David Chart's Blog

Category: Roleplaying

  • Going to School

    I have been a bit distracted over the last month or so. First, I was asked to translate an academic paper into Japanese. That’s hard work. In general, it is a bad idea to try to translate things out of your native language. Fortunately, the translation was for internal use only, so awkward language is…

  • School of Magic

    As I mentioned at the end of last year, I decided to look into whether designing the School of Magic game I’ve been wanting to make for decades would speed up the process of getting the mechanics into playtest. The only way to do that, really, is to try writing, and see whether progress is…

  • Strategy for 2016

    Another year draws to a close, and Kannagara still isn’t finished. On the bright side, I didn’t run a Kickstarter for it. On the down side, I would have liked to be a lot farther along than I am at the moment. Writing a significantly different kind of roleplaying game turned out to be quite…

  • Liberalism and Diversity

    Recently, I have come to think that I have been confusing two desirable situations when thinking about tolerance, diversity, and liberty. Here, I will refer to them as “diversity” and “liberalism”, not because I think that is how the words are generally used (I think a lot of people confuse them), but because I think…

  • Harae

    Today, I have had time to work on the game, and it felt very productive. I did two main things. First, I tweaked the mechanics in an attempt to deal with the problem of near-redundant statistics I noted a few weeks ago. I think this approach will work, and make the rules significantly simpler, but…

  • Core Mechanics

    Today, I think I completed the rules framework for the game. It is nothing like the rules I described earlier on this blog, but it all hangs together nicely, and will, I think, support the sort of game that I want to design. I actually have a track record of designing in this way. First,…

  • Increasing Diversity in Pen-and-Paper Roleplaying

    At the time of writing, Andy Kitkowski at Kotodama Heavy Industries is running a Kickstarter for the English translation of Shinobgami, a Japanese role-playing game about ninja battles. (You still have time to back it!) In the description, he emphasises that he has recruited a very diverse array of authors, including many from outside the…

  • “Playtest” Results

    This blog has been quiet for a bit, because development of Kannagara has been on hiatus while various life things happened. However, they’re over now, and I’ve moved this game to a higher priority. Today, I ran the first mini-playtest of the new version. In a sense, it wasn’t a real playtest, because I was…

  • The Freedom to Publish and Safe Spaces

    A month or so ago, I wrote an article saying that I disagreed with OneBookShelf’s decision to start refusing to sell “offensive content”. In the discussion of that on my Facebook page, a number of people expressed incredulity at the idea that anyone might have a right to be sold. That comment thread was not…

  • OneBookShelf’s Offensive Content Policy

    On September 1st, OneBookShelf, the company that runs DriveThruRPG, announced an offensive content policy in reaction to the outrage over a product entitled “Tournament of Rapists”. Steve Wieck, the CEO, published a blog post explaining his decision. It is a thoughtful and serious attempt to wrestle with a difficult issue, and one that recognises the…