[YGAD] - update and chapter order question.

[Tobias]

Well, work on YGAD continues steadily. The vacation in Hungary was great, but not very good for gaming (which is fine, since I've recharged batteries, which is good).

To make sure my rules where somewhat symmetrical, elegant, not over-burdened with character stats or tile-types, and to try to find out how to present the whole 'YGAD' experience, I decided to see whether I could draw a map of the essential interaction of different rules (and their appropriate chapters).

I did, and it's visible at the standard YGAD download page (or at least it should be, I cannot see right now cause my cache hasn't refreshed yet):
http://www11.brinkster.com/tobiasopdenbrou/YGADdl.html

There you'll see a basic sphere layout. Sphere's divided in half (with a character and a world end) and inbetween is the Bag as rule core. I'm aware there are things which are left out from the picture if you look at it as something that's trying to capture the whole RPG experience, but I'm just using this as a visual aid for the core rules and chapter layout (visually highlighting 'where the reader is' in the final text).

Now, my initial thought on describing the whole was to have a quick introduction, and then to proceed through the chapters 'character', 'world' and 'bag'. Which i think is fairly traditional for RPGs. But I'm wondering - is it automatically the best possible way, now? There'll be the bonus of familiarity to RPGers if I use that order, but there might be things to say for changing the order. I guess it's also a matter of the type of RPG experience the reader might want (being the character, inpacting the world, having fun with the rules and random chances). Therefore, I'm also thinking about writing the chapters in such a way that they can really be read in any order (little summaries of important facets of other chapters might be in order then at the start of each chapter - possible sidebars, or something?).

I'm thinking of keeping the 'style of play' and 'this how the game should be played with your group of players' sections fairly light and indepent from this 'core' of explaining the game. New players shouldn't be smothered in 'this is the correct way to play' but just get helpful tips. Old hands will know all this anyway and just throw out whatever they don't like and bolt on that which they DO like anyway. So old hands might benefit from a little focus on innovations in the game (such as the bag and the tiles it contains, as well as the world-as-relation-map-you-can-impact-with-play thing I'm developing).

As to that world-as-relation-map thing: I want each session to have a pre-prepared core of a relation map of persons, items, locations, rules, etc. that are of importance to the place the players are in. It shouldn't be overly difficult to make (prep for a complete session should be around 30 minutes for the GM), but it will give something fairly solid for players to riff from and try to change in-game (for which there will be plenty options, which are central to the whole game (Value, Role, Karma, Contact, etc.)).

So now you know I'm still working on it. I've resisted the temptation to start kitchen-sinking in different CA's, (de)centralisation of player power options but have, to my mind, been able to 'get' a nice system to both character-develop RPG in as well as making a concrete impact on the world. Now to get the setting description strong enough to invite people to want to become a character there, or strive for some change.

Comments or brainfarts welcome, as always. :)

Oh, and I understand about GenCon... hope everyone had a good experience there.