What are you waiting for? Go read it!!

Best,
Ron

That was a good solid review I think.

The only point of question that I had was that you found the trait activation led to diverse solutions and did NOT lead to hitting the problem with the hammer over and over again.

I found this statement interesting because in both of the games I played the opposite was true and the hammer was employed. Whichever the characters best trait was got worked into as many conflicts as possible in his favor, If the character had a particularly bad trait it got worked into as many conflicts as possible against him.

Did you do anything special to keep this from happening, did you perhaps police the Trait write-ups to make sure they weren't broad and universally applicable?

As is Ron's policy, I was able to see the review before it was posted so that I could offer feedback and clarification. It is to Ron's credit that most of my feedback consisted of "You're absolutely right." As I am writing this, I am working on continuing to fill out my manuscript, which is slowly edging towards completion. The feedback from this review has been quite helpful in enabling me to see potential weak areas in the text of my game so that I can make them more obvious and explicit.

Thank you for the review, Ron. It has been greatly appreciated.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

Hi,

Ralph, I'm thinking back on the games we played, and as best I can tell, this was a Social Contract thing - if character A activated character B's trait against him, we expected that character A knew about it or lucked onto it somehow in this particular situation. If character A activated his own trait to his advantage, we expected a certain amount of justification, very much in the Universalis sense. But none of this was handled explicitly; it was simply the way we understood the rules, apparently across everyone involved.

Seth, you know how long I've been waiting to post this review. It was a great pleasure.

Best,
Ron

Just as a clarification on the issue of the influence of Alyria on Universalis, Alyria is entirely responsible for Universalis. Ralph and I were discussing the lack of Alyria map as it happens, in the forum for it on GO, and we wondered if a game could be made where the players created the map as a mechanical part of play.

From that initial discussion Universalis was born.

So one might see why Ralph and I are eager to see our game's parent be born. :-)

Mike

Actually, Mike, I believe that you can find that discussion here.

And the rest (as they say) is history.

Hmm. I wonder what some of the various Alyria setting elements would look like if interpreted as Universalis Components.....

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

You nooooo, next time you're writing up a section of setting and you're not sure what to say about it...that might be an interesting exercise. Describe the Web as a Universalis Component as a way of boiling it down to essential and manageable elements to talk about...

And, yes, I think those discussions were here.

Valamir wrote: And, yes, I think those discussions were here.