You are right, though. It’s something that plagues game designers, and always has: it’s perfectly obvious to me what I’m doing, and so I fail to explain it adequately to others because I expect it to be as obvious to them.

It’s also one of the qualities that marks good writers: the ability to explain something clearly enough that other people grasp it.

Thanks for the comments; it’s good to know that someone read the piece, at least.

–M. J. Young

Reading that thread, and then this post of yours, helped me to put my finger on what feels like the intense vagueness surrounding the formation of stat+skill dice pools in my fantasy samurai game-in-progress, Mask of the Emperor. I ended up knocking out a quick flow-chart, the kind of thing that always felt redundant to me in the past.
Here goes (trust me, you won’t need game-specific context):
1 – What do you want to do, in terms of the plot? (establish the task to be performed)
2 – What would doing that accomplish/what are you *really* trying to do? (establish the conflict being touched on, and clarify what’s at stake)
3 – Are you going to use physical or social means to get what you want?
4 – Which stat makes sense to use here? (1 social stat, 1 physical stat, and 1 hybrid stat to choose from)
5 – Which skill makes sense to go with it? (4 physical, 4 social, and 1 hybrid to choose from)
6 – roll the dice!
Now, onto “where does narration fit in with the mechanics?” But that’s another story

Social contracts develop during the game and are essential to it. They form the story and the output. Yet I think that you should try to bind them to as little rules as possible, because trying to make it fit inside a tight box restrains it to much, killing the story. At least, that’s what I think.

My advice on the Sarah Conner Chronicles (based on feedback I’ve gotten from people who actually do watch the show and from published interviews with the creative staff) is don’t take it too seriously–the writers aren’t being consistent in their application of temporal rules, so you’re not going to be able to unravel things easily.

And yeah, it’s the same guy. I’m a bit of a generalist–learning less and less about more and more until one day I aspire to know nothing about everything.

–M. J. Young