Products of Creation

The products of creation are an important part of the game, so their description does not need to be particularly simple. They are, for example, as important as characters, if a little less important than personae, and so their description could certainly be as complex as a character’s description. In particular, a creation need not be described by a single number, and indeed most often will not be.

A creation that grants a bonus should specify the situation and the bonus. The bonus might be extra dice to roll, extra dice to keep, or a reduction to the difficulty. Those can be abbreviated as +1R, for an additional die to roll, +1K, for an additional die to keep, and –1D, for a one-point reduction in the difficulty. The situation might also be open to abbreviation, for certain standard contexts, but it should also be possible to describe it more generally. The rules should avoid restricting the personae’s possibilities for creation.

A single creation may have more than one bonus, and more than one type of bonus. In general, the type of bonus desired constrains how the creation must be created, but the details depend on what is being created. The players are often able to choose the bonus they want, and that affects the difficulty of the creation process.

A creation that changes the context should specify how it does so. This result will, I think, almost always be specific to a scenario, as contexts are not generally portable. That is, the same context does not normally arise in different scenarios. However, there are always exceptions. To take a simple example, a crash helmet changes the context of a cycling roll to avoid an accident, by reducing the severity of the injury the persona suffers on a failure. The change in context will determine the difficulty of the creation, and will generally need to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Guidelines will be needed, but the game system needs to be a bit more solid before I can start doing that.

Creations that create options also need to specify the option. That might be like a move from Apocalypse World, describing a single action that a persona with the creation may take. It might also be a bit more general, allowing a range of related actions. The difficulty of creating the creation will depend on the usefulness, and difficulty, of the option created. For example, composing a piece of music creates the option of performing that piece. A piece that is easy to perform, but has a great impact on the audience, will be harder to create than a piece that has the same impact, but is more difficult to perform. (This is perhaps not entirely realistic, but it is close enough.) Again, guidelines will be necessary, and will depend on the details of the game system.

A single creation could have all three of these properties, creating several options, offering bonuses to actions, and changing the context of a situation. On the whole, I suspect that it will be better if most creations are not that complicated. An option and a bonus, or a few bonuses, might be best. People do have to be able to play the game, after all. On the other hand, a whole campaign could be concerned with realising a single creation, and in that case it might be a very good idea to make the central creation extremely complex. The creation would structure the whole campaign, so making it simple would also make the campaign simple. The rules, then, should not place any restrictions on the complexity of creations, although they should naturally lead to relatively simple creations in most cases.

The next question, for the next post, is about the rules for the process of creation.


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