Dragon Age - PnP Design Diary #1

Thanks to the Dragon Age forums for pointing out this Design Diary from Chris Pramas of Green Ronin on creating the upcoming pen-and-paper game.  Here's an excerpt:

We are getting ready to launch our new Dragon Age RPG, so to whet your appetite I'm doing some design diaries for the game here on greenronin.com. You may know me as the president of Green Ronin Publishing; I'm also the designer of Dragon Age. I hadn't had a chance to roll up my sleeves and do some serious design work since Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, 2nd edition, so I decided to take on this project myself. But I'm getting ahead of myself. [...]

So fairly early in the process I decided that the game would best be served by designing a new system. I also decided I wanted to do it myself, as I was up for a game design challenge and had a lot of ideas percolating in my head about how to approach a new class and level game. I would draw inspiration from the computer game, but ultimately the tabletop RPG would be its own animal. What works for a computer game and what works for a tabletop game are not necessarily the same and first and foremost I wanted to be sure we made a great tabletop RPG.