Writing Dice with Glyphs

image from ArtBreeder

filed under writing on 29 May 2017
tagged narrative, writing, and theory

In between letting Heirs simmer in the back of my brain and working on a new thing about dungeon delving, I’ve been messing around with card games, which led me to Writer’s Dice, which turns out to be a very tidy tool for handling one of the core dilemmas of soloing– “What happens next?”.

It’s licensed under Creative Commons, meaning I can poke at it a little. I don’t see incorporating it into a system directly, but instead using it as an additional layer, like Mythic.

I was so impressed with the free stuff that I ended up making an order on drivethrucards for some of his other games. Not even sure how I’m going to make it “1 to 3 weeks” to play Koi… so I also same-day-ed (not a word) Kodama which is going to be here any minute.

Anyway. Topic at hand. These dice essentially take “and/but” to the next level. The manual has clear instructions how, but that’s it in a nutshell. Instead of just “yes, and”, you mmight get “yes, as” – something relevant happening elsewhere – or “yes, if” – success predicated on accepting a bargain.

The best part? You can use these without the printed Writer’s Dice, which are sold out. Regular d6s work fine and it’s not that hard to memorize six elements.

Admittedly, not everyone needs quite that level of nuance, but I love it.

I ended up combining a random roll of the Writer’s Dice and a randomly picked glyph, like so (using python of course).

if-slashed-shield
glyph is licensed CC-BY from lorcblog by way of http://game-icons.net
and-beard
glyph is licensed CC-BY from lorcblog by way of http://game-icons.net
helmet-head-shot
glyph is licensed CC-BY from lorcblog by way of http://game-icons.net

Since the pieces are all CC-licensed, I might incorporate it into Pythia. I’ve always avoided glyphs because I’m terrible at interpreting them, but I like the way this looks. I’m at least going to do an actual play.