With the advent of Gamehawk (April 1, no foolin'), I'm pretty much ready to start up Gavilan. I just haven't decided what system to actually use. I'm leaning toward PowerPoint. ...You know, slideware. (See, here I'm gonna get into a manifesto.) I'm old-school, in some ways. I like the game producing a good Story, but stopping to figure out Story mechanically snaps my suspenders of disbelief just as much as having a wacky die roll make a hero muff the climactic battle scene and break the Story does (and the latter at least only happens unpredictably while the former is mandated). I'm quasi-immersive; I want to be able to just worry about what My Guy is doing, thinking, and so on, though sometimes it's sort of third-person even when I'm a player. On the other hand, I'd rather play freeform in PBeM. Yeah, I wrote a die-roller into the Phoenyx, but I'm pretty sure I've never actually used it in a game. Rules, PBeM-wise, are there so everybody has the same expectations as much as is possible, not to actually be used. I do like character generation rules, but I'm kind of catholic in my tastes. I've been known to say "Give me a character sheet/writeup. But I don't care what system it's in." So what I'm thinking, with the PowerPoint thing, is... I need to know what's important about your character. (Because otherwise it's not important. Duh.) So I want characters summed up in... what's the conventional wisdom, three to five points on a slide? Yeah. Now, behind each of those points is going to be some detail. If one of your points is "Best starship pilot EVAR!!!" you put whatever skills and other traits you think support that behind it. Piloting skill, overconfidence, reputation, previous employers, whatever. Points can be anything. Whatever three to five things sum up your character in his or her entirety, pretty much. (If you come up with something halfway through that doesn't fit into a point, that's still okay, it just means your points weren't right. Or aren't right now, at least.) Now, because Gavilan is all about "Starship Crew as a (Sometimes Dysfunctional) Family," at least one of those points is probably going to be about the character's place in the family. Aboard the Spotted Eagle, the example ship/crew, one of the young supercargo's points would be "The Vargr killed my father." This affects his relationship with his mother (the pilot/owner, though not the best EVAR!!!) and stepfather (the ship's engineer), plus giving him some fun interpersonal issues with all the Vargr the ship run into (which is a lot, since the border is kind of fuzzy. No... hairy.) So do I really need anything more to fulfill my manifesto? In theory, if the points are properly selected, any question that comes up should be answerable (at least partially) by a point. Can the ship evade a pursuer? Well, it's piloted by the best starship pilot EVAR!!! (I don't always play diceless when I play freeform, so it's not necessarily a sure thing a la Amber. Sometimes I roll dice, and if I roll, say, a number out on the far left of the ol' bell curve, I go "Huh. Maybe he should fail unexpectedly even if he's the best..." and see where the Story goes from there. That's as intrusive as I want Story "mechanics" to get, y'know? Or, come to that, as character-can-do mechanics should get.) Can young Joshua Campbell handle himself in a starport barfight? Well, he's The Young Supercargo (that might, in fact, be his principal point), so he might be a little green. But The Vargr Killed His Father in a dockside ambush, so he might have an Unarmed Combat skill backing that point up nowadays. Or maybe a holdout pistol. I know some games (Theatrix some, others more explicitly though I can't think of any names) have things that sound kind of like that, but they're all cluttered up with rules about "activating the descriptor" and whatnot. Mechanics, suspenders, bah. These are just PowerPoint points. And darnit, I don't like animated backgrounds, so they're JUST GONNA SIT THERE. -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
