Sage LaTorra has a new blog post about his plan to start helping game designers by giving them focused feedback. Developing a better feedback community for RPG designers is something I’ve been concerned about for a while (partially for selfish reasons — I feel I need better feedback for my game), so I’m going to try to jump on Sage’s bandwagon and hope others follow suit, too.

Here’s the deal:

Designers, ask me for feedback on your game (either via e-mail, blog comments, or on any of the forums I frequent). I pick at least one of those games to give focused feedback on. I’ll post my thoughts about it here on my blog (I’ll admit I don’t get a ton of traffic…) and/or on places like The Forge or Praxis when public comments are appropriate, or via e-mail for a more private comment (or we could even take it to Skype). Hopefully these will be starting points for engaged conversation — I believe that a big part of the benefit of getting feedback about a design is that the process of talking about your own work helps you think about it, so I’d like to avoid fire-and-forget critiquing. If I’m excited about the game and can get other people on board I may even playtest it, and possibly record that playtest and post it to my AP podcast Designer vs. Reality where I try to showcase games being playtested (so far it’s mostly just my game, but I’m hoping to change that).

Some things you should know about me:

  • I am honest. I try not to be a jerk, but when people ask for my opinions I find it difficult to lie.
  • I am a perfectionist: with any activity my attention is quickly focused on what problems need to be solved, so I will occasionally err by failing to give proper praise to positive things. For many years I worked as an engineer finding bugs in microprocessor designs before they were manufactured. By both personality and training my inclination toward things I care about is to make them the best they can be by fixing problems with them. This can come across as “negativity”.
  • I don’t have a big name in the RPG scene (yet)
  • I haven’t published any games (yet)
  • My personal preference in games is toward interesting mechanics or design innovation. I’m not saying that games that don’t have those things aren’t good games, just that they’re unlikely to be my cup of tea.
  • Most of my gaming is done over Skype.
  • I think I’m a reasonably good writer and would make a good editor, but I haven’t done either one professionally.

If that hasn’t scared you off yet, here are some things you need to be sure of before asking me to look at your game:

  • The game needs to be as good as you can make it right now. That doesn’t mean it needs to be at a publishable level, but it does mean you need to have all of your thoughts down in text. I don’t want to invest intellectually or emotionally in something only to hear that I was giving you feedback on something obsolete that doesn’t match how the game works in your head.
  • You need to be serious about taking the game as far as it can go. I don’t want to get excited about something only to have the designer lose interest.

Sound like a good deal? Then let me know where I can find your game, and if it seems interesting I’ll start reading.