David Chart's Blog

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  • 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…

My Old Pages

These are links to my old webpages, from back before I moved to a wordpress-powered blog. Back when I wrote the HTML by hand in a text editor. Yes, really. The formatting on some of the pages has broken a bit, and there are newer versions of some of the content in the current part of the site. Nothing here is maintained, nor likely to have anything done with it in the future.