As an 18-year-old in my first semester of college I was tasked by my freshman comp professor with keeping a journal. And when my thoughts turned to game design in mid-September, the journal captured them. A year or so previous I'd designed a fantasy heartbreaker with funky character races, randomly generated attributes, exotic character classes, and elaborate formulas for derived scores. But as you shall see, despite a context of juvenile frustrations, by the time I was keeping this journal my design thinking had evolved quite a bit.

September 28, 1985

You may not know much about role-playing games so a brief background is in order. Most role-playing games have you create a person on paper called a character. Each character has different ratings for their characteristics (strength, constitution, dexterity...). The ratings are generated randomly through the use of dice.

In the ideal sense, the player of the game acts out the part of the character and responds to external stimuli provided by the game referee.

In practice, this is seldom the case. Players cut down each other's characters for having too low of strength scores. Immature players treat the game as tactical, rather than intellectual, and seldom create and portray a personality for their character. If a character dies in play the response of the player is "oh, well, I'll have to roll up a new guy"; often a player hopes for the death of the character because he rolled low on the ability scores.

I admit that playing a character that has low scores may not be much fun but the problem might not originate from the player. The game system may be at fault. There are 2 types of role playing systems on the market: class based systems and skill based systems.

Class based systems usually have the player roll random statistics and limit his profession by restricting him on the basis of his statistics to certain professions that he meets the criteria for.

Skill based systems assign either an arbitrary or random number of points to the character. The player can divide these points up between his abilities and/or skills and get more points by taking disadvantages.

In my opinion, these types of games inhibit role-playing by being quantitative, that is dealing with numbers.

Tomorrow I will give an alternative.