a hello by anyother name

[kumakami]

as our dear mod CA has shown, mini storys are powerful tools in the writing of an rpg. no matter if its a intro or a way to get people to just download the bugger, it work when done well.

but are there other options? has anyone tryed epic poetry? the choose your own adventure rout?

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Some editions of "Exalted" and "Werewolf" open up with expository comics. For those of you who can draw and have a better sense of visual art than I, this could be an excellent lead in.

My old Rifts book has two large sections of painted color plates about 1/3 and 2/3 through. Why not put those at the front of the book? It might be neat to open up a game with a large photo montage or multiple page mural showing elements of the world, important places, the kind of combat that takes place - all possibly being "narrated" in character to explain the significance.

It would be rather difficult to embed multi-media in the game itself. Perhaps if it was distributed via old hard drive or flash key and set up as a website it would be possible. But as to the website hosting the PDF - there you could have music samples that either help show the culture in game or a good beat to drive combat forward.

[Rob Lang]

I tried making an , which run out of steam as it took far too long to make each episode. I have also written some very long stories (not quite novels because none of them are finished) in a hope to introduce it.

I like the idea of choose-you-own-adventure and the big images at the start of the rules.

[Onix]

About the Rifts pictures in the middle of the book. The reason they were in the middle isn't much of an issue anymore and so yeah, putting them in the front makes more sense from a storytelling perspective. Back when the book was printed, color was rare and expensive. The pages in the middle were a glossy stock if I remember correctly and they were set in the middle of the book wrapped around the interior 'book' of pages because that's probably where the printer told Palladium where they had to be so as not to charge ten dollars more per book.

Like Rob said (paraphrased) art takes time. Programming takes time. I had a online character sheet and was working on a chat that would take the character sheet and equipment stats etc and handle rolling and event resolution. I was working on populating the database and something happened to the database and I couldn't get it to restore from backup for some reason (can't remember it was 5+ yrs ago). To get to the point, I got discouraged and dropped the project. A player just asked about it yesterday and I told him I wouldn't start on that project again unless I had a lot of help on the project.

I think there's a real cut off of what we as individuals can do in our spare time. Give us funding so that we can live off it while working on the project and I'm pretty sure we could get a lot done.