The way to figure out what you want to learn is to figure out what truly interests you in the media you consume. All this stuff about making the medicine go down is me thinking about how my games work well in retrospect of having created them. I didn’t conceive of My Life with Master out of consciously wanting a tool for teaching how to resolve being controlled via suppression of self-esteem. I just couldn’t stop thinking about a game in which the player characters were evil henchmen.
Ben Lehman in ‘Who’s your Unteacher?’:
“Well,” she said, “what do you want the system to do?”
“I want it to force the players into hard choices where their knight has to bargain with a demon.”
“Well,” she said, “why not just do that?”
“oh.” I said.
I have a few game concepts (for example, my Noir Cyberpunk Tarot Exalted idea) that I’ve been thinking about, on and off. These two posts actually helped me figured out what some of my major concepts (for me: the Trump Cards) were really talking about, and that’s pretty enlightening.