrological signs. And then the idea is when you draw one of these cards, it provides sort of a meaningful input, not a numeric input. So if you get the card drowning in armor, it means that your protective measures have turned against you.

And so that's a bad card to get, especially if you're trying to protect somebody or protect yourself from something, but it doesn't have a numerical value. And then the character stats are very simple, Since everything was sort of this new agey feel to it with the cards and the people from all different cultures, your stats were sort of the four Aristotelian elements, earth, air, fire, and water. And those all represent parts of the person, you know, your energy, your resilience, your intellect, the depth of your soul. And so have a pretty simple system for assigning those points to your character and defining who you are.

And then you wrap that all up. And you've got a system where these sort of unusual, one-of-a-kind heroes band together and traveled from one world to another world. And sort of like Star Trek, you know, go to the new planet and see what the weird thing is there and cope with that and be a good person. and stand up for good values or, you know, kill the monster. Yeah. And so that's, that's every way. Yeah. So I'm fascinated, you know, to take to take something that is, you know, kind of classically, right, like D&D and role playing games somewhat evolved from like war gaming, right, which is a very crunchy system.

Yeah. And very much numbers based and very rules based. That's right. This is how we move. This is what we do. And then to evolve it, I, everywhere is the first game that I came across that was. this very diceless, very like anti, you know, anti rules in a certain sense. There are rules obviously.

You know, it's a, and that, what got you to there? Because I think that's just, it's something that has been such a powerful thing. I've had a lot of RPG designer guests on the podcast and a lot of them that are broken the rules, you know, and sort of, you know, designing games like microscope and fiasco and other ones that kind of pushed in different directions. But I feel like you really opened a door here. And I'm curious what motivated you and how you got to that, to that design. line. Yeah, that's an interesting, interesting question. So at about the same time, I was working

on another game that was more miniatures oriented. Like it was about aliens have invaded Earth and are pretending to be friendly, but you're part of the resistance. And it was meant to be played with miniatures if you wanted to as just a miniature skirmish battle or, you know, as a role-playing game. And so, you know, I definitely have my rules crunchy side. And for this, the idea was, and I don't think it didn't really come true, the idea was that we wanted to be able to reach people that Dungeons and Dragons didn't reach. Like if Wizards of the Coast was going to publish a role-playing game and really wanted to shoot for the moon and swing for the fences, then it needed to be something that could reach an audience that Dungeons and Dragons wasn't already reaching or else

there would always, you know, be second fiddle in that, at best, in that territory. Yeah, yeah. And it's very interesting to me for a couple of reasons, right? One, I mean, I think there's a version of this that, you know, it asks less of a player in terms of like, I need to understand all these rules and all this math, all these numbers, but it asks a little bit more of the player in terms of like, I need, there's some fuzziness in terms of like, I see a picture, I need to be able to tell a story. more openly about what's going on.

So in a sense, there's a different kind of barrier you're putting in front of the player. For some people, they're going to love that. For other people, it's going to be a little tough. That's right. And the pictures are there in a way to make being creative easier. And, you know, I think it's still a big ask for a lot of people. And maybe back then I didn't understand how intimidating it can be for a lot of people to try to be creative. But for years before then,

I had been trying to come up with ways to help people be more creative in their role-playing games. That's really why you like role-playing games, is that regular people get the opportunity to be creative, to do something new with their friends that no one's done before, and it expresses a little bit of themselves,

and they get to explore ideas. And I really love that. And so I did a role-playing game called Over the, edge, which like every way, the idea was you should be able to create a character without having to hear about what the setting is. So the setting is sort of modern day, maybe a couple of years in the future, on an island where kind of anything goes. It's this wild like William Sborough's inner zone sort of thing.

And so since it's the real world, you don't need to be told what the setting is. And because it's kind of anything goes, kind of weekly world news, paranormal. You can kind of make up whatever character you want. And sort of like every way, you come up with some weird character from someplace in the world, and then you meet other weird characters who've all, for one reason or another, come to this island. And I remember I was running a game at a convention, and a young woman came by who was not really familiar with role-playing games and wanted to know what we were doing. And I tried to pitch to her like, You can make up whatever character you want.

And she seemed not impressed by that. And so that got me thinking, like, what would it take to get people who aren't already steeped in role-playing games to get them to want to create a character, to think of a character? And so the cards with the images on them are an answer to that, right? Like, if you tell someone, look at these 90 beautiful color art cards and pick five of them that speak to you, and now make up a story based on them. Like I've seen people who are not gamers sort of surprise themselves. I'm like,

what a cool character they come up with or how fun it is to tell a story because the cards give them that crutch. Whereas, you know, the over-the-edge game I had done earlier, it was all sort of pulled out of your head. Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting. So then the other thing that I've thought about recently when kind of just, again, doing the research for this podcast, I honestly, I'd forgotten about every way. And I was like, oh, yeah, this was really cool. I can't wait to talk about it. And there's still a core fan base out there and the silver edition that got made and everything.

That's right. But I think it's like when you're building a game that's so based around the art as guide, so much of that comes down to like the choices that you made as a designer or whoever was doing the illustrations, you know, push in that direction. That's right. Now with the modern era where we have, you know, the ability to create AI art at that scale, you know, suddenly you could rebuild this thing with almost any theme or create a far more open universe potential. That's right.

Which I think could be really fascinating in a way to, I could almost, I could almost imagine a slightly different system where something where like, you know, you're creating AI art as part of the game and the AI art coming back at you as some ways to resolve things. I think could be a really fascinating game system that gives you a little bit more, a little bit more control, but pushing in different directions. I haven't fully thought this through, but I figured it'd be a fun thing to talk about with you because I think there's something like I, again, just full disclosure, I don't want to get into any of the like contentiousness around AIR,

but what it does to unlock like a new game mode that would be impossible. Otherwise, that's really interesting. Yeah. So I'm curious what if that spawns anything for you. You sure hit on something that for a lot of games, especially when like you're trying to launch a new game or whatever. The art is the most.

difficult part, right? That it's expensive to buy art, it takes a long time to generate art, and then the art always gets filtered through what the artist wants. And so that has long been a

challenge, like all the way back to I don't know, first edition of Ars Magicka, it was a challenge to get the art we wanted on time, under budget, It's with the vision that we wanted. And so, yeah, the possibilities of AI art that's kind of opening that up so that that bottleneck gets,

it's open. I think you're right that there could be a lot of really interesting possibilities. There are already, you know, there's a service online where you can create a miniature, custom create a miniature and then have it sent to you. And so guys in my game group have their characters created up for $30. And that's another example of, you know, it used to be so difficult to get a miniature cast. And now it's pretty easy, even as a one-off. And so I guess I look forward to seeing what people come up with along those lines,

the idea that you just sort of floated that you can somehow feed stuff in to the system and it comes back to you with the original art based on your props, but then has an effect on the game. Yeah, that's pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah, to me, I always ask this question whenever it comes to new technology that exists, right? What new design space does this open up? What new experiences is open up?

What problems that existed before? does this now solve, right? So when we, just, you know, from my own story, working with Richard Garfield, we did when, back when the iPhone and iPads came out, we were like, oh, wow, this is a great medium for making games. And we made the original version of SoulForge as a digital trading card game. And that wasn't really a thing back then. Right.

And then now with digital printing, the ability to make one-of-a-kind decks, right? And be able to have those things we exist and scan, and QR codes letting you scan them in your own account. We now have SoulForge Fusion out where you can buy a physical deck that's just your and no one else will ever have it. It could be in your online account, and you can play it online and have those things, right? And then, you know, we did, I was, Ascension was the first deck building game to go into VR,

and there was cool elements around maxing like a, like a tabletop thing. And so I think these things, like when I look into technologies like AI, technologies like blockchain, like these things like that are, you know, there's obviously plenty of upsides, downsides, interesting challenges to come with these, these technologies. But I love being at that forefront and saying, okay, what, what can I do now that I could, couldn't do five years ago.

And what does that mean for the craft of design? I think it's just like a fascinating time and space to be exploring. Yeah, I'll be really curious to see what people come up with. Okay, so we spent time. We've jumped into the future already. I want to make sure we cover sufficient parts of the past. Because if I don't talk about Dungeons and Dragons, then I'll get riots from my audience. I think that's right.

So, you know, being one of the lead designers for Dungeons and Dragon's third edition, huge deal. Yeah. I've had Monty Cook on the podcast before. Yeah. But I'd love to hear this story from your side. What was it like? What prompted it? What were some of the choices, the tough choices along the way?

We'll dig into it, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, as you can imagine, the choice of who gets to be on the third edition design team, that was a pretty fraught or politically sensitive or emotionally charged decision. And so there was a lot of, there was a lot of back and forth and some changes. on the team and for a while Peter Akison stepped in and ran the team personally in order to

sort of get it on track and and I had started as sort of the representative of the non-TSR people like the other people on the team were from TSR and so I was sort of bringing the Wizards of the Coast

angle to things Richard Garfield set up a really a really strong R&D department that could really analyze rules, game rules and game systems and improve them and fine-tune them and understand them and take them apart and put them back together again. And so I sort of brought that to the team. Is there, I just to, this is a great story, but I will interrupt you often. Sure.

But like that piece is really, important, right? Like, people were generally bad at games, back in the day, this idea of being actually able to break them down. What, were there any things about the process of like what made, how was, I know Richard, because I work with Richard, I know he's great at this individually, but how did he build a team that was great at this? What does it mean to have a team that's great at this? Yeah. So he actually had a, a project that was, we are going to learn how to understand, games. We're going to learn how to analyze them and what's good about them.

And we're going to break it down into sort of components, you know, like speed of play and number of players. And what are the things that go wrong if you don't look out for them? Like a great example that he gives is the sort of the chip-taking component. there are a lot of multiplayer games where, you know, five of us are sitting around the table, and every turn, when it's my turn,

I get to decide who to attack and who to sort of weaken. And you can think of it, like who to take chips from. And if you had a game where everyone started the game with 10 chips, and every turn you take a chip away from somebody, you could play that game. game, like that, and then you could end up with a winner of like whoever has the most chips or whatever, but it would all be, there's no, there's no rule support for tactics. It's all personality and psychology. And a lot of games are chip taking games, but have sort of some rules layered on top of it. So it looks like you're playing according to these rules, but what you're really doing is, you know, trying not to be, try not. to pull ahead so people don't go dog pile on you. Try not to draw attention to yourself so people don't take revenge on you and, you know,

harbor your resources until the end and then win. And so by discussing how rules work, how games work in sort of abstract ways, we were literally put together a document that where you could assign points to games based on their different components. I think they ended up making a textbook out of it, Robert Gochera, Scaf Elias, and Richard. And so there was an effort in addition to whatever games you were working on and stuff that you were doing,

everyone was also trying to figure out how games work and apply those criteria, those rubrics to new game. that we were working on or games that were submitted and that really that made the team really good at what we called developing a game

like you have a game concept and then it would get developed and a lot of that maybe came out of magic right so the legend set came in from one of Peter's friends was a super-enthusband enthusiastic magic player.

And that guy pulled in all sorts of stuff from the D&D campaigns that Peter Akosur run. And it was full of all these great ideas, but they were all unbalanced. And it was like, wow, you can't do this with that card or whatever. And so what the R&D team had to do was see what was good about what was in there and preserve that and maybe even bump that up and dial down the stuff that was out of control or whatever. And so that experience of taking a magic set, taking a, you know, a big idea for a cool magic set, and then giving it the polish it needs to be a balanced magic set, that, that plays pretty closely into doing the same thing with games, like what, what's going to make this

game rule work, or does this game rule work at all, or what does it have, what effect does it have on the length of play, what the effect does it have on the number of choices you're making in a turn. Yep. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. And that book, the book you're referencing is called the Characteristics of Games, which

lays out those fundamental principles. And then that concept of being able to sort of move through the kind of core of the heart of the game, the engine design into component and design and development is what form the foundation of my A book as well as building off of them in terms of how you think about these processes and how you kind of can go. step by step through what, what does it mean to refine a game from where's the fun? What's the concept to? Is this balance?

Does this work? Does this make sense? Exactly. You know, all the way through that process. So, okay, great. Thanks for that detour because I think it's like, it literally is like this, you know, we started this conversation talking about like you had to start designing games when there were no fundamentals.

That's right. And you were part of, you know, either in some ways directly in some ways adjacent to it. It's part of the process that led to these fundamentals getting established and built. I just, I think it's one. Thank you. And too, like, it's great to call out and see, so people can kind of see this evolution as it's going. So, okay, so just to bring us back into the story, Wizards of the Coast had acquired TSR.

There's a very contentious process for taking what was second edition, Dungeons'Deges, turning into third edition of Dungeons'Deges, bringing in, you're the iconic representative of the Wizards of the Coast way, bringing this game design philosophy and style into the TSR mix of whatever, throw all the things in, and here we go, in terms of the mechanics. mechanics. So, okay, go, go from there. Right. And so, you know, the, the folks on the TSR side had lots of experience working with Dungeons and Dragons, but not a lot of experience doing a new game or even a new edition.

Like even, you know, the second edition of Dungeons and Dragons didn't really, you know, go all the way and handle the issues with the game design. You know, it cleaned things up a lot. The editing was way better, but it didn't handle things like Armour Class goes the wrong direction or that sort of thing. And so the first design that the team did before I was put on it didn't feel like Dungeons and Dragons and got some real negative responses in a meeting where it was released. So there was sort of like a back to first principles, back to the drawing board. And that's sort of what I showed up. And if you look at the core system for third edition,

where you roll a die and you add a bonus based on your skill or training, and you add a bonus based on your raw ability, that's straight out of Arsmagica, where you had the same mechanic. And in fact, the same year Arsmagica came out in 1987, Mike Ponsmith came out with Cyberpunk, which had not exactly the same system, but very close to the same system.

So I think that it was kind of in the water. I had gotten the system. I derived it basically from tunnels and trolls, which had, like I said, had a really flexible saving throw system. system, and they sort of didn't take advantage of it. And in some of their supplementary products, so mercenary spies and private eyes was based on the same system,

they started to move toward, you know, really taking advantage of their system, but didn't go all the way. And then so our smogic, I was like, I see what they're doing. I'm going to just start over and you're going to do it right. And I ported that system basically into third edition. That became the core system. Great. And then the decision around kind of the open gaming license and the building that, right?

That has become a hot button issue over the years. It was a revolutionary. I'm sure it was contentious at all. It was contentious at the time. Talk to me about your take on that and what role did you play in that decision process. Right. So the first role- when an open gaming license is, some people might not know.

So let's just give a brief, brief, brief overview of what that means. Sure. So 30 edition changed Dungeons and Dragons forever by coming out with an open gaming license that basically allowed people to do products that were compatible with Dungeons and Dragons as long as they didn't use, are the, you know, the name Dungeons of Dragons, the trademarks, and then certain characteristic things were off the table. Like you couldn't use mind fliers, you couldn't use the worlds, the D&D worlds, but you could, you know, create a bug bear and, you know, have an adventure with bug bears and silver pieces and plus one swords and all the regular stuff. And that was fine. And that changed everything. So in the year 2000, when third edition debuted, if you went around GenCon, you know, the really big game convention in the Midwest, Many, many of the booths were staffed by people who were trying to get you to stop playing Dungeons and Dragons and play their game instead.

They were all there to find Dungeons and Dragons players and get them on board with their games so that they could start selling their products to D&D players. Well, one year later, 2001, Gen Con's back, and very many of these booths were staffed by people who were trying to get you to, play more Dungeons and Dragons, but by their adventure, by their gearbook, by their monster manual, and play Dungeons and Dragons. And so instead of everyone trying to peel customers away from us, we had all these people who were dogpiling and trying to improve our network. So now it's like everywhere you look, it's going to be people playing Dungeons and Dragons. And that, boy, that was a huge change, and you saw it in one year.

So that was all the brainchild of Ryan Dancy. And his big thing was network effects. He said the number one advantage of Dungeons and Dragons is lots of people play Dungeons and Dragons. If hardly anybody played Dungeons and Dragons, there wouldn't be much reason to play Dungeons and Dragons. Because you would want to play whatever it is the game that everybody else is playing. And so he said, let's just get more people playing Dungeons and Dragons. Let's increase that network. And he had the vision for it, and he was right, and it made a huge difference.

And it's very much kind of a West Coast thing, right? Like, we're going to give some stuff away to our competitors that they're going to use to make a profit. But we're going to benefit. Like that, you know, Hasbro didn't really understand that. And people from TSR didn't really understand that. And so there was real resistance. And that, I mean, you've seen it. That resistance has popped up over and over again.

It popped up with fourth edition, which had a crappy license, and it popped up again. Was it just last year where Wizards was going to like retool everything? And so it is, it is a weird West Coast idea that lots of, I guess, Midwesterners and these coasters just had a hard time getting their head around. But, man, it worked gangbusters. it really was something. And I have always believed in systems that sort of transcend a single game. So the first game I bought,

role-playing game after Dungeons and Dragons was Metamorphosis Alpha. And I was angry because it did not use the same combat system. It didn't use the same hit point system. I was like, I already know how combat works. I already know how to roll dice for my character. why are you making me do it a different way? And it's not even better.

Like it's just different. And so I think that's when the seed was planted in me to want to do something like the D20 system, if I ever got a chance. And so one of the things that I was working on when the D20 system sort of finally got announced, was I was working on a version of Gamma World that was going to use the D&D system. And my buddy, Chris Pramis, was working on sort of a Wusha, Hong Kong film, fantasy martial arts game that also would use basically the core system. We didn't call it D20 because it wasn't, the idea wasn't, we're going to let other people use D&D.

The idea was we internally are going to create other little. games that use the D&D system. And when I brought that to Ryan Dancy, he said he would not do that in a million years. And so both of our projects got shelved. And I was angry because that's what I've wanted to do since I bought Metamorphosis Alpha was to create a game about mutants with lasers using the D&D system. And I was this close to doing it. But he was right because what he needed to do when he took over

when he took over being the what did they call him the creative director for Dungeons and Dragons for role-playing games his number one goal was to get everybody back on the same page so TSR had driven Dungeons and Dragons into the ground by creating system you know world after world after world after world and sometimes they were like sub-worlds so domains of dread was a sub-world of some other world that they were doing.

Mask of the Red Death was a sub-world domains of dread, and domains of dread was related to something else. So if you play D&D, you had to choose which of very many different worlds you were going to play. And when you went to go buy a D&D adventure, you couldn't buy most of them because most of them were not in the setting that you were using. So they took the D&D market and they split it apart,

they fragmented it, so that people didn't want to buy the adventures, they didn't want to buy the monster supplements. It was nonsense. And as sales dropped, they did more and more of it because they didn't understand what they were doing. They thought that they were getting new sales with every new world that they put out.

And what they didn't understand was they were just pulling sales from their other lines. So Ryan Dancy's big thing was he turned attention back to core D&D. Like he took, they were about to release a Ravenloft book, a Ravenloft book of monsters. And he said,

that's great, just take the name Ravenloft off of it. And then it was a Dungeons and Dragons book of scary monsters. And it sold better than the other Ravenloft stuff because hardly, you know, most people weren't playing Ravenloft.

They were playing some other version of D&D. So he did not want to see players splintered into, you know, playing Gamma World or playing playing Woosha or whatever. That was right. I mean, those games that we were doing only made sense in the context of the failed

marketing system that we inherited from TSR. So it's fascinating. Correct me if I'm getting this wrong. But what I hear is that they universalized the system at the game rule system and made it open so that anybody else could create whatever worlds they wanted. but they would bring people into understanding Dungeons and Dragons, to bring them into the Dungeons and Dragons universe, but that within TSR or within the Wizards at this point,

you are actually not proliferating the worlds at all, that you're actually trying to consolidate the worlds. And so the IP and the story, you want that to be as consistent as possible in what you are delivering, and you let everybody else do all the crazy worlds. And at the same time, you're building that universe of your game system so that people can easily jump in

and go to quote unquote classic Dungeons the Dragons, which is what Wizards of the Coast is putting out. Is that right? That's exactly right. And so that was the interesting sort of conundrum or irony that you, or paradox that you just proposed is that we wanted internally to focus on everyone playing the same kind of Dungeons and Dragons so that our products would sell. But we also let people outside of that do whatever kind of crazy stuff they did because

you always needed the player's handbook, basically, in order to play in this other cool worlds that people did. That's right. Fascinating. Fascinating. Okay, this is great. I love this tale. And again, for people that want more,

you go back to my episode with Monty Cook and his version of these tales as well and various others. But I want to jump to, I want to cover some other topics that are not just role-playing games, even though I love your history in this space is amazing. I'm going to start. I want to jump a little bit to something I don't know much about, which is your time designing for Amazon and Facebook.

Looks like there was a good five years or so of this window. It's a very different world. It was a different world back then. I want to know what that life was like and how your game design principles applied or got modified during those working at those behemoth companies in very different categories. Yeah, that was pretty interesting. So I worked at Amazon for two years as a game studio there started out.

And I think they finally have a game that is successful, but that didn't happen until years after I was gone. The first couple of years of the studio were pretty tumultuous. And my goal was I wanted to set aside my own way of doing things and learn how these social media games like Facebook games worked so that when I came to understand that, then I figured I would then be able to sort of combine what I know from the more hardcore games with what I know from what I had learned from Facebook. And the general manager that I reported to had had a really successful, you know, online game. So I thought, you know, I was going to be able to learn from him and I was going to sort of pick up how to do this new format of game.

But, you know, when a studio isn't successful, it's like nothing is successful in it, right? So the management was bad, the relations within the teams were bad, the strategy was bad, it was bad. It was, you know, so I did manage to get a game out. I'm proud that I launched a game when lots of other games just sort of foundered. But it never did well. and the boss never wanted to come to terms with how the game was not keeping enough players because then he would have to explain to his boss and his boss's boss that the game was not keeping enough players. So he just sort of kept things going as if everything was okay so that he would never have to, you know,

reveal his weakness to the authorities, especially because, The worst possible is pretty bad. Yeah, that's right. And it was like, my game had launched and others hadn't, so it needed to be a success. And even though it wasn't, we treated it as if we should just keep going. And we never sort of went back and figured out either how to make it work or to cut it and try something again. I learned a lot from that. I learned a lot about my own weaknesses as a team member and,

a lot of my personal growth started with me being squeezed out of that in 2013. So in some ways, I'm glad I did it and I made good money and made some friends there. But so months in, maybe I was hired in July and in August, Facebook overhauled their rules for Facebook games. notifications and whatever. So Facebook had such a rich environment for social games that at one point, Zinga, they had the most,

they had Farmville and the most popular games. For every new player they added, that player would bring in another 1.1 players. And so that's just exponential growth. Like, you're happy if, for every player we add, they bring in another one quarter of a player, right? And that's like, okay, so that, that'll get us a little bit of growth, but it was bananas. And I don't know how many people remember what Facebook was like in 2011, but you, I mean, it was obnoxious the way that you would get notifications from people playing games all the time

and whatever. And so it was great for the game producers, but it wasn't that great for. were people on Facebook and then Facebook changed their rules. And suddenly, it was not going to be as profitable to do Facebook games like we wanted. And again, you know, the general manager couldn't go to his boss and his boss's boss and say, we need a new plan. The plan that I showed you is not going to work. He just never owned up to that. And so we just sort of charged ahead on the original plan.

And guess what? things didn't work. So the general manager got a promotion and ended up at another department, but the studio foundered for years and years. Wow. So his obfuscate tactic worked for him. He got to another job. Worked working really well.

The other thing that happened was, you know, we were working with Rich and Scaf on game ideas. And at every meeting, you know, they would come in to talk. us about Facebook games, and then Scaf would say, by the way, you should be doing mobile games. Right? But again, to switch to mobile games, would mean the boss would have to go to his boss's boss and say, I was wrong about doing social media games. We should be doing mobile games instead.

And so we never pivoted until, you know, really late in the process, there was a question of like, hey, I've got a game that, you know, it's the most successful game we've done. done so far, could we put it on mobile? But because we had never planned to put it on mobile, the animations would not have translated to mobile. And so we couldn't do it. But if we had thought ahead and said, let's make something that'll be transferable to mobile, that would put us in a good spot. So I guess I learned a lot. I didn't learn what I thought I was going to learn. But I did learn a lot from those two years. So if you don't mind lingering, you talked about learning about your weaknesses as a team member and personal growth. And I think that stuff's really,

really important, especially, you know, we all think we're smart and capable in many ways we are, but when it comes to working in a team, there's a different subset of skills that are required. That's right. It takes some humility and strength to realize that and grow from it. And I'd love to just, you know, maybe service some of that a little bit more detail if we can for people listening. Yeah. So one thing was, like I went there with the idea that I'm going to,

to follow the boss's lead because the boss has done this before and I haven't. And so, you know, maybe I went too far in doing that. Maybe I should have pushed back more or probably wouldn't have made any difference because, you know, like I said, nothing worked at that studio for years. But it can continually surprise me that other people in the studio wanted to do things their way. The artist wanted to do things their way, especially. And, you know, like we're all on a team. We signed up for this guy to be the boss and to set the direction. And so I continually was struggling, you know, either assuming people were going to do things the right way and then being surprised when they weren't, or struggling to get them to do things the boss's

way. And I never, I just didn't appreciate people want to do their own thing. And if they're not going to do their own thing, you've got to persuade them. They've got to, they've got to want to do what they're doing. They can't, maybe, maybe I'm unusual in that way. Or like I had a senior enough position that I felt like I could sit my ego aside and follow the boss or I don't know what it was, but it's like, yeah, you can't just rely on people to follow the strategy. You have to get them to want to follow this strategy. And so that was a big failing of mine. Yeah. I also sort of more personally, I think I discovered something about how disagreeable I am. So for me, disagreeability has been kind of a superpower in that I would look at a game and there would be

lots of things I didn't like about it and I would think about how to make them better. And a lot of my game design has come out of the thing that these other people have done isn't good enough or the thing that I just did isn't good enough. And so that disagreeability has kept me from following along what's done before and always sort of trying to do something new. But people don't like disagreeability as it turns out. And so. As it turns out. And so, you know, I've often been able to do good work. but it's been hard for me to, you know, get support from a team or something like that.

And so just understanding my own personality better makes me, helps me understand where other people are at. And so I think the whole process made me kind of more realistic. Like people aren't going to appreciate it if you tell them they're wrong, even if they're wrong. Right? And I don't like being told that I'm wrong, but I probably take it better than a lot of people because I'm disagreeable and expect things to be wrong. And I often find fault in my own work. But most people are not like that. And so I think my approach was just really,

like if the studio had been staffed by people like me, it would have been great. Yes, if only I could find more people like me, everything would be awesome. I've saw that many times. That's right. That's right. And so, you know, when things fell apart at Amazon,

I had a choice to make, which was either to be resentful about all the wrong things that other people had done, or to take the opportunity to reflect on how I had contributed to it and how I did things differently or could have done things differently. And I picked that latter path. And I have had a lot of personal growth in the last 11 years. It's been really good.

I've come more to terms with how my personality difference from other people's and what that means. You know, like in Amazon, the boss was sort of a smart, nerdy guy, and the leader of the art team was a tall, well-dressed musician, as well as artists, of course. And so on paper, the general manager has the authority, but in the reality of the situation, people are going to follow the tall, good-looking, well-dressed musician. And I didn't take that into account at all, like when I was trying to figure out what's

going on in the studio and who do I need to have on board in order to get things to work. So, yeah, big learning experience. Yeah, that's great. Thank you for sharing that. I mean, you know, one, you know, just understanding the principle of, like, how do you enroll others and how do you understand how the social dynamics of the situation work? to I can so relate on the disagreeability thing. I was literally in high school.

I was voted most likely to disagree with anything you say. I was by default, and it's good, it's a strength in a sense, right? I find problems. I figure out how to solve them. It's like kind of one of the cores of who I was,

but I didn't realize I was pissing people off a lot all the time. Straight through college. I mean, I was like kind of a jerk. I realized in retrospect. And so fortunately, I was able to take that feedback, uh,

realize that there's some alternate ways to go and other, perspectives I could choose to take. That's right. And find that, find that balance. And so I think it's really important. And the most important thing I think is what you said was, you know,

look, anytime something goes wrong, you have two basic choices is reframing you a little bit. Like you can blame the world or you can look to see what you could have done differently. Yeah. And being, looking at what you could have done differently is by far the most powerful way to

look at life. Even if it's not the main culprit, right? Even if in fact, there was this, your boss was a jerk and finances were bad and whatever. The, what could I have done differently?

I learned this during my early days as a pro magic player because when you know you got outdrawn or your opponent got lucky, yeah, okay, you could complain about getting bad luck or you could have thought that actually, you know what, if five turns earlier I had made this different play, there wouldn't even have been an opportunity for him to get lucky later. And I could have, you know, you know, and so those players, the players that thought like that were the ones that were, you know,

at the top of the game and winning championships and the people who complained about their bad beats were the ones that just got a chance to complain and went home, you know. So those skills are really, really important. We're running late on time as at least two more topics I want to get to. So I'm going to get to one because we're talking about the idea of personal transformation. Yeah. And the lessons learned. And you were responsible for a huge lesson learned and transformation for me.

Okay. And this happened when we got to meet at Burning Man at Peter Atkinson's camp. Yep. And you ran a game. Yeah. And this game was a foot pole. It's game of exercise. I don't know what you'd call it a game.

or not, but talk to, tell people what the foot pole is, and I'll explain the specific thing that happened for me. I'll tell my version of the story. Okay. Yeah. So it's a pole like P-O-L-L, and it's a foot pole because it's a pole that you answer using your feet. So you have everybody sort of jumbled in the middle, and then you have like a collar in front of them. And the caller says, if you like Star Wars more than Star Trek, go to my right. If you like Star Trek more than Star Wars, go to my left. And so the further you go, the stronger your feelings are. And if you're conflicted, you stay in the middle.

And so then people split up and everyone can see where everybody is. Sometimes the questions are like you're trying to get to know the other people in your camp. And so it's like who grew up in a big city, grew up in a small town. It's not opinions. It's sort of personal history stuff. But mostly it's, you know, do you believe in free will or not? you know, how big do you think innate characteristics versus learning have on your personality or, you know, what's more important fame or money or that sort of thing? And if you get really fancy, you can do it in two dimensions, right?

So we did, do you think aliens are in contact with humans, move to one direction? Do you not move to the other? And then do you believe in God? Then you go at 90 degrees if you do and you stay put if you don't. And so now you've got a two by two quadrant. Yeah, so it's like the y-axis that people are walking along is one question and the x-axis. Thank you. That's a great way to put it.

Right. And so, like, what we found was there were very few people who believed in one of those things, but not the other. And it was mostly people who believed in neither or both. Right. Right. Well, I was like, oh, I didn't predict that, but that was interesting. And then, you know, the caller starts with a bunch of questions that they have may be prepared on a topic. And then other people in the audience can, like, throw out questions.

And you just, you play your own. over and over again and you drill down on the places that are interesting. And then you interspers that with, you know, if that's the quantitative look of like how many people are in which direction, then you have sort of a qualitative angle where you get volunteers from one side of the other to talk about their position. Like, why do you think women are inherently different from men? Or why do you not think that? Or why do you like Star Wars so much?

And then it's not a debate. You don't go back and forth and try to prove everything, but you try to lay out differences so that people can see what other people have to say. And I came up with this system as a way to control loudmouths. Like if you just had a popcorn question like, hey, who wants to talk about free will or whatever? it's going to be probably a guy who raises their hand first and probably a loudmouth. And I'm a bit of a loud mouth, and so I cannot stand other loud mouths. And this is my way of letting...

It's almost going to be talking a lot. It's going to be me. Yeah, that's right. And so in this way, you can state your position on Star Wars versus Star Trek without even opening your mouth. You just walk to one side of the stand or the other. And it lets everyone participate all the time instead of one person at a time. And I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep loudmouths from controlling a situation, whether it's like panels at conventions. You know, I never do popcorn questions where anyone can answer, ask questions in whatever order,

because there's always loud mouths. And this is sort of the same thing. Fascinating. Yeah, I didn't know the origin story of it. And so I, I will tell my piece of this, which is, I thought it was really fun. It was a great get to know you thing, a great experience while I was there at camp. And then there was one question that you asked. And it was the first was, how much do you value and feel like being connected, always connected is a good thing or a bad thing, right? This like being connected to the internet, being on your phone, whatever it was. And I was like, okay, well, this is, my whole life depends on this, right?

I'm a, you know, I wasn't a full digital nomad at the time, but like, I love being all these connected. It gives me all the freedom. I'm like all the way on one side. and then and then says, okay, well, how much would you want there to be a connection and internet at Burning Man? And I was like, oh my God, I don't want that at all. Right. And I went to the other side.

So I'm in this like bizarre corner now where all of a sudden I say, wait, hold on, I really value being always connected, but there's something very special here that I didn't realize how important it was to me. That's right. Until that moment that being disconnected was part of what made that event special. And that the power of being disconnected was something I had just ignored internally. And so it was that hole that stuck with me now for like a decade. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's been a long time. And it changed the way I behave in the world. I mean, it made it so that I actually carve out little digital Sabbaths for myself where I will purposefully put phones away and devices away. And I will like, you know, build out more conscious structures of when I don't let myself be always connected, even though my life depends on, you know, this sort of ever-present on-present connectivity. So I'm very grateful to you for that.

I got goosebumps there. That's really quite a. story. Yeah, you're welcome. I mean, that's what Burning Man is for, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So it was a really cool thing. So in addition to controlling loud mouths and getting to know you, you actually kind of forced some insights for me personally. Yeah, good. Okay. I got one more topic to cover. We got maybe a little, you know, not that long, but this is the topic I know you're excited about. And I didn't know about before I started doing research here, but you are not just a game designer and event designer here. But you've, you've, you, you,

written a book and this is a book that's her children's book to really help move the needle forward. So talk about, let's talk about grandmother fish, I think it's called. Yeah, that's right. So I've got a 29-year-old daughter and I guess 25 years ago when she was little, I wanted her to have a book that would explain evolution in a way that was scientifically sound, but approachable for a preschooler. And so I started working on that book. I thought it would be kind of easy.

And boy, it took me years to put that together. This was all while I was working at Wizards. And there was a point at which maybe 10 years into the process that I thought I had it. Like I think I've got what I can is good enough to send off to publishers. And one of my, the mother, one of my daughter's friends who was in kids books, took a look at the manuscript and told me it wasn't ready. And she was kind of nice and subtle about it. And if I hadn't been attuned to it,

I wouldn't have really understood that she was telling me that there's no point in sending it off in the current format. But I have a lot of experience, playtesting games, and a lot of experience accepting negative feedback. And so I took that to heart, and I shelved it until I could figure out how to make it really work.

And then after I got pushed out of Amazon, I went to Burning Man for the last time, came home from there, 2013, was soaking in the hot tub smoking weed, thinking about the origins of language and how early humans must have used pantomime in order to express ideas about animals and stuff like that. And then I had this eureka moment

where I shook all over and I realized that If you want this book about evolution to work, you want to get the kids to mimic the ancestors. So they wiggle like a fish and hoot like an ape and crawl like a reptile. And suddenly it's like, this is it. This is the thing that is going to make the book work. And in fact, it makes the book reach an even younger audience because they can be even pre-verbal, but they can hoot or a crawl or whatever it is. and so I started working up plans to finally get it finished,

and by this time, Kickstarter had come on board, so instead of going to New York publisher or whatever, I found an artist, and we put it up on Kickstarter, and the Kickstarter did great, and then there was a positive review on an NPR blog, and I sold out of all the little self-published books that I had, then an agent got a hold of me and wanted to rep my book. And like three different book companies, book publishers sort of bid on it.

And we went with McMillan. And then within McMillan, a couple of imprints within McMillan all pitched me on there. They would be the one to publish my book. And I went with FIBLE and friends. And so now it's in Japanese. and Chinese and Italian and there's a Japanese

television show some like a made for TV movie that has some young woman reads the book and you know comes in touch with the value and wonder of life or something like that it was like oh yeah

it was one of the books featured in a Tokyo Natural History Museum they did a big thing on kids books for evolution and the guy running that exhibit was also the translator. So it's just been kind of a dream come true.

That's amazing. To make that kind of a transition is so incredible. I love that you told, you know, very specifically the lesson, key lesson from game design of, you know, playtesting, accepting negative feedback was critical to writing a book. That's right. And I mean, I've seen the book. It's available. People want to get it. It's available on Amazon and all different places. The reviews are outstanding. Yeah, that's right. That's just so incredible. And so it was literally just you did this on your own. You got feedback from some professionals or people that were in the

industry to give you some of that data. But then you made it, you know, hired the artist, went to Kickstarter, and then the book publishers came to you. Like you didn't see them out. They came to you. That's amazing. What a great story. I have a friend of mine that's working on a children's book as well. It's kind of the, I guess I don't know if I'm a lot of talk about the name of it, but it's this, you know, getting intended to be a learning kind of children's book. And so I've, this is a great story. I'm going to have them listen to this episode. So going on Kickstarter was also a big part of it because if you tell your friends,

you know, I'm going to self-publish a book or I'm going to ship a manuscript off to New York. It's like, okay. But if you tell them, I'm going to put my book up for the world to see on Kickstarter, and we're going to see if people like it or not, then they want to help. And so, like, I had one friend help with how to do the typography. and I had a husband-wife writing couple, give me advice on what the manuscript needed. One said you need more details,

and the other said you need fewer words. So it was like, oh, okay, I'll do more details and fewer words. Easy. Yeah, easy. And then got, so that was just a big help. And people were enthusiastic about supporting it because it was on Kickstarter. Yeah, great. I love it. What a great, what a great story. We've covered an enormous amount of the breath of your incredible career here. And I'm glad I got to be a small little note in it in one of the chapters. That's a great story.

So since we are kind of running out of time, we've already given people a lot of hints. But if you want to see more from you or the other projects you're working on or anything, you want to direct people to, I don't know if you're involved in the social medias or whatever, is anything, any last messages you want to give to the audience. we wrap it up. Yeah, so, you know, I'm on social media, mostly on Twitter, but I'm also on Blue Sky. You can find me pretty easily with my name. There's a new edition of 13th Age coming out that I'm working on with Rob Hainso. And so we did this game 10 years ago, and it's sort of like, one reason I like the Open Gaming license is that it allowed Rob and me to create sort of our own version of Dungeons and Dragons. And he was the lead designer on Fourth Edition. I was the lead on third. Those are two very different editions,

and we have many differences in our play styles and design styles. So coming up with a game that pleased us both has been a real challenge, and I think has ended up being the sort of game that obviously neither one of us could have possibly done on their own. Fascinating. Okay, well, now I'm intrigued. I'm definitely going to go check it out. Okay, yeah, it's going to go on Kickstarter leader this year.

Okay, great. Thank you so much. I appreciate the time. And of course, the many great things that you've created to the world that have touched me and the audience directly. Love it. I appreciate it. It's been fun. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares with a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry

and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books or something.