15. Do you design in public or in private?

Public, in the sense that I talk about my design stuff on the internet. I'm not sure this actually works very well. I think there are a few reasons for that. First, what's the purpose? Is it to attract interest and attention, or is it to actually work stuff out? Does trying to do both at once actually work? Secondly, I tend to be bad at both initiating and maintaining conversations, for a variety of reasons. Third, and perhaps most importantly, if you're still trying to figure something out are you in a good position to lead a conversation about it? This is one of the reasons I've been skeptical of some of the conventional wisdom about how to have game design conversations like addressing the "What's it about?" question (if you can easily boil it down is it interesting enough to be working on?) or the admonition to ask a directed question (if I understood my problems well enough to ask good questions about them, wouldn't I be most of the way to solving them on my own?). I think that engaging in conversations tends to help people think and work out their ideas, myself included, but I have trouble getting that to happen with the things I want to work out.

16. Any design partners?

I blogged about that one here
WeaselComic

17. Favorite form of feedback?

That one was a full blog, too, right here
BestTTRPGFeedback

18. Current inspiration?

I'm not feeling very inspired by anything right now. I'd like to be, it would be nice to feel a pull towards something in life rather than just lots of pressure to move, especially since I think a lot of that pressure is tangling me up.

19. Game that's most essential to your design?

I don't think I understand this question. Usually when I see a question I try to see if I can answer it literally first, but I'm not sure how a game can be "essential" to someone's "design". But even if something's not actually essential, I guess you can answer what is "most essential" since something that's irrelevant would be less essential than something that's important? I'd say that Dogs in the Vineyard was very influential to my sense of how games work and some of the mechanisms I like to use. My game Final Hour of a Storied Age is pretty core to what I would like to be able to accomplish as a designer. So maybe those?

If we scramble the question to "the design of yours that's most essential", I did try to design a game once where "essence" was an important element. It was for a Game Chef, and it was inspired by Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the computer engineering concept of Finite State Machines. The idea was that, like Dr. Jekyll, the PCs would be experimenters in identity who would use "scientific" methods to suppress, enhance, transfer, etc., various "essences" that compose people's identity/personality. The Game Chef game never came together, the FSM stuff was way to clunky and cumbersome. I tried to retool it as an explicit Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde game, where the characters from the story would be NPCs, but I still couldn't quite get it to gel.

There were two big problems with it: First there was the "what do the characters do?" question -- at the micro level I knew there should be unsavory activities like kidnapping people, experimenting on them, extracting essences, etc., and at the macro level I wanted some sort of mechanic that felt like scientific discovery, but I couldn't quite get that to come together, and I couldn't be sure if the game should supply some external motivation the characters were all striving for or if that should be something the players brought to the characters. The second was that, even without the FSMs, the mechanical direction I was going was too clunky. I felt like I needed something mechanically engaging so that manipulating your character's essence would matter the way it seemed to lead the "player" of the Jekyll/Hyde character to make very different decisions in the different modes, but the direction I was going seemed like it would be very leaden and tedious in play and I couldn't think of any zippier alternatives.