Character Advancement

I'm working on some of the character advancement rules at the moment. One of the things that I want to incorporate is that character advancement is a continuous process throughout game sessions rather than something that happens right at the end of a game session. I've always hated systems that make you wait until you've completed an entire session before they allocate your points. It's always been my thought that experience and development should be implemented in incremental stages throughout a game. You should also have the ability to pay improve skills outside of the game time as well.

I'm leaning towards including the ability for characters to pay for schooling from mentors and other instructors out of game time as an Advanced Rule. In this way, characters can improve skills by paying the appropriate cost (money etc) and get experience for it. This needs to be carefully controlled as well, so I'm going to have to design rules to handle that. A good example of this would being able to have a character who has a low skill level be able to learn from a professor or mentor who has the skill at a high level. By spending time and money with that mentor/instructor you'd be able to accumulate enough experience to improve skills. The more I think about it, I might have to include an actual subsystem in the game to handle this, but I think it would be a worthwhile piece to add to the system.

A Long Overdue Update

Wow. Has it been that long since I posted?

I've been busy with too many other projects lately over the past few months and haven't really spent any time working on EveryGame. I've recently got a new laptop and have just installed all of the software I need to get back into working with EveryGame and a number of other projects I'm working on.

Once I've gone through the files to review what I've previously written, I'll post another update.

Technical Problems

Due to some technical problems I've had with the laptop in the past week (losing the partition tables on both the laptop and the external drive) A number of changes I had made recently have been lost, so I'm going to have to recover the work I did since the last backup, which was a week or two ago. I've changed my backup plans so things like this shouldn't happen again. Chiefly the parts that are missing are additions to the Multiple Careers section of the Character Creation chapter, which are easy enough to recreate.

I'm hoping to have the Character Creation chapter ready for the end of March 2005.

Character Creation Preview Coming Soon

I should have a preview of the Character Creation chapter to show soon. I've not been working all that hard on Everygame over the past few weeks, but I've been tinkering here and there. The first part I really want completed is going to be the Character Creation chapter as it really is the nuts and bolts of what people's first experience of Everygame will be. Should be done within a week or so.

Status Update

Now that I've got more time to myself, I can get back to work on EveryGame. This is a current list of the completed content so far:

CORE RULES

PART I (EVERYGAME SYSTEM)
Work In Progresss (Low Priority)

PART 2 (PLAYER HANDBOOK)
Work in Progress (High Priority)

• Chapter 1 - Character Creation - 35%


• Chapter 2 - Skills - 50% complete


• Chapter 3 - Combat - 50% complete


• Chapter 4 - Powers - 15% complete


• Chapter 5 - Character Advancement - 5% Complete

PART 3 (GAMEMASTER HANDBOOK)
Work In Progress (Medium Priority)

POWERS ADDENDUM
Work In Progresss (Low Priority)

ASSETS ADDENDUM
Work In Progresss (Low Priority)
1% complete

BOONS & BANES ADDENDUM
Work In Progresss (Low Priority)
5% complete

BESTIARY ADDENDUM
Work In Progresss (Low Priority)
1% complete

SKILLS ADDENDUM
Work In Progresss (Low Priority)
5% complete

RACES ADDENDUM
Work In Progresss (Low Priority)
1% complete

CAREERS ADDENDUM
Work In Progresss (Low Priority)
5% complete

I'm hoping to be able to post some of the current work on a website soon, just as soon as there's something for me to post. I may start notifying others of the existence of this blog and EveryGame.

Update

Just a quick update. Things have been pretty hectic with RealLife(TM) lately, so I've not had much of a chance to work more on EveryGame. I'm going to be busy pretty much for the next 6 weeks or so, so there won't be much of an update on EveryGame coming unless I can sneak time away from other things. I'll see what I can do.

Ventura Ventura Ventura

I decided that I'd use Ventura for the publishing, as it has a lot of in-line table options, and as I'm going to show a lot of tabular information, it makes sense to use a tool that makes it easy to do.

I'm now about 50% of the way through writing the Player's section of the rules. Should have it finished soon.

Publication Format

I think I'm going to release the books in PDF format, and stay away from RTF, HTML and other formats. Sticking with PDF means that I'll need to maintain only one set of documents for each publication. I'll either use Pagemaker, Ventura or OpenOffice for creating the publication. As I don't see these books being published in dead tree format at any time in the future, it won't really matter what DTP tool I use to publish them, as I won't require CMYK separations.

Initial List of Publications

I'm making a list of the initial publications that will comprise of the EveryGame System. So far I have:

• Core Rules
  
• Careers Supplement
  
• Skills Supplement
  
• Racial Supplement
  
• Boons & Banes Supplement
  
• Asset Supplement
  
• Bestiary Supplement

Technically, each of these could be added into a single publication that's downloadable, but I think that keeping them all in their own separate
publications will make it easier for people download -- it'll be easier to download one document portion of the system instead of the full
document again. As a change is made, it's automatically applied to the publication and is made instantly downloadable.

I'm also considering creating individual Change Log documents for each publication that can be downloaded separately from the publication. This
is a handy way for me to keep track of when changes take place. The Change Logs can also be made available as RSS feeds for quick reading in an
RSS reader.

I've decided against the separate Basic and Advanced books, as it'll be much easier just to combine the Advanced rules into the text of the Basic
text. It'll also pad out the document a lot, as the skills themselves will be in their own publication.

EveryGame World Settings

Another core aspect of EveryGame is the concept of World Settings. Although it's a generic system, EveryGame World Settings (EWS) are customized templates for individual settings. Each is self-contained and details the allowed Advanced rules, as well as items, flora, fauna, locations, Skills, Powers, and characters specific to that setting. The main Basic and Advanced Rules books will contain all of the generic rules for the game system, and there will be Addenda for each of the EWS that builds upon this. Think of the Addenda as a reconfiguration of the rules for a specific setting.

I want to keep rules and setting content separate. I know there are a lot of people who don't like this, and prefer to integrate the rules and setting into one complete publication, but I'm personally a fan of keeping them separate. If nothing else, it keeps the generic nature of the system intact, by allowing the interchanging of any other system to use the generic settings. I'll probably launch the game content under another label.

I'd also like the EWS to be able to be pulished in such a way so that they'll be able to be used by other generic game systems such as GURPS, FUDGE, TRI-STAT etc. Keeping content and rules system separate means that it should be easy enough to produce a stand-alone rules Addenda for any EWS created so that it can be used for other game systems.