|
I've got a couple of role-playing game projects started. I've just started on the basic premises the next step being producing something playable to experiment with. The biggest hurdle (for me at least) seems to be imagining the play - how to structure the rules to facilitate a certain kind of play experience. And even more simply, imagining the best possible play experience. There seems nothing tangible to use as a guide.
 But then it dawned me that the first stake of a role-playing game, the one thing holding the wishy-washy stuff firmly on the ground has always been the character sheet. I remember when we got bored with D&D with my friends (we were 11 or 12 at the time), we came up with a viking rpg in a couple of hours - all we needed was a spanking new character sheet (complete with six attributes sounding a lot like STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS & CHA). Just by making the char sheet we had our own viking heartbreaker (but fortunately we didn't go and publish it and sell it for real money).
But, nowadays I'm a bit iffy about char sheets being as useful as they used to be for prototyping uses. Sure, you still put all the crunchy bits of your character in the sheet, but how exactly does a char sheet show what kind of game you are dealing with?
Maybe you have more room for the important stuff. The 3:16 sheet has a lot of space for flashbacks and they tend to have a big impact on the play on a scene level. But, other than that I would think that you would need a different kind of artefact to design your game's play experience with. Right now I'm thinking game boards - using a game board or something like that to illustrate the game's scene structure, the interplay of different mechanics or somesuch. You could even have a score board instead of character sheets. The score board would have positions for all the different combinations of character stats so you would see at a glance where everyone's at.
I don't know, what do you think is important / helpful at this stage as a design / demonstration tool? Are char sheets informative? How?
|
