Welcome to Part II!

Last week I talked about why I prefer it when players internalized the rules for tone dice in Swords Without Master and how a table that illustrated those rules was a barrier to that process, not an aid.

So, throw out the table, but now what? https://twitter.com/Epidiah/status/1293900957626118144

This is a question that's very much on my mind lately, as my latest project is descended from Swords, but has a few more literally moving parts.

Instead of rolling 2 dice, a Glum one & a Jovial one, in this new game you throw 3 coins, a Bold one, a Sly one, & a Stout one.

There are 8 different possible results depending on the combination of heads and tails, and again, I want to avoid providing a table for them.

I want folks to throw the coins & have a nigh immediate reaction to the result.

And I want that reaction to be shared around the table.

I don't know how it is for other designers, but when the rules for a game start to bubble up within me, they will have a certain internal consistency that is not always evident to everyone else.

Undoubtedly this is because my internal consistency is the product of decades of playing and designing games.

Not just any decades or games, but a very specific set of decades and games in a very specific order under very specific conditions.

Part of my job as a game designer & writer is to perform something akin to a reverse Pierre Menard.

To take rules that make sense to someone with my specific set of experiences and find a way to make that intuition available to folks who haven't lived my life.