David Chart's Blog

Month: July 2010

  • Removing Obstacles

    My general mechanic for coming up with an idea includes rolls to reduce the difficulty of a statistic or to increase the number of dice available to roll. In this post, I’d like to look at what you should roll to reduce the difficulty, and how you should role-play it. First, a quick preliminary. I’m…

  • Creative Actions

    So, how do we go about describing the actions that characters take while trying to come up with ideas?  The first step is to think about the talents and abilities that characters will have scores in. We’re going to want different ones from most role-playing games, because our emphasis is different, and we probably don’t…

  • Hikawa Shrine

    A few weeks ago, I visited Hikawa Shrine, the Ichi-no-Miya of Musashi-no-Kuni. That sentence probably needs a bit of explanation. “Hikawa Shrine” is the name of the Shinto shrine I visited; there are several other shrines called that, but this is the main one, and it is located in Saitama City, the capital of Saitama…

  • Pretending to be Creative

    There is a fundamental problem with the roleplaying aspect of the rules for coming up with an idea. That is, in order to describe it, you have to come up with an idea. There is no way around this, but I think there are two approaches that can mitigate it. First, in pre-written scenarios, the…

  • Negative Evidence

    If you look around on the net, you can find a lot of anecdotes about how the Japanese exclude foreigners, along with generalised statements that don’t even include anecdotes to back them up. I’d like to provide some anecdotes on the other side. They’re still just anecdotes, and the vast majority are only significant because…

  • Paths to Ideas

    The combination of three statistics for every idea and path dependence for the process should ensure that players have to make important in-character decisions, and that those decisions will make a difference. However, the results of the die rolls should also make a difference. The players should not be able to map out their whole…

  • Yet More Preliminaries

    Today we had another meeting of the Kawasaki Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. We are still working on the preliminaries, but we have, at least nearly finished. Today’s job was to choose the topics we will discuss in detail over the rest of our term. My goal for my subcommittee was to have the whole…

  • Rules for Creativity

    So far, this has all been preliminaries. From this post, I want to start working out how to make creativity part of a game. It makes sense to start with what I think is the hardest problem: rules for coming up with ideas. If I can solve this problem, the rest should be relatively easy.…

  • Dice Mechanics

    The core of a role-playing game’s mechanics is the decision mechanic, what you do to decide whether an attempted action succeeds or fails. It’s certainly not the whole of the mechanics, but it’s a very important part, as the rest of the mechanics have to be designed to work with it. That means that it’s…

  • The Purpose of Mechanics

    I wrote this post over the last week or so, and then a discussion of romance in role-playing games over at Gameplaywright moved on to this topic. Rather than repeat myself, I decided to put this post up a little early. All role-playing games have mechanics, and I don’t think that this is a matter…