benlehman

Easy. Game design, especially design influenced by the Forge, is intensely personal in nature. The vast majority of games grow out of a passion for the subject matter. Further, mechanics are a ritualization of an activity that can be handled without them. For someone to write effective game mechanics they need to either get lucky (happens all the time actually) or have a decent understanding of the activity they want to support.

By knowing about you: your dreams, your loves, your hates, your life I am able to better understand why you think what you think and where you learned what you learned.

Aside from that I think you're a pretty cool guy, and that's the real reason I try to keep up with you (despite having met you precisely once at GenCon this year). But the above is one of the reasons I try to get to know the people who write the games I play.

Thomas