David Chart's Blog

David Chart’s Blog

Latest News

  • Ars Magica Crowdfundings

    My first professional publication for Ars Magica came out in 1993, in White Wolf Magazine. Things rather grew from there, and I spent over a decade as the Line Developer. When I retired from that position, I ended up taking a break for a few years, but now I’m back.

    First, I prepared the text for the upcoming Definitive Edition. The text is now done and is being laid out, and the crowdfunding launches in a few days.

    Second, part of the crowdfunding is the release of Ars Magica under an open license (CC BY-SA), and I have a Patreon at which I am writing for that license. The licensing has not happened yet, but I have permission from Atlas to do that. When you have been working with them on the line for years, you can do that.

    I am looking forward to writing for the game again!

News Archive

My Writing

Fiction

I have written some fiction.

Academic

I have published a few peer-reviewed academic works, on philosophy and Japanese history.

Roleplaying Games

I have written for roleplaying games.

Mimusubi

Mimusubi is my project for non-fiction writing about Shinto. It has its own website.

Recent Blog Posts

  • Photographs of Mayuki

    Sonoe took some more photographs of Mayuki. As usual, the text is all in Japanese, but you can enjoy the pictures. The last one is of Mayuki dancing to some music, making up her own choreography. That’s something she does quite a lot.

  • Making it Real

    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…

  • Helping Creation

    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…

  • Removing Obstacles

    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…

  • Creative Actions

    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…

  • Hikawa Shrine

    A few weeks ago, I visited Hikawa Shrine, the Ichi-no-Miya of Musashi-no-Kuni. That sentence probably needs a bit of explanation. “Hikawa Shrine” is the name of the Shinto shrine I visited; there are several other shrines called that, but this is the main one, and it is located in Saitama City, the capital of Saitama…

  • Pretending to be Creative

    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…

  • Negative Evidence

    If you look around on the net, you can find a lot of anecdotes about how the Japanese exclude foreigners, along with generalised statements that don’t even include anecdotes to back them up. I’d like to provide some anecdotes on the other side. They’re still just anecdotes, and the vast majority are only significant because…

  • Paths to Ideas

    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…

  • Yet More Preliminaries

    Today we had another meeting of the Kawasaki Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. We are still working on the preliminaries, but we have, at least nearly finished. Today’s job was to choose the topics we will discuss in detail over the rest of our term. My goal for my subcommittee was to have the whole…