Hi Earl!
Also Writer’s Rights Day, not sure what that entails. Probably just copyright.
Feeling somewhat gastrointestinal. Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten Thursday’s pizza on Sunday? I’m not sure what else I have eaten recently that was sus.
Read (short): “The Thing About Ghost Stories” (Naomi Kritzer): Academia plus ghost stories that insist on not remaining mere oral tradition.
Written (game design): 190. In fact, these 190 words right here:
IF you’re trying to do something and you
– know what you’re doing
– have the tools and capabilities you need
– have enough time
– don’t have anything else in your way (goblin attack, blizzard, etc)
THEN
– you succeed
– there aren’t any unforeseen consequences
Obviously, this is where you want to be with everything you do, but
that’s not going to happen. The more of these factors you lack, the more
Difficulty you have. If the Difficulty is too high, then you just can’t
do it; you need to get more resources or eliminate some adversity.
When there’s some Difficulty but not enough to make the job impossible,
that’s when you have to roll. If you roll well, you still get
consequence-free success, but if you roll less well, you have to give up
one or the other, and if you roll really poorly, you may lose both.
Knowing what you’re doing needs to be as binary and easy to judge as
having the appropriate tools, not something like D&D where the GM is on
the hook for inventing a target number and never does.