Inspiration

What would make good mechanics for creation?

The first point is that it is important to make it possible for several personae to cooperate. In the real world, a lot of creation is done by individuals working alone, but even then, not all, or even most, of it. In a game, you must give as many players as possible the chance to participate. Obviously, the personae have to be able to communicate in order to collaborate on the creation, but that’s unlikely to cause problems. The personae don’t even need to be in the same place; I have worked on books with collaborators on four different continents.

The process of creation, in my experience, goes something like this.

Have an idea.

Write some words that capture the idea.

Revise the words, because they didn’t work at all.

Have another idea.

Revise the words to incorporate the new idea.

Have someone else read the words, and revise again based on what they say.

Decide the idea was terrible to start with, and go back to the beginning to start again.

The fact that it is possible to just throw an idea away and start again must be reflected in the rules. Going back at any point is possible. For some kinds of creation, there may be limits on whether you can rewind part of the creation process and restart from a partially completed work (you can’t stick marble back on a block of stone, but you can go back to an earlier draft of a novel), but going right back to the beginning is always possible in principle. In some cases, you might not have the resources you need to do so, but that’s something that stands outside the rules for creation itself.

There are four other basic actions in the list above. Let’s call them conceive, embody, assess, and revise. Each of these should be a single action in the game, following the normal rules for single actions.

Conceive is coming up with the idea for the creation. I think it works best if this creates an option. Specifically, it creates the option to create that creation. Let’s say that the conception defines the best that the artwork can be, and also how difficult it is to create. The player can trade these two off to some extent, based on her roll. If she really needs a brilliant artwork, she should make it difficult to realise, but possibly great. On the other hand, if she just needs a basically plausible story, but really, really needs that story, then an easy creation of mediocre quality is the thing to go for.

It is possible to add ideas to a creation later in the process. I do that in real life. However, for game purposes these further ideas should not be able to improve the established potential of the creation. Instead, they add new potential. If the first idea lets the creation have a bonus of up to +3K, then a new idea might allow –2D, or add an additional option. Adding a new idea should always increase the difficulty of the creation, and should increase it more the nearer the work is to completion. Throwing away some or all of the work done so far to get back to a point where you can add the new idea is, of course, an option, if you have the time and resources to do so.

My feeling is that there should be a limit on conceiving for a single persona. Ideas don’t just appear to order, and sometimes you need to take a break and get inspiration from somewhere. However, other personae do not run out of inspiration because you do, and their ideas might inspire you again. One way to implement this would be to impose a penalty to the number of dice rolled, while another would be to require personae to spend a resource statistic (that is, something like Confidence points, Willpower points, Fate points, or Hero points) in order to make a conception roll. I don’t have a resource statistic yet, but I think I’ll be adding one. In any case, this is also something to decide on later.

Having the idea is not, of course, the end of the process. The next post will look at the 90%, the perspiration.


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