{"id":1940,"date":"2016-01-22T21:58:06","date_gmt":"2016-01-23T05:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/?p=1940"},"modified":"2022-07-09T16:28:24","modified_gmt":"2022-07-09T20:28:24","slug":"review-fundamentals-of-role-playing-game-design-by-ernest-adams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/review-fundamentals-of-role-playing-game-design-by-ernest-adams\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Fundamentals of Role-Playing Game Design by Ernest Adams"},"content":{"rendered":"

Title<\/strong>: Fundamentals of Role-Playing Games
\nAuthor<\/strong>: Ernest Adams
\nYear<\/strong>: 2014<\/p>\n

Summary<\/strong>: Very short introductory book on traditional role-playing game design considerations. Not bad if you know nothing about RPGs and need a quick primer, but not recommended for serious reading.<\/p>\n

\"fundamentals<\/a><\/p>\n

This will be a short review since the book is rather short.<\/p>\n

Fundamentals of Role-Playing Game Design<\/em> one one of a larger series of short ebooks that Ernest Adams has written covering different genres of games, such as sports, strategy, simulation, puzzles, and so on. The book is very short – a little over 50 pages – and only available in ebook format.<\/p>\n

Out of all the books I’ve collected, I have not found any that seek to go into detail on a single genre and dissect that from a design point of view. When I stumbled upon Adams’s collection of titles that seemed to cover exactly that\u00a0I decided to pick one of them up and review it to see if it was worth diving into the series. After this one, though, I probably won’t pick any of the others up.<\/p>\n

Fundamentals of Role-Playing Game Design<\/em> reads like\u00a0an introduction to the genre to someone who has never played a role-playing game before but has some knowledge about games or gameplay. It is very basic and only covers fairly traditional role-playing game design conventions (dice rolling, character sheets, magic systems), covering mainstays like Dungeons & Dragons or\u00a0Planescape: Torment.<\/p>\n

The book acts as more of a survey of what is done, why, and when some decisions are better or worse than others – for example, different inventory management strategies or dialogue\/story branching structures.\u00a0The book could have been much longer, and I was hoping it would have a more solid foundation on role-playing games including tabletop and LARPing. The author\u00a0alludes to these and other considerations but claims that there’s not enough room in this book to cover them in depth.<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t recommend the book for active game developers or people who know a lot about the genre. As a student I may\u00a0have found a book like this on strategy games (which Adams has also written) helpful for getting me up to speed on a genre of games I had practically zero\u00a0familiarity with at the time. I suspect that the series is meant as individual supplements\u00a0to follow-up from Adams’s Fundamentals of Game Design<\/em>, a much larger and more comprehensive textbook.<\/p>\n

The book ultimately fails for me because it is just too short to do the topic justice. A book on role-playing game design could easily fill an entire textbook and even knowing the page count ahead of time I found myself disappointed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Title: Fundamentals of Role-Playing Games Author: Ernest Adams Year: 2014 Summary: Very short introductory book on traditional role-playing game design considerations. Not bad if you know nothing about RPGs and need a quick primer, but not recommended for serious reading. …<\/p>\n

Review: Fundamentals of Role-Playing Game Design by Ernest Adams<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[17,105],"class_list":["post-1940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-design-library","tag-game-design","tag-roleplaying"],"featured_image_src":"","featured_image_src_square":false,"author_info":{"display_name":"Liz England","author_link":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/author\/liz-england\/"},"rbea_author_info":{"display_name":"Liz England","author_link":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/author\/liz-england\/"},"rbea_excerpt_info":"Title: Fundamentals of Role-Playing Games Author: Ernest Adams Year: 2014 Summary: Very short introductory book on traditional role-playing game design considerations. Not bad if you know nothing about RPGs and need a quick primer, but not recommended for serious reading. …

Review: Fundamentals of Role-Playing Game Design by Ernest Adams<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>","category_list":"Game Design Library<\/a>","comments_num":"1 comment","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1940"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1943,"href":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1940\/revisions\/1943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lizengland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}