Welcome to another episode of Perspective Checks where I sit down with friends and folks from the TTRPG world and discuss what they love about this wonderful hobby!

This month's episode is with Craig Hatler (a.k.a. Tezrak the Impslayer most places on the internet), a game designer and educator who came on to talk about the importance of a game's communication and resources when sitting down to learn how to play, run the game, or even for designers before it goes out. We talk about his game Shadowlight & Personae, a genre-agnostic neutral system aiming to be able to emulate any type of story, and the work he's done to improve his layout, resources, and more.

This episode bounces around a lot, but we primarily stick to the topic of "how can we, as designers or players engaging with a game, ensure that the rules and mechanics are effectively spelled out so we can just get right to the gameplay." Even as an admitted hoarder of TTRPGs, the act of sitting down to read a rulebook isn't the most exciting thing, I'd rather be reading an actual book to get ideas going, I just need the game book to explain how to do the thing. 

We talk about Daggerheart's cards, pre-generated character sheets, player resource sheets, the read-along rules from For the Queen, and more to lower your game's barrier to learning!

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Rene's Games:

MECH | MECH Cities 2 | One Last Quest

email: [email protected]

Music in the Episode (in order of appearance):

Rene Plays Games Theme written & produced by Dan Pomfret | @danfrombothbands