This time, we tackle a great listener-submitted topic about how to makes risk and challenges feel dramatic and satisfying in your RPG designs — and how to help players think about risk and challenge in play.

Another great listener topic, another episode wrestling with said topic. This time: we talk about designs involving Player vs Player and Player vs Environment mechanics and, y'know, some of what that means.

Here we attempt to tackle another great question from the G+ community. This one’s about designing with purpose and how purpose can align with (or away from) content, context, vision, and more.

We’ve talked a lot already about design steps and techniques, thoughts and approaches. You’ve got vision and notes and notions. Now let’s talk about bringing it all together.

What even is a playstorm? We think we know and we dive into the answer in this episode, to consider what makes playstorming different from playtesting, what it’s for, and when we do it.

What is “a success” in play? What is failure? When do players’ and characters’ victories align? When do they diverge? And how do we talk about it all? Tune in and hear.

When we talk about “color” in RPG design, we’re often talking about texture and tangibility and how they interact with and express your game and what it is about. We think.

What do we mean when we talk about emergence? What’s emergent by design and what emerges anyway? We wrestle with the issue this time — and maybe not for the last time!

Space, in many games (and especially RPGs), is abstracted and metaphorical, letting the idea of space mingle with other ideas in exciting ways. What is “narrative mass” and how do relationship maps suggest or defy a space? Let’s talk!

It’s time to talk about time. This time, we make time to discuss real-time play, abstractions, and dramatic units of time in RPGs and other games, which takes us into territory about focus, abstraction, and player agency once again.