Anyway, leaving that aside, how do you view the concept of taking what you like from each game? Such an amalgamation would be a new design, but yeah, I guess beginning from scratch with just the aesthetic might work out better than cannibalizing other games, though I think that’d work out well as well (I’m considering something of the sort for something of my own right now).

I’m curious about Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, do you mean PDQ#? It seems to me that setting is not irrelevant and disconnected from what you’re aiming for. Even if it’s modular and should fit several settings, it still seems like there might be a “gist” aimed at. I’m not sure how to put it any better.

Last, I feel a big “lite” and “crunchy” tension. But I guess many of the games we love the most engage in this fight… both the ability to pick it up and make all sort of stuff work in it, and yet be mechanically engaging.

I am very interested to see how this progresses, I’ll try to pitch in with an idea or comment when possible.

(click to download vector / pdf)

Any of these objects (boxes) could be split into sub-objects (as the character creation / character development boxes could be one object) as long as that set of sub-objects answered and received the same methods as the “parent” object would have.

I think this is about the minimal requirements for a functioning game. Anything beyond what’s here can be understood as a set of sub-objects filling the role of the parent. I think.

I haven’t discussed much how marketing would work here (in ways different from Nine Worlds or Serial Homicide) and how the community could help.

The marketing’s more important in terms of success here than the particular game system itself. It requires some critical early successes — for example, getting designers involved who bring with them some level of recognition among hobbyists. Or, getting publishers on board early with the same effect.

From there, actually building and hosting the tools to foster a community is the next step. At least one “hub” site with community activity is key. With that, direct marketing in the form of registered users and consistent, regular email newsletters is important, too.

That community must also allow members to post and share their own hacks, games, components, etc., thus contributing to the usefulness an broader application of the game.

All of this is different from you or me publishing our particular games for a couple key reasons. First, it distributes the effort among participants, rather than requiring individuals like you and me to do the work. Second, it allows interested gamers to do the same — they’re given platform for creation, evangelizing, and so on. And, it does it all in a framework that still allows creators to own, create and sell their work. (Rather than, for one example, me starting a company and getting a bunch of people to either freelance for me or license material.)

I’m not saying this is a simple matter. It can, of course, fail miserably. But, I don’t agree this is the same thing, expecting a different result. My take was that I was tired of not having good options outside of what you describe, so give it a shot anyway.

So, yeah, in no doubt some inaccurate way (because I’m not programmer), the analogy makes sense to me

As I understand it, your plan is saying that “Step 1: Design a new game system” is going to lead to “Step X: Have passionate, supportive community of players on the scale of FATE/BW/Lumpley” just because the game system is different.

However, there are tons of games that started with “Step 1: Design a new game system” that actually lead to “Step X: Have limited exposure and few sales on the scale of Nine Worlds / Serial Homicide Unit”.

I don’t understand how modular design is supposed to shift the odds in a favorable direction. Maybe I’m just being dense, but it looks like doing the same thing and expecting a different result. And that way lies madness.

When I read your PART 1, I figured you would be centering your plans on community development and how to get players to talk to one another about your game and their experience of your game. Mr. Hicks had laid out his thoughts on the matter in this blog post. It seems to me that the communities you’re trying to emulate (at least FATE and BW) excel at communication BETWEEN players, with communication FROM creators TO players being a less-important component of community membership.

In the “good ol’ days” of The Forge, was it all great and energized because Ron was telling us what to do, or because we were excited about exploring one another’s ideas and contributing our own?

It seems to me like you could turn all the arrows in your chart into methods, and all the blocks of text into objects. So the resolution object takes inputs of traits and gives outputs of success/fail and maybe magnitude of success/fail. Then you could design modular bits of game mechanics that fit that specification. Whether it uses cards or dice pools or spinning around until you fall over, as long as it takes inputs of traits and gives outputs of success/fail, it will work with the other game mechanic “objects.”

I think on the macro scale you are better off atomizing things only as far as is necessary. So a box for “resources” makes more sense to me than four boxes all labeled “a special kind of resource” It’s an issue of taxonomy and clarity. Those special flavors deserve their own breakdown elsewhere.

I suspect that my tastes run too far toward structured freeform to be particularly useful when discussing conflict and intent for this project. You can effortlessly divide the two in Fiasco, for example. It is perfectly acceptable to stumble into scenes without an agenda, and there’s a sharp distinction between conflict (optional, sometimes emerging organically, sometimes a goal) and scene (the thing that gets resolved through the resource of procedural privilege). I don’t think it is where you are going with this, although it is a lovely place you should totally visit.