Dungeons & Dragons is enjoying a renaissance these days, driven in part by a passionate community of YouTubers and streamers engrossed in the lore and mechanics of this classic tabletop role-playing game.
The folks at Wizards of the Coast are responsible for shepherding D&D (now in its 5th edition) towards a more immersive, inclusive design, and at the Game Developers Conference next month you'll see how they did it!
As part of the Board Game Design Summit Wizards of the Coast creative director Mike Mearls will present "Creating Immersion in Tabletop Games", an hour-long talk aimed at showing you how to synthesize world-building and rules design into a cohesive whole, best practices for creating terms and labels for their game's elements, and an understanding of how to use realism to make tabletop games more intuitive and authentic.
Using 4th edition D&D as a point of contrast, it illustrates the differences between a design that creates immersion and one that foils it and extends them into principles useful to any tabletop genre.
GDC 2020 runs from Monday, March 16th through Friday, March 20th. This will be the 34th edition of GDC, and now that registration is officially open, you'll want to take a look at the (ever-expanding) session schedule and your GDC pass options -- register early to lock in the best price!
For more details on GDC 2020 visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.