Title: Mistmare
Genre: RPG
Big Word: Smog
Strap: Is it on target, or will it have mist? We haven’t the foggiest.

"Look what you got us into!"

"Me, are you crazy? If you knew how to keep your mouth shut, the punishment would probably be to make our beds or something like that!"

"Well, I guess you’re right. I should keep quiet. I should learn to think before talking. I’m sorry."

It’s enough to make Hegel proud. It’s the level of dialogue from Arxel Tribe’s latest.

Try to imagine that you’ve never played a role playing game, but that you have a friend who likes them. You’ve watched him play now and then, not paying that much attention, because let’s be honest, no one likes to watch someone else play a game. ("No, no, wait, I’m just getting us to a good bit…") Occasionally you’ve thought about playing an RPG - your friend seems to get lots of entertainment from them - but in the end you never do. Ok? Right, so now imagine that from this position, you sit down to write one yourself.

Here are some basic rules you might not know about:

If you have a third person perspective, camera mounted behind the character’s shoulder, you move them with the keyboard – not by aimlessly clicking the mouse on the scenery.

If you have elaborate quantities of statistics, weapons, and skill categories, it’s important to have some form of interactive combat – not just holding down the letter ‘W’.

If you want your player to develop the character through the enormous number of skill levels and ability categories you’ve created, you have to have the story take notice – not be an entirely linear script from which it cannot deviate.

I spent my training arsing around. The weapons combat guy wanted me to fight, but I didn’t, because involvement in fighting consists of pressing the ‘W’ key, and frankly, that’s insulting. The magic training guy wanted me to learn all sorts of spells, but I didn’t, because magic involved pressing F5, then F6, 7 or 8, and nothing else, and frankly, that’s insulting. So instead I did stuff that took up huge quantities of the time. Like, for instance: opening a box (quarter of a day). And at the end of this, this impossible to control, horribly programmed, badly written, poorly animated mess, I was told,

"You are one of our best students ever."