For ye shall suffer the injuries of capricious dice.

October 1, 1985

Now that we know about the character, we must figure out what he can do and translate it into game mechanics to know how he does it.

I used a twofold solution to this problem. Assuming that a person has a chance to do anything I assigned a base percentage chance for the average character to do certain things. Boxing, fighting, lockpicking, driving, acting...

Assuming that all adjectives are of equal value I gave a list of beneficial and maleficial adjectives for each category of things that characters could do and assigned a base 5% to adjectives in general to be applied positively or negatively depending on where the adjective falls in the list. Being "hefty" may help in boxing and hinder in "swimming".

This gave rise to a new category of abilities. Skills. Assuming that it is possible to get better at "lockpicking" with practice and without gaining new adjectives (which I decided was impossible). Gaining a new adjective would have the effect of making you a better lockpicker and worse at "handstand racing". A skill, I decided, was a gain of 5% in a category for each level of skill.

My final work on my game consisted of deciding upon offense defense rolls based on initiative in the case of competition between people.

I have a long way to go on my game. I have not decided on an environment. I am leaning toward a modern type world with guns and Bernhard Goetz and violence and such.

It was also suggested that I include magic in the game. If I did, I would have a list of magical skills and include beneficial and maleficial adjectives for each to standardize the game around the system previously established.

Look for different game info as it becomes available.

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.

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.

Wherein I lay out my simulationist foundation for the design.

September 29, 1985

Real life is not quantitative, not even from an evaluative point of view. It is ridiculous to assume a boxer will win a fight just because he can bench press more than the other guy.

Real life is qualitative. If a boxer is strong, fast, and ugly you can assume he will mutilate a tall, lean, sensitive boxer. This is not to say that a boxer who wins 25 fights doesn't have a better chance against a guy who won 2; that is experience and not a measure of strength, constitution or dexterity. Rather it indicates a proficiency with a skill.

As far as I know, the role-playing industry does not have a qualitative game on the market. Thus I have decided to write one.

A qualitative game would reflect modern life. Measurable appropriate factors would be included: large caliber bullets tend to do more damage, having gone over Niagara Falls in a barrell 9 times gives you a better chance to succeed at number 10.

Irrelevant unmeasurable arbitrary factors would be left out. There is no fine line distinction between categories of strength (or any attribute for that matter). A common evaluation of an individual would either indicate that he is strong, weak, or normal. Sure you could compare two big guys and pick one that is stronger but chances are that it wouldn't be based on how strong the guy is but on the fact that he looks meaner, heavier, faster etc...

In logic you can make a value statement or an evaluative statement. You can say that John is a good boy, or that John is a good Boy Scout. The first statement is an opinion and is neither true or false, the second is true or false based on certain criteria established by the Boy Scouts of America. In a qualitative game you would have to assume that evaluative statements about the character were being made, and that he is indeed hefty, short, strong or ugly.

Next: How to establish a way to distinguish non-quantitative characters from each other.

"And so, three first time players who were not, as far as I could see, particularly striving to tell a thematic tale at the start of the game, ended up with: one tale about a man discovering female sexuality and being destroyed because of it...; one heart-rending tale of a young girl abused then condemned by a male-dominated society; and one man succumbing to his own lust before he decided that the only way to deal with it was to forcefully excise it from his own body..."

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My piece is a breezy 750 word shriek of narrativist pain and design fervor. Can't wait to read the rest of them.