[YGAD] - update for those following the action

[Tobias]

Those who have been following the development of YGAD (Your Gods Are Dead) know that i've been striving for a 'buckle-down' phase to get all the rules into place, finally.

Life has conspired against it, though. Not in a bad way, but with just a lack of time in general - luckily, I have a vacation coming up, during which I will be traveling to Hungary, visiting a music festival, and, hopefully, getting the ideas to come to fruition.

There were three loose threads that definately needed to be tied with regard to Ygad. They, and their solutions are given here. Hopefully, after my vacation, more. YGAD is not dead - just taking it's time to develop (which can only be a good thing, right? I have no deadline to meet).

1. Merits/Flaws.

This I've 'fixed' with my double-edged Descriptor thing. There are now more explicit rules for them in place - but they still need a good name. :) I've thought of 'Detail' or 'Twist', but they don't cut it.

2. Karma and Push and (re)gaining

I had issues with the moment characters regain Karma - they should get it for striving for their goals, I said, but I had no mechanical way outside that statement. I've decided to drop the 'good karma' tile, and now players get karma when they draw their contact tile and contact activates - but contact has now been restricted to only activate if their actions are in line with their Value, Goal or Role. So Karma is now automatically in line with them as well.

Karma runs from 1 to 5 still. If you go to 0 (and you can, by bad luck or Karma expenditure), this represents some form of crisis, and the character's Role, Value or Goal become 'inactive' (not usable for purposes of activating Contact). This is also the way Value, Role and Goal can change - a character may change them when they are inactive. They can be reactivated by a player declaring at the start of a session that he's working on re-activating one of them. In that case the player will emphasise his actions so as to reflect this search of self. At the end of the session, if the player's satisfied with this self-investigation, he can re-activate (thus this system depends on honor).

If Karma goes to 6, you 'impose' your own Value, Role or Goal upon the surroundings - which are described by a network (see next point). If you go over the threshold of the network, the network starts functioning differently - thus allowing you to have impact on the world.

When karma goes to 0 or 6, it 'resets' to 3 immediately.

Push is regained by 2 tension-free nights of sleep.

3. Society and Setting

I had a picture of Setting, but I felt it neccesary to have a feel of the rules used to effect changes in it before I would flesh it out. The rules I want to use is to have the SK (when neccesary in collaboration with the players) draw a diagram of connected key structure of the social group/setting in question. The larger the place, the bigger the diagram. In the diagram should be present the Role, Goal and Value of the society and key structures such as places, items, rules, terrain, key persons, buildings, etc.

This description might sound fuzzy, but I'll draw a few samples after I'm back from holiday which will clear things up, hopefully.

After that, I can test that, and flesh out the setting, and some last FAQ-like issues in RPGs. (A sample complication upon the horizon: multiple-person battles/interaction (because I want to keep social confrontations equal to combat ones - and in fact possibly emphasise them somewhat - but that later))

So I'm still plugging, people. And many thanks for your input till now. If anyone's inspired to do art for this, don't hold back either - the (unknown) artists I had lined up have other issues to deal with suddenly. Such are the vagaries of life.