What’s the situation in your game? How do you flag, support, and inspire situations in play? RPG play can be as small as a single dramatic situation or as vast worlds teeming with volatile circumstances … but it’s for naught if the players don’t know how to interact with that situation.

Let’s talk more about settings and worlds for gameplay, including designing and recognizing links between your world and your game!

How does your game’s setting interact with its design? How do you begin to design a setting? How does your setting suit your game — and why?

Let’s talk about influences on our designs and how we converse with them and with our own game’s vision and voice.

What are some early exercises and tactics for starting a new design?

This time, we look back at the show and reflect on 20 episodes of conversations. What are we happy with and what do we still want to attempt? What course corrections might we attempt for the show next? This approximates the kind of reflection we do as designers, midway through a design, and helps us identify what’s next for the show in 2016.

What is antagonism in play — we talk about the problems inherent in the term, what it means in play, and how you can think about it in your design.

This time, we talk about communications between a game’s designer and its players—especially the GM—both implicit and explicit.

This time we’re dropping names and game titles all over the place, focusing on just a few of the games that we’re feeling influenced by lately or over time — especially when it comes to GMing.

This time we’re talking about designing for GM authorities and responsibilities in tabletop RPGs.