Kevin P. McDonald:
> I am working on a community questionnaire for my game set in the Western
> Reaches. If anyone has design philosophy suggestions or advice I would
> love to hear it! The Issaries online clan generator is obviously fairly
> complex - I would love to know more about what goes on behind the scenes
> to generate its results.
Hopefully it's not telling too many tales out of school to comment on the latter part of this query... The way both the on-line clan-gen and the version that's been kicking around in draft form for more years than I care to think of (Greg -- publish the dang thing!) is by "check boxes" for each question, in various categories that are being tracked. For the Orlanth clan-gen, these are what you see under "Goals" and "Values", plus running totals for each of the possible economic specialities, favoured deities, plus "one offs" for certain highly specialised questions, like attitude to dragons (*bloop*). Each question just assigns a "tally" (or two) to none or more of these totals. IIRC, the tallies work identically between the on-line and draft paper versions. Where they differ somewhat is the final stage, because the applet version, perhaps counterintuitively, uses somewhat simplified rules foir calculating the various totals, scores, and attributes from the tallies. (This simplification being for the sake of anyone having to do the calculations by hand, in the not-yet- appeared print version of the generator.)
Incidentally, I don't have a current email address for Larry L-F, but if he's reading this, or someone knows how to reach him, it'd be very handy to have a version of the applet one could use off-line
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