David Chart’s Blog

Why do characters come into conflict with personae? Because the characters want things that differ from what the personae want, or because the personae want things from the characters that the characters are not immediately willing to give. That, of course, is the in-game reason. The meta-game reason is that conflict with characters is one…

The rules described so far can be used for building relationships or changing attitudes. Although the game roles of these two are different, they are closely linked, and in the real world it would be hard to separate them. Therefore, the same kinds of actions can be used to modify either. So, the personae could…

What are the sorts of things that serve as elements when trying to find out about someone? The default assumption is that the personae are not spying on and manipulating the character, although that is possible, and should be supported by the rules at some point (although not necessarily in the core book). Instead, the…

What do personae do with the information they have gathered? They put it together into a theory that tells them something about the subject they are investigating. Putting the information together is another simple roll. The player rolls the relevant knowledge, and keeps the number of dice granted by the pieces of information. A persona…

The next step in discovery is mechanically simple. The player rolls her persona’s investigation dice, and keeps the number of dice indicated by the elements of her investigation. The result of this roll is the pool of points that the player can use to describe the information that her character has discovered. Again, this is…

The investigation phase of discovery does not involve any die rolls. Instead, the players describe how the persona is investigating the subject, and describe something of what she finds. This is tied to the game mechanics by elements. The elements of this phase describe things that the persona does to investigate. Each element has two…

Discovery is also supposed to be an important part of Kannagara. In the grand concept, the discovery in question is things like discovering how to transform yourself into a kannagi, but discovering what sort of food someone likes so that you can cook her the perfect dinner falls under the same general category, and that’s…

In order to make the rules for building relationships definite, I need to start attaching numbers to it. The best place to start is with the strength of relationships, since everything will develop from there. A strong relationship is, let us say, a score of 6. This allows for a lot of differentiation between relationships;…

Creating and improving relationships with characters, and quite possibly between personae, should be one of the central activities of personae in Kannagara. Given the design philosophy of the game, that means that we need rules for building a relationship. I don’t want to introduce something completely new, so I will use the structure of the…

Attitudes are not quite the same as relationships. A character might really trust a persona, believing that the persona never lies and always keeps her promises, without feeling that he has any particular tie to her. If she tells him something, he will probably believe it, but most of the time he doesn’t think about…