David Chart's Blog

Category: Roleplaying

  • “Diversity” and American Dominance in RPGs

    The US dominance of both the pen-and-paper RPG industry and the diversity debate is a real problem, one that, I think, is actively hindering attempts to address the problems created by a lack of diversity. Let’s take an example I’m intimately familiar with: Japan. (For people who don’t know, I’ve lived here for 12 years,…

  • Progress!

    In the last week, I seem to have crossed a critical point with Kannagara. I now have a 6500 word draft of all the core mechanics, and I think they are both simple enough to be usable, and complex enough to support the sort of game I want to write. I don’t yet have anything…

  • Ars Magica and Kannagara

    Today, Atlas Games publicly announced my retirement as Ars Magica Line Editor. It doesn’t take effect until the end of this year, and it’s been planned for about three years, but the public announcement is an important step. What does this have to do with Kannagara? Well, the reason I am retiring from Ars Magica…

  • Not Even Resting

    Kannagara is not dead. It’s not even resting. It’s just all been happening behind the scenes. I know I haven’t posted anything to this blog for a long time, but I have been working on the game, along the lines I outlined previously. This has proved difficult. It took me a while to identify the…

  • Choose Your Success

    A lot of roleplaying games take the possibility of failure to be a necessary element of the fun. If you know that your characters will survive, where is the tension, the anticipation? That is the argument, but it has always had an attendant problem. If a character dies permanently, that player has nothing to do…

  • Inclusivity in Roleplaying Games

    Recently (over the last year or so) there has been a lot of talk in gaming of the need to make products more inclusive, to provide options who are not straight white cis-men. This campaign seems to have started in computer gaming, where my limited experience suggests that it is really needed, but it has…

  • Evidence, For and Against

    This week, I did make some more progress on theories and evidence; I now have specific content for what happens in the draft scenario, and half of it is written up. I can see that this mechanic will be good discipline for people writing for the game. In Kannagara, theories will define the world. The…

  • A Bit About Theories

    Things have been held up a bit by the need to work on other projects, but this week I’ve been able to make some more progress. Today, I’ve been working on discovery. I’m now thinking of Kannagara as a roleplaying game of discovery, creation, and growth, so this is one of the three fundamental pillars…

  • Concrete Revisions

    This week, I’ve started work on the new draft of the playtest scenario. Although the basic story is still the same, it’s going to be quite different in detail. For one thing, I’m over 3,000 words and I still haven’t got to the place where the previous version started. This is only to be expected,…

  • Fundamental Revisions

    Today, I’ve made a start on the revisions to Kannagara based on the results of the first playtest. I’m looking at making quite a fundamental revision: I’m working on dropping the dice mechanic. This is a bit painful, because I really like that dice mechanic. I think the probability distributions it gives have some very…