System Design Philosophy

Rules are essentially the physics of a game world. They exist to define the extent of character successes and failures, prevent disputes, and impose consistency and fairness Roleplaying without them would be something like living in a world without physics — to the extent to which it would be possible, the universe would be in chaos, and no one would know what was going on.

If you've played Higher Arc, you'll notice that many of the ideas present there are aspects of this system. However, Story Arc is considerably simpler. The basic idea behind Story Arc was to allow players to do more or less anything they want (so long as it's reasonably possible), without bogging down the game with a lot of rules for things any gamemaster can decide pretty easily herself. This minimizes the amount of time spent looking up rules (because there are just a couple of basic, universally applicable mechanics to understand in order to play), though a rules system like this one may require more independent judgment from the GM than a more complicated one. It may also require the GM to trust the players more. We're comfortable with that if you are. Another advantage is that Story Arc is much more portable between gaming systems than Higher Arc was, which is nice considering the diversity possibile games.

As Story Arc describes a system and not a world, please note that this text describes just game mechanics most of the time, and provides practically no advice on how to make gaming interesting. This is true despite the working assumption of Story Arc's creators (the folks at Limestone Publishing), which is that developing a good character concept is a lot more rewarding and interesting than filling in numbers on a character sheet. If you want help with making a character that's fun to play, see the upcoming Gygaxia, or Chain of Being for that matter.

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