You’ve got an action. Let’s call it “build Blooper”. You’ve got a second action. Let’s call it “buy Blooper”. You put your actions before your playtesters and in very short time you notice that nobody is building Bloopers. Your whole Blooper economy, your cute BloopBuilders, everything is just pointless.
And you’ve got no idea why.
So you make building Bloopers less expensive. Now everyone should build Bloopers all the time. Except they don’t. They’re still buying Bloopers.
So you make buying Bloopers really, really expensive. And now your game is stalling out and your playtesters are complaining. Nobody wants to build Bloopers and all the BloopBuilder concept art you commissioned is just so much dollars down the drain. What the hell is going on?
Welcome to the wonderful world of action analysis.
Fortunately there’s a quick and dirty tool you can use to graph your actions and compare them to each other. All you need are three simple axes* of analysis: Cost, Benefit and Risk. (more…)