Have you heard Tim B's interview with Dreaming Dragonslayer ? I've listened to it twice . Here's what Tim said that I can't stop thinking about (slight edits for clarity): "With an RPG, you have to think, okay, the players are going to be moving through space— what is the experience of one person in this story? Whereas with a social matrix game, you can think more about the story as a whole. Lull Astir started in my head as a D&D scenario. There’s this exiled revolutionary and he’s being protected by this monastery. The monastery doesn’t want to give him up, but if they don’t give him up, then there could be this big war. And at first I was thinking: then I throw some adventurers in, right? And they have to go solve the problem. But I started to think: why are the adventurers here at all? Because the interesting conflict is not the conflict between the player characters and whatever monsters they’re going to fight in the dungeon. The interesting conflict is b...