More publishing work, less talk.
Dan went to China for three weeks, and now John is beginning his medical rotations. No playing Delve has meant little inspiration for me to think and write about play. Instead, I've been working on getting a usable file into the hands of the people at Dexcon who expressed interest.
I'm trying to present everything simply and graphically, without a lot to read through. I'm doing my examples in comic book format (perhaps I'll post a few pages online, I think they're neat and folks might dig 'em).
It was working well until I got to character creation. There are a lot of options to list, a lot of numbers and finicky rules to be clear on, and a lot of relevant observations and guidelines to offer.
And, in the end, character creation is only as important as the players want it to be. If you're content to be exactly average at everything, you have a vague idea of what it's like to grow up as a medieval farmer, and you can contribute color via roleplay, then you don't even need a character sheet to play Delve. You just need scrap paper for bookkeeping, so you don't forget how many vials of acid you have or who owes you money, or what color aura the traitor had.
I also don't like doing the math and weighing the trade-offs in spending character points. Not that I dislike it, it just isn't the fun part for me. I wonder if it's optimal to have a number-crunching char-gen process in a game where there's no other number-crunching. I like the results it produces, but maybe there's a more apt-feeling process...? Ah well, unless someone wants to convince me that printed aesthetics of char-gen procedure are a key to delivering the play experience, I'm going to say "screw it" for now and just lay out those point cost tables.
Speaking of layout, Matt Snyder had a tremendously interesting blog series started on that subject. Planting that link is my reminder to myself to go check it out.
I'm trying to present everything simply and graphically, without a lot to read through. I'm doing my examples in comic book format (perhaps I'll post a few pages online, I think they're neat and folks might dig 'em).
It was working well until I got to character creation. There are a lot of options to list, a lot of numbers and finicky rules to be clear on, and a lot of relevant observations and guidelines to offer.
And, in the end, character creation is only as important as the players want it to be. If you're content to be exactly average at everything, you have a vague idea of what it's like to grow up as a medieval farmer, and you can contribute color via roleplay, then you don't even need a character sheet to play Delve. You just need scrap paper for bookkeeping, so you don't forget how many vials of acid you have or who owes you money, or what color aura the traitor had.
I also don't like doing the math and weighing the trade-offs in spending character points. Not that I dislike it, it just isn't the fun part for me. I wonder if it's optimal to have a number-crunching char-gen process in a game where there's no other number-crunching. I like the results it produces, but maybe there's a more apt-feeling process...? Ah well, unless someone wants to convince me that printed aesthetics of char-gen procedure are a key to delivering the play experience, I'm going to say "screw it" for now and just lay out those point cost tables.
Speaking of layout, Matt Snyder had a tremendously interesting blog series started on that subject. Planting that link is my reminder to myself to go check it out.