Through the Lens: Board Games - Game Design Theory - page 139

Look Beyond D&D
If you're new to pen and paper RPGs, it might seem like Dungeons &
Dragons is a good place to start. I would advise against this in most cases.
The reason is that D&D , now in its fourth edition, has a lot of baggage.
The game has always been somewhat unfocused, and you're probably
not getting the best bang for your buck in terms of how much you're go-
ing to learn versus the materials you'll have to buy and read.
In the past decade or so, there has been a very steady rise in indepen-
dently created pen and paper RPGs. I recommend doing some research,
buying or downloading some PDFs, and playing with some of these sys-
tems (check out BoardGameGeek's sister site, RPGGeek.com).

Emergent Stories
As I said earlier, the interactive story is always at war with itself. I won't
say don't make an interactive story—if that's what you want to do, go
right ahead. But as I also said earlier, it's unwise.
Keep in mind that there's a lot you can do with pure games that is
social and has a lot to do with human interaction. The traitor game he
Resistance is fantastic at creating emergent stories, most of the mecha-
nisms of which are simply people's ideas about each other, rather than
pieces on a board or cards in a hand. All games (and all activities, actu-
ally) create stories, but social games such as The Resistance take place
largely in the verbal realm. I recommend doing something like that, with
the feel of a story-based game yet not tied down to a linear narrative.

Cooperative Games

Examples: Pandemic , Forbidden Isle , Arkham Horror , Reiner Knizia's
Lord of the Rings

Closely related to solitaire games, a cooperative game is played by mul-
tiple players against the system itself. These games use randomness—
usually in the form of card draws, dice rolls, or both—to create adversity
and simulate an opposing intelligence. While cooperative games tend to
be beloved by more socially oriented gaming groups, the genre has some
inherent flaws that thus far no one has been able to completely solve.

Mistakes Are Good
The relationship is actually too close. If you want to, any cooperative
game can be played in single-player mode simply by controlling all of the
players on their turns. In and of itself this is obviously not a problem; in
fact, it's kind of neat that it's an option. The problem is that if one per-