[SamuraiProgrammer]

Earlier in the post, there was mention of finding a way to allow the players to negotiate settings for the game. I have an idea that might be interesting.

This idea originally comes from the Phaze series by Piers Anthony. In these books, there was constant open competetion in games by many of the denizens of the planet where the book was set. People were ranked globally on their ability to compete. The competitions could be anything from sports to parlor games to art or anything else you could imagine.

Whenever a challenge would go out, the two contestants would go through a selection process that determined which contest they would compete at. Each contestant would try to influence the choice to an area of competition that they excelled at.

Essentially, they alternated choices that would progressively narrow the pool of available contests until the determination was complete.

It shouldn't be too hard to set up a series of questions that the players could alternate in answering that would result in a rules package. The trick would be to make the most important questions come first so that the alternation of choices made it fair.

Alternatively, each player could 'nail down' any piece of the rules puzzle when it was his turn to choose. The trick here would be to judge which sets of rules should be picked together for cohesiveness or if there should be any sets.

I am rambling... it is just an idea. Post what you think & before long we might have a pretty good way of determining a rules package.

It might also be useful if the scheme worked for more than 2 players. That way a group could fairly determine what rules to use.

thanks for listening to my $0.02

Have fun!