Feb 032009
 

I recently wrote this bit on a private mailing list. Jeff Tidball saw it and asked me to repost it over at Gameplaywright.net in the discussion about Things We Think About Games, the game-ruminations book he and Will Hindmarch put together. Which I did. And so I thought I’d post it here as well. I’m interested to hear what you think.

Game balance is completely overrated.

People conflate balance with fairness all the time. They are not the same thing. If you’re all playing by the same rules and with the same pieces, the game is just as fair to every player.

By that, I don’t mean that you shouldn’t have a game that’s roughly balanced, nor that you shouldn’t try to root out the bits that throw a game completely off the rails. However, if all choices are always optimal (i.e. equally good), than what’s the point of playing?

Games should have their rough spots, their peaks and valleys in the mathematical sheet of balance. They should be crunchy, not smooth, filled with secret caves of hidden knowledge for players to discover, ponder, and exploit.

Feb 032009
 

ICv2.com reports that Scyre, the last remaining magazine devoted to collectible games, is ending its run in April. By my count, Scrye was also the last adventure game magazine of any stripe left in wide circulation, joining Dragon, Dungeon, InQuest, Games Quarterly, and several others in the periodicals graveyard.

I used to love reading gaming magazines, but with the rise of the internet, there’s clearly not much space for them any more. Any news articles they run are out of date before they even go to press much less by the time they hit stands. The same goes for their price guides. Chewy, well-written content still has a place of course, but it’s hard to appeal to a broad audience if you focus on just one game. If you spread your wings a bit wider, you find that most players only play a handful of games and don’t care for omnivorous coverage instead.

The only magazines I know of that are left are Polymancer and Kobold Quarterly. I’ve never seen an actual copy of Polymancer, so I can’t comment on its quality.

Kobold Quarterly, which is edited and published by my fellow Alliterate Wolfgang Baur, rocks, but it’s focused exclusively on D&D material. At that, it does a wonderful job. It leapfrogs backward over the wide-ranging magazines of the ’90s and lands squarely in the days when D&D was all that most gamers cared about.

If that suits you, go for it. I read KQ—in PDF form rather than print—but I still have to mourn the loss of a wider-ranged print magazine. Of course, I have the massive resources of the internet to console me, so I can’t feel all that bad.

ETA: I forgot to mention, of course, the various gaming comics books like Knights of the Dinner Table, which features a lot of game content too. With Nodwick cancelled and (I believe) Dork Tower and PvP on print hiatus, that seem to make KoDT the last book standing.

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