Category: Roleplaying

Although I will, of course, develop the detailed design of the game world while I’m working on the game, I do need to choose the basic type of world I want to create. Since we are focusing on things I’m personally interested in, there are four options: “classic” fantasy, modern fantasy, science fiction, and historical.…

Introducing the game world is, like character creation, a major problem for role-playing games. Most games end up with several volumes of world information, running to thousands of pages; Ars Magica is certainly no exception to that. Reading this information and discovering the game world is part of the fun for a lot of people.…

My suggestion in the last post that we could generate characters during play created the problem that it would work better if the basic rules relied on simply beating a difficulty, not on the amount by which you beat it. However, the rules I designed for creating something relied on the final total. Can I…

Character creation is an essential part of any role-playing game, even if it just consists of choosing a character from a list. Indeed, it’s a part that a lot of role-players really enjoy, including me; I’ve created quite a lot of characters that I’ve never played, and knew I never had any chance of playing.…

So, how do we stitch creative actions together into a story? Here, I think I do want to model things on the classic RPG pattern. It’s classic for a reason, after all. The pattern is to have a number of encounters, which go together to form an adventure. Adventures are then strung together into campaigns.…

The abilities needed to execute an idea are very likely to be different from those needed to come up with it (a possible exception is knowledge of genres), but what about the talents? Do they have to be different as well? I think that we can have some overlap, which is a good thing; characters…

As anyone who has ever created something knows, getting the idea, while essential, is not the hardest part, or at least not the part that requires the most work. Turning an idea into an actual creation is a major undertaking, and something that should also be central to this game. Actually, in some cases there…

The final part of my outline rules for coming up with ideas concerns ways that players can get more dice to roll. We’ve already covered some of these: I’ve said that good descriptions of actions will get additional dice. However, that’s a reward for player actions. I think we should also have character actions that…