Wherein I describe the method of chargen.

September 30, 1985

As of now, this is the process I took in designing my game:

I asked myself questions. How can a character without number values do anything? Most importantly how do you distinguish characters from each other?

I had been critical of role-playing games (because of their quantitativeness) for quite some time. The above two questions had been floating around in my mind for some time also. One day while pondering over them I decided to put forth the thought necessary to turn my concept into a game. Much time was spent thinking after that.

My first major breakthrough was the concept of adjectives. Each character would have a number of adjectives which described him in 2 categories: physical, and personality.

I still did not know how to generate random adjectives or how to use a list of adjectives to determine how well a character could do something.

I quickly decided against rolling dice to consult a table of adjectives. Too random, I like to determine what my character is going to be like, by myself.

My solution was a deck of cards; almost unheard of in modern RPGs. When generating a character the player draws 3 cards from the deck, one at a time. He will have 3 choices printed on each card. Each choice will consist of from 1 to 3 adjectives. Giving the character from 3 to 9 physical adjectives.

Personality adjectives will be generated by the player selecting them from a list, the player can select only as many as 10 minus the number of physical adjectives he has.

I was still trying to figure out how to use the adjectives to determine a character's success at something. I added a third category to the description of the characters and came up with a tentative solution to my problem of how characters could be assessed with a chance of success. Continued tomorrow.