Category: Game Design

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…