Which is easiest?

[Username17]

OK, I'm doing a Final Fantasy write-up for d20. It's here:

http://www.scshop.com/~ritaxis/ff/index ... [br]Anyway, one of the things I am running into is Skill Ranks and Frst Level Bonuses. I want to keep the Max Ranks = Level +3 mechanic because people are used to it and it works at all. However, I am making a game where free multiclassing is assumed, so the thing where taking a level of Rogue and then a level of Bard is simply superior to taking a level of Bard and then a level of Rogue has to go. Now, I am going to flatten out the first level bonuses, that's a must - and as long as it's even it doesn't really matter what it is.

So which is the easiest thing for people to understand?

Apprentice Levels: In this system, people get no special bonuses for their first class level at all. Instead, they have 3 "apprentice" levels where they get d6+Con hit points and 8+Int Mod skill points and nothing else.

This has the advantage of allowing you to meet children and such who don't have a class level yet without actually making it so that they are doomed in the long run (having a level of Commoner means you will never make it as a Rogue, for example), or introducing complicated class level switch-out programs. This system also has the odd effect of handing out a rather large pile of extra hit points to everyone.

Static Bonuses: In this system, while characters get no bonuses for what their first level is - they get 24 + 3x Int Bonus skill points and 6 hit points as a lump sum at first level.

This has the advantage of being exactly like the first level bonuses that you already get in 3rd edition D&D. Unfortunately, it retains the some of the same basic problems that you got before - namely all that weirdness whenever you encountered someone with less training than a first level character - in that there wasn't really anywhere for them to go down to.

So, which is easiest. That is, which do people find themselves having the least difficulty wrapping their minds around? Either one will work at all, but to work well, players have to have an easy time comprehending it.

-Username17

[fbmf]

My vote is for the static bonus. It just seems easier, but that's probably because it is what I'm already doing.

Game On,
fbmf

[Joy_Division]

I also think the static bonuses are a bit easier.
They're pretty much the same thing if you make the apprentice levels give 2 hp (no con bonus) and 8+int mod skill points. Then you could play with the more familiar static bonuses and just use the apprentice levels if they ever became important.

Of course that makes apprentice levels very different from normal levels.

I do think that apprentice levels fit the idea of a game modeled after FF a little better, but I'm no authority on FF i've only ever played FFTA.

Edit: Hmm there's no indecisive mood.

[Essence]

Questions:

• Why specifically three apprentice levels?
  
• What would the skill list for 'apprentice' levels be? It would have to be either extraordinarily limited or extraordinarily open in order to avoid favoring some classes over others, methinks.
  
• Similarly, I'm assuming apprentice levels would hand out Commoner BAB and Saves, so as to avoid messing up the other classes...so why not also commoner HD? Why a d6 over a d4?
  
• Unless, of course, you were being very literal about your "and nothing else", in which case, the question becomes: why not just 1+Con HP and 1+Int mod in skills?
  

Mainly because of the skill-list-coherency problem, which I see few ways to really work around, I'd vote for the static bonuses.


Essence

[Username17]

Well, after talking to a bunch of people in email and in person, here's what I decided to do:

Design Intent: Characters with more than one character class While balancing a Monk 7 against a Fighter 4 / Rogue 3 is difficult - A Fighter 4 / Rogue 3 should be in all ways equal to a Rogue 3 / Fighter 4. After all, while the two characters have a different history, they have spent the same amount of levels on the same classes now - and in a game that started at 7th level they really are the same character. That means that none of the classes can give abilities that are larger or smaller if taken at specific character levels vs. being taken earlier and saved or newly acquired at a later date. It also means that the familiar D&D mechanic of maximum hit points at first level and four times skill points at first level have to go. After all, some classes (for example: Rogue) get a large amount of their class bonuses out of having more skill points - while other classes (spellcasters, for example), get other abilities instead. As long as the skill abilities are multiplied by four and the other abilities are not - there is obviously some inbalance with regards to taking the same levels in a different order.

Design Intent: Gaining Levels It is desirable within the context of a level gaining system for people to gain levels. That means that it is undesirable for people to - as part of normal advancement - trade one level for another level. That means that when a player in D&D starts life as a Tiefling (with a single Outsider Hit Die) and then goes up as a Wizard, losing hit points, skills, Saves, and BAB in exchange for class features and the possibility of further advancement - that's bad. A character should not be in the situation where they lose level dependent quantities such as BAB because they went up in level, it violates the whole point of the level structure. It also means that when you encounter the prophecied hero as a young boy - it makes the game mechanics go all flooby. That kid doesn't have any real skills or combat abilities now - but in ten years he's going to be a single-classed Paladin and the D&D rules don't really support that.

Final Fantasy D20 addresses these issues with Apprentice Levels. Before characters can take any classes at all - they have to complete three whole levels of apprenticeship. These levels are in many ways incomplete - granting no Base Attack Bonus, no Class Abilities, no weapon or armor proficiencies, and no Saving Throw Bonuses. Each level gives only hit points and skill points. The skills can be spent into any skill - because the character doesn't actually have a class yet.

Starting Play in Apprentice Levels: It is entirely possible to start play before your characters reach first level - before you actually have a character class of any kind (see the XP table). Such a character's abilities can grow organically into what the character actually does and the character can eventually work into the character class that seems to fit their personality and role in the party.

Apprentice Levels for background characters: The young squire, the kid who sweeps the archmage's floor, the child whose family just got killed by orcs - these are going to be the next generation of mighty adventurers. But they aren't adventurers yet - they don't even know what part of the lance is the part you hold or how to pronounce the mystic sygils in the Draconic Wyrmling's Fun Book. These characters have only apprentice levels now, and in the future they are going to be transitioned directly into player character classes.

Playing a Prologue: Just because you are going to be playing a seventh level adventure doesn't mean that you know what kind of character you want to play. Often it is useful from a role playing standpoint to play the character without their abilities for a while before you play them with the abilities. After all, sometimes those mighty powers are going to end up driving the character rather than their motivations as a person - if there isn't a strongly defined character personality to take over. It is sometimes useful to play a "prologue" adventure - one in which the characters are apprentice level and have relatively minor tasks to accomplish. Once that's finished, the players should have a fair idea of where they want to go with their character - and you can skip ahead in their lives to whatever level you want to set the main adventure.

Each Apprentice Level gives you:

* 8 + Int Modifier Skills points. These can be spent on any skill, with a rank maximum equal to your number of Apprentice Levels.
* d6 + Con Bonus hit points
* No Class Features.
* No BAB.
* No Saves.
* No weapon proficiencies.
* No Nothing - you don't even have a class yet - what do you want?
* Your Third Apprentice Level comes with a feat.

After you take your three Apprentice Levels, you can start taking core classes. You can't take any more Apprentice Levels, although you wouldn't want to anyway. Your skill rank maximums are always equal to your class levels plus your Apprentice Levels (thus, a character with 1 class level has a rank max of 4, just like in regular D&D). The first class level grants no special bonuses - no multiplied skill points, no maximized hit points - it's just a level.

It was ultimately decided that avoiding level swappage was sufficiently important to do it this way. Plus, there turns out to actually be a demand for playing zero level characters.

-Username17

[Joy_Division]

Just a quick question about the transition from apprentice to core class.
You get a feat at apprentice level 3, so you then don't get a feat at (real) level 1?

Other than that it make sense in a lot of ways. At very least it make the first level bonuses look much less arbitrary.

[Username17]

You get a feat at apprentice level 3, so you then don't get a feat at (real) level 1?

Precisely. The feats are handed out every three levels forever. There's no longer a blip at level 1 where feats happen more often.

So the feats look like:

Apprentice Level 1
Apprentice Level 2
Apprentice Level 3 Feat
Core Class Level 1
Core Class Level 2
Core Class Level 3 Feat
Core Class Level 4
Core Class Level 5
Core Class Level 6 Feat
Core Class Level 7
Core Class Level 8
Core Class Level 9 Feat
... And so on...

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

Dude, are you still working on this?

I really think that there would be a market for your game. It makes me sad to see this unfinished project...

[Lago_AM3P]

Also: How do you plan to handle fist-fighting? Are they still a completely separate mechanic from real weapons like in d20, or are they like the equipped H2H weapons in the various Final Fantasies?

[Username17]

Dude, are you still working on this?

Honestly, no. I'm not. I tried to run changes on the d20 system to fit with a balanced and extensible mode of play for a long time, and I gave up. It's not that I think that balanced game mechanics are an impossible pipe dream, it's that I don't think that they can be done with all of the legacy concepts of d20. The more things I found that could be altered to fit an extensible gaming setup, the less it looked like d20. At this point, I've abandoned d20 in my deliberations altogether.

I am the world's worst critic of bad game design. Really. And it's very hard for me to write things up that I don't tear down before they reach completion. The Pokemaster, the Monstrous PrC, the FF d20 projects, all of those met with rave reviews from people. And that's because honestly they were really good ideas. But ideas which were nevertheless flawed. The game can never really be extensible if it uses hit dice at all. That's just not a viable mechanic if you want two giants boxing to have the same feel as two pixies doing the same thing.

So I've been working on the SAME system instead. It scales. It's ultimately probably going to have some fatal flaw in it. Something that makes it not quite work... but I haven't found it yet, and that keeps me thinking about it.

----

Here's the deal with character progression:

You can gain relative defense.
You can gain relative offense.
You can gain relative options.
You can gain relative homogenaity.

You can't choose one or more of those things off that list. It's got to be the same for everyone. A game can be set up so that higher level combats last longer and longer. It can be set up so that at higher level initiative counts more and more. It can be set up so that the amount of stuff you can choose to do each round (viably) goes up all the time. It can be set up so that your options narrow as you go up in level.

So at the limit of infinite advancement, the game becomes silly. The question is how. In the far future, is everyone going to be practically invulnerable as the game goes out past padded sumo? Is the final adventure going to be a straight initiative check for the fate of the world? Is the end-state of your character going to be one in which you don't actually know what your character can do, because he can theoretically do so much? Is the campaign going to collapse because the only attack that works is Ultima Sword, so all characters and monsters of your power level are interchangeable?

So the options for character advancement relative to other advancing characters are:

[*] Padded Sumo
[*] Rocket Launcher Tag
[*] Big Draw Hand
[*] Discard Mania

D20 is unsalvageable because it actually mixes these metaphors, which is why the high levels are so weird. Of Hit Points, Damage, and DR, you can have precisely 2 vary with character power. If you move three around the game becomes non-scalable. Everything goes to hell.

D20 can't make up its mind what it wants the high levels to look like, so I can't write material for it any more.

-Username17

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Hey, good luck. If you can make it so that players are not able to make substandard options and not have every character identical to the point where they're differentiated only by their flavor text, you'll have something great on your hands. I don't think it's possible, but it's not the first thing I hope happens that I don't think will.

-Desdan

[RandomCasualty]

I don't think you'll ever truly be able to make a system that actually extends forever. The numbers themselves could possibly extend forever, but abilities will inevitably run out. Sooner or later you won't have any ideas and +1 fighter levels is just going to be +1 to attack rolls and +1 to damage or something similar.

And I don't think that's particularly avoidable. There gets to be a point where you possess all the abilities (or at least all the abilities you want) and the only thing you care about is numerics. There are only a finite set of possible things you can do to people. Unless you want to start inventing new types of saving throws, eventually you'll run out of things to do. There's only so many ways you can mechanically try to kill someone.

Eventually you run out of damage types and you're forced to either create new high level damage types or start building towards Ultima attacks that ignore energy resistances. You can start small where you have a Fire/Cold attack that uses the lower of the two resistances. And then build up to a Fire/Cold/Acid and so on, but eventually you'll end up with one attack that's either going to get resisted or not get resisted.

[Wrenfield]

I worry that in Frank's search for the Ultimate Perfect RPG (patent pending), he won't come to realize that there is no such critter. Any attempt to consistently and accurately simulate and quantify the mechanics of living beings is literally impossible due to the x-factors of, well, randomness/chaos/entropy finding a way to impact the results of any interactive event. I hope he finds a happy medium, and an acceptable ratio of flaws in his final product. I totally dig all the stuff he has on the Invention Forum. And I truely feel that amongst all of us (along with Josh), he has the strongest chance at devising the best game mechanic solution for a D&D-like RPG.

I can only imagine that pondering tweaks to a home-brewed gaming system must drive someone batty (like I feel when minmaxing in character creation). How can something as complex as a comprehensive RPG system ever be truely *complete*?

I'm sure sentiments like that are what spawned the ill-fated publishing of the 3.5 upgrade ...

[RandomCasualty]

The two main problems that I see as the biggest are:

-Padded Sumo versus Rocket launcher tag
-Casters versus noncaster balance. Trying to make warriors be equal yet still maintain the basic feel of being a warrior instead of an armored mage with a sword as a focus.

If those two problems are solved, then I think it'd be about as close to perfect as anyone can get.

The first one, Frank has pretty much cracked with his SAME system. The second one is pretty much the ongoing bitch of RPG design, and I'm not sure if anyone can fix that one.

[Josh_Kablack]

I totally dig all the stuff he has on the Invention Forum. And I truely feel that amongst all of us (along with Josh), he has the strongest chance at devising the best game mechanic solution for a D&D-like RPG.

1. Thanks for the compliment.

2. And now I'm going to crush your hopes with some harsh reality: Neither Frank nor myself is at all suited to be a game designer. Really. Frank's bluntness and perfectionist nature means that he does not work well with those currently in the gaming industry (short-sighted fools though they may be), and a combination of my laziness, tendancies to walk off projects without explanation and forseeable economic situation make me equally, if not more unsuited to the task.

[Username17]

-Padded Sumo versus Rocket launcher tag

Yeah, the SAME system by its nature allows the designer to toggle the approach of Padded Sumo and RLT to any degree you want. Since ideally you'd want to set it up so that combats were exciting and paced about how you wanted them at the beginning - the approach you'd probably want for both would be "zero". And you can do that.

Nevertheless, some people actually want to have a setup in which higher level combats last longer (perhaps because the players themselves become more adept at operating their characters and it takes more rounds to get the same flow), and so introducing padded sumo is an option in the SAME system. Ditto for RLT, although why you would want high level combat to look like that is beyond me. Maybe you just wanted to make healing a big deal, so you wanted to drop high level people constantly? I don't know, but that's an option too.

So yeah, I figure I've got this one covered every way it needs to be covered, with a built-in option for people who want those alternate play styles.

-Casters versus noncaster balance. Trying to make warriors be equal yet still maintain the basic feel of being a warrior instead of an armored mage with a sword as a focus.

I've given a lot of thought to your ideas of casters and non-casters. I think it's doomed. The paradigms you will accept for a "warrior" is simply not compatible in terms of story effect with what you demand out of a caster. Let's face it, Lancelot is simply not comparable in terms of story effect with Merlin. And different story effect means a fundamentally different power level in game terms.

And that means that between Lancelot and Merlin, one of them is an NPC in the actual RPG of Camelot. And that's an unresolvable problem with your demands. You want a system that accurately represents might/magic character interactions such as Gandalf/Boromyr, Merlin/Lancelot, Djinni/Aladdin, Sorceress/He-Man, etc. etc. And that's impossible. It's not that those relationships can't exist in the game, it's not that those relationships don't have source material merit. It's that those relationships describe a power differential that is simply unacceptable between two PCs. That's all there is to it.

In order to play Might and Magic the way you actually want, it requires that you make one of the following decisions:

[*] Magicians are NPCs. Gandalf is represented by the DM having the White Wizard walking in and saving the day every time the PCs blow their Stealth checks in the Mines of Moria. The actual PCs are all people like Legolas and Magic is never their schtick.

[*] Fighters are NPCs. He-Man is a Deus Ex Machina, and the actual game is an investigative one in which the PCs are all people like Sorceress who make use of shape shifting and scrying to determine what Skeletor's plans actually are. Essentially, the PCs play detectives, and the DM plays the cops.

[*] Each player has two (or more) characters. One player has both Aladdin and Djinni under his control. Or Merlin and Arthur. He's got a romantic lead and a pile of crazy under his control at the same time, and abilities are split between those characters.

All of those would work. Essentially, what your problem is is actually not a game mechanical problem, it's a genre problem. The genres you are attempting to mimic rarely include 4-6 protagonists of roughly equal story effect. That's a social dynamic problem, and you are going to have to do something drastic to the Player/PC dynamic if you want to make that work. But you do have to realize: No game mechanics will give you the feel you want, because the feel you want cannot be granted by game mechanics!

What I'm going for is the situation where a "warrior" is Pigsy, and a "Wizard" is Sandy. The effect they have on the story is roughly equal and the power set they both have is overlapping enough to be balanced and yet distinct enough to matter. I think that's an achievable goal for the 1 Player = 1 PC for each memeber of the party standard.

I don't think you'll ever truly be able to make a system that actually extends forever. The numbers themselves could possibly extend forever, but abilities will inevitably run out.

This is actually the big problem. It's a really big problem, and it's completely non-trivial. It's actually definitionally true. I can't make any game in which people continue to acrue abilities extend forever. Unlike bonuses, they actually run out eventually. The goal, then, is to make enough abilities that people can go for "long enough" before running out.

How long is "long enough"? I think the answer is oddly "long enough that people don't feel like they got punched in the balls when they find out they need to buy the ELH before they can go any farther with their character". That's one thing D&D got right. There is enough stuff to get in the Core rules that the ELH requirement to extend that doesn't seem like a whiskey enema. The ELH itself is the application of an anal pear, but that's a whole different story.

---

So that's where I currently am with the SAME system. I'm trying to generate enough stuff for people to accumulate in a roughly balanced fashion such that people can play their characters long enough so that the game is substantially more likely to end because players moved out of town than because they ran out of abilities that they want for their character.

And I'm trying to keep the ability list short and sweet enough so that people can actually remember what it is that Senician Life Sight does so that telling other players that you have it causes this to mean anything at all to them.

That's a thin line. But I think it's walkable.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1116916215[/unixtime]]
I've given a lot of thought to your ideas of casters and non-casters. I think it's doomed.

Well, basically there does come a point where warriors have to start turning into warrior mages. Warriors for instance need to come to a level where they can either do super high jumps or can outright fly by the time wizards are doing that. The main issue however is when that actually happens.

I think it's possible to have simulate several types of fantasy in an RPG. For instance dedicate level 1-10 to Tolkienesque style low magic for Conan, Aragorn and Merlin, level 11-20 to a high magic setting for characters similar to mid range superheroes (wolverine, Gambit, Cyclops, etc.) and level 21-30 to crazy powerful abilities between Thor, superman and silver surfer.

And the factor for when that shifts actually has little to do with what attack spells a wizard is tossing, but more with when you want to give wizards spells like fly, teleport, invisibility, and so on.

And I really see no reason you have to immediately give them the abilities at a low level. There are actually plenty of lower level simplistic spells that can be dealt with first that don't cause problems. In fact the majority of combat spells don't change the power gap at all. There are only a true select few spells that actually cause any real change. Those spells granted seem to be among the most commonly used in D&D. But I think it'd be ok to push them back a ways to make a good sized gap for the Conans of the world.

And there are plenty of things for wizards to do before then. Necromancers can have their skeletons and zombie hordes and throwing death bolts, Conjurers can be summoning monsters, evokers can be throwing fireballs and blinding people with light rays, and transmuters can be turning enemies into frogs and all sorts of cool stuff.

And I think you need to have milestones like that in a game world. In addition to that, the currency should change as well. Gold should be the currency for levels 1-10, and 11-20s should be worried about something else. And when you get there, it's almost like you're going into a different sort of world, but really you have to, because that way it doesn't give the high levels any reason to go over to low level lands and totally rip em a new asshole.

One idea that I think definitely needs to be rethought is the idea that there are level 20s and level 1s somewhere in the same nation. That just shouldn't happen much, anymore than you should have gods avatars walking around killing people. High level people really do need their own little universe, and epic people need their own universe, with sufficient reason to go there and leave their inferiors mostly alone. When you don't have archmagi bullying everyone, I think fighters seem a lot more on par with lower wizards assuming you're willing to push back the few problematic spells.

Really though, the one problem that I have yet to figure out is what to do with fighters in a noncombat scenario. And that one is the real bitch. The problem is that the majority of character concepts like the heroic knight really doesn't do a heck of a lot when out of combat. He's a diplomat and a leader, but that's about it. And I've really got no clue about how to make a fighter type competetive out of combat when you've got wizards turning into ravens and scrying for recon, charming people for diplomacy and casting divinations to solve mysteries. I've got no clue how a fighter can really even begin to compete with that in a fantasy setting.

And I'm trying to keep the ability list short and sweet enough so that people can actually remember what it is that Senician Life Sight does so that telling other players that you have it causes this to mean anything at all to them.

That's a thin line. But I think it's walkable.

This I've found really difficult. Especially if you try to do something similar to tactical feats, where you're handing out three separate minor abilities. It gets very difficult to keep track of them. I tried the basis for an "ability a level" system a while ago, and it seemed that by the time you hit level 15 or so people would be getting very confused as to what ability does what.

[Murtak]

RC, so you are saying that you really want multiple games and a character converter, right? I mean, why even try to fit radically different styles into the same game?

If you want mundane characters there is no reason for anyone to ever get teleport, burrowing, invulnerability, flashy magic or anything that breaks the game's rules.

And if you want all that flashy stuff there is really no reason not to start handing it out at level 1. If someone wants to play a shadow assassin they should get to turn into a shadow as soon as possible, not after an arbitrary number of levels.

[RandomCasualty]

1116958755[/unixtime]]
RC, so you are saying that you really want multiple games and a character converter, right? I mean, why even try to fit radically different styles into the same game?

Well not quite. Characters of given levels can exist in the same game. Much like a character like the Punisher can exist in the same universe as a character like the silver surfer. And those characters can fundamentally use the same rules set. It's just that you've got to keep them apart. For the same reason pretty much that we don't want gods walking around the realms kicking mortal's asses. There's really no difference between Bane taking down 15th level heroes and a 20th level archmage taking down 5th level ones.

That just can't happen.

Now, this is partly a world design issue and partyl a rules issue. The rules come in because they have to provide the 20th level character with very little to gain, and a big hassle when trying to waste his time eliminating low levels. In fact, it should be a really big waste of time. This is why economics is a huge issue. 5th levels just shouldn't have anything a 20th level would ever want. And I think this is a big issue for the SAME system, because the SAME system allows people to become completely invulnerable. Which can be ok, assuming you don't give high levels reasons to slaughter low levels.

And while you could run a game of only 1st - 10th levels or only 11th to 20th, the rules should be designed so you can put them together too. And they can really use the same rules set too. And it's a good idea too because you have a lot of unexplored space between flying and walking.

Namely you should be getting 20' high jumps and so on before you ever see the ability to truly fly.

If you want mundane characters there is no reason for anyone to ever get teleport, burrowing, invulnerability, flashy magic or anything that breaks the game's rules.

But I don't want mundane characters per se. For some campaigns, I definitely do want that, for other campaigns I want to run something more high magic. But the point is that you can run both within a rules set like SAME if you dedicate a fixed number of levels for each style of play, and you can simply apply certain prereqs to some of the abilities (or PrCs, not really sure how SAME is going to handle class structure yet).

Because unlike in D&D, there's no fundamental difference between an 11th level SAME character and a 1st level SAME character. Other than that the 11th level character has a lot more abilities. So if you wanted to run high magic, your characters should all be starting at a relatively high level. This doesn't necessarily have to mean they're experienced. Level doesn't really have to mean anything beyond how powerful you are. So in a high magic setting, everyone could start out a relative badass. So a beginner in high magic land could very well be considered a level 11 or 12 character under the rules. And that's ok.

Once you stop equating level wtih experience and just with power, I think the system becomes very intuitive and obvious.

And if you want all that flashy stuff there is really no reason not to start handing it out at level 1. If someone wants to play a shadow assassin they should get to turn into a shadow as soon as possible, not after an arbitrary number of levels.

This is why I think it's a good idea to break level gaps into genres.
Level 1-10 - Mundane LotR
level 11-20- High Magic
level 21-30- Divine and cosmic power

And if you're starting at level 11, chances are all your characters will be able to do all the crap that mundane guys can, and they should be able to do that. They should be able to make 40' tall anime leaps, or even fly at 11th level. Since when you're level 11 you should get access to a bunch of new high magic ability sets that you can start accumulating. And when you master those, you go on to divine ability sets and so on. I figure that at level 30 we can just have the system more or less end, since eventually you'll run out of abilities to hand out anyway.

So when you start your level 11 or 12 shadow assassin he could start getting some cool shadow powers right away.

You really can have the best of both worlds if the system is designed right.

[Oberoni]

Well not quite. Characters of given levels can exist in the same game. Much like a character like the Punisher can exist in the same universe as a character like the silver surfer. And those characters can fundamentally use the same rules set. It's just that you've got to keep them apart. For the same reason pretty much that we don't want gods walking around the realms kicking mortal's asses. There's really no difference between Bane taking down 15th level heroes and a 20th level archmage taking down 5th level ones.

You know, I think I see the ol' Gotham/Metropolis issue in what you're saying.

The villains that seem to spring up in Gotham tend to be human or weakly super-human; the villains that spring up in Metropolis tend to be capable of unleashing large amounts of distruction, sometimes with a literal wave of the hand.

Gotham and Metropolis exist in the same universe, and yet, for some reason, no would-be Superman villain ever decides to run amock in Gotham (and vice-versa, usually).

You want to know the reason why this happens?

Just because.

That's it.

Ultimately, there's no great, in-story reason why the superhumans congregate in one city, and the merely really good humans in another, other than "just because."

There's always going to be incentive for superhumans to want to screw around in regions populated by regular folks. Short of doing something crazy like introducting "negative XP," you're going to always have the possibility. Might as well accept it.

[RandomCasualty]

1116975223[/unixtime]]
You know, I think I see the ol' Gotham/Metropolis issue in what you're saying.

Yeah that's pretty much the issue here.

There's always going to be incentive for superhumans to want to screw around in regions populated by regular folks. Short of doing something crazy like introducting "negative XP," you're going to always have the possibility. Might as well accept it.

Well, you can set up the mechanics such that there's no real reward for doing so, and it's mostly a waste of their time. And generally it has to do with time management versus reward. If gold for instance carries no real value at 11th level+, nor do low level items, then it's unlikely Dr.Doom is going to waste his time pillaging the low level town.

Sure, he could for fun, but it's not going to advance his agenda in any way. And mostly high level people don't help out the low level town, since there's not really much reward in it for them either. Which leaves gaps for low level villains and low level heroes.

And that's real important, and I think it's not a good idea to hand wave a problem so big for world consistency. If you want to have a world with invulnerable superpowers, you must come up with a reason why they don't go newbie bashing. Simply saying "just because", is generally bad for game design since you'll never be able to create a cohorent world out of it.

if you don't want to think about that stuff, then generally you've got to make everyone mortal and your world looks more like Shadowrun, where even a great dragon can get shot down by an assault cannon.

With more realistic games, it's a non issue, but when you get into fantasy and especially superhero level powers, you've got to come up with reasons why the high level guys stick to their neighborhood and the low level guys stick to theirs. Unlike in a comic book, Batman in an RPG is eventually going to become as powerful as superman, and when he does you need to have some kind of reason why he decides to go to Metropolis instead of staying in Gotham.

I don't recommend coming up with punishments, but I do reocmmend having a different sort of wealth system for high level characters. Require them to have and conquer mana nodes or something similar to keep up their power and so forth. So instead of taking gold mines and gemstone shipments, you've got high levels looking for wellsprings of mana and etheric junctures or whatever. And divine beings are concerned with stuff above that, so they're not bothering the 15th levels.

Low levels, High levels and gods pretty much belong in separate "worlds", and they should intersect only very rarely. There should be a good reason why Darth Vader doesn't go hunting minor smugglers and they instead let the lesser imperial captains do it. And similarly there should be a reason why evil archmagi don't just teleport kill 5th level heroes, and good gods don't go down and beat the crap out of 15th level villains.

It's actually one good argument against having fast methods of travel. If it takes an archmage 5 minutes to scry/teleport kill someone, he's much more likely to do it than if it takes him a week to fly his floating citadel of pain over the heroes tower and blast it into oblivion.

[RandomCasualty]

Heres another offtopic question about the SAME system.

How do you plan on handling non-muscle powered weapons, like firearms or crossbows? Is strength still going to determine damage, or are you going to use another stat?

[Username17]

I worry that in Frank's search for the Ultimate Perfect RPG (patent pending), he won't come to realize that there is no such critter.

Oh, I already have, to a point. There's a number of trade-offs inherent in game design, which are not always in your favor whichever way you go with them. The classic example is complexity.

The thing people usually think of with less complexity is that you can't simulate things as well with a less complex system. This is usually not true. More complex systems are rarely more realistic. Check Runequest. Or Fatal. No. The thing you are giivng up with complexity is a learning curve. The more complex a system is, the harder it is to figure out basically how it works. The harder it is to master the system.

And sometimes that's good. In a computer game for instance, you don't want people to master the game right off. The longer a learning curve the game entails, the longer it is able to maintain your interest. But in a pen and paper game, this cuts back the other way. If it takes a long time to be able to figure it out to the point of knowing "basically how it works", then noody is going to be able to run the damned game.

I know that however long the learning curve of any game is, my personal learning curve is shorter. I won [counturl=15]Hive[/counturl] on my first try. So I know when I have difficulty understanding a game mechanical rubric, that it's just too fvcking hard.

Any attempt to consistently and accurately simulate and quantify the mechanics of living beings is literally impossible due to the x-factors of, well, randomness/chaos/entropy finding a way to impact the results of any interactive event.

That's often presented as the big kahuna. Mostly it is done so by pompous game designers who are attempting to demonstrate how hard their jobs are and how much you owe them for giving you whatever they decide to spoon up today. Honestly, it just doesn't matter.

The goal isn't to accurately represent a living being. That's absurd, and you are already a living being every damned day anyhow. No, the game is there to represent a story, and the mechanics are there only to facilitate a group of three to eight people in telling that story with a minimum of confusion and acrimony. This is itself a tall order, as you can't get three people to agree on pizza toppings, let alone the direction that a story should go.

But it's an achievable goal. The goal then is to make things as simple as possible without boring the players by being too easily mastered. The goal is to have the game be understood and not mastered at the same time, which is a happy medium of complexity which will vary from player to player.

The specifics are going to vary from genre to genre, and from play group to play group. Here's an example of how to do Gothic Horror:

SAME Vampire:

The stats of Strength, Agility, Moxie, and Elan remain constant, just like in standard SAME games. However, in SAMEV you only have 6 total damage tracks to keep track of, because the only elements that exist are Life, Death, Fire, and Water.

Everyone has a physical wounds track and a damage track for each element. At 10 physical wounds you are "unstable", and take additional damage if you take strenuous action or are in unsecured locations without medical treatment. At 20 physical wounds, you are dead. At 10 Water wounds, you are "dominated", and deeply believe anything that anyone tells you while you are in that state. At 20 Water wounds, your brain melts and you die. At 10 Fire wounds, you are "terrified" and do anything you can to escape/appease threats. At 20 Fire wounds, your heart stops and you die of fright. Life and Death wounds do not normally acrue for humans. When a normal human takes any wound, they also suffer a box of Incapacitation (some attacks may inflict additional Incapacitation). At 10 boxes of Incapacitation, you can't take any combat actions. At 20 boxes of Incapacitation, you are also unconcious (in addition to being dead if that all came from one source). Every 2 Incapacitation boxes you have gives you a -1 penalty on everything you do.

Vampires are Different!

As a Vampire you suffer damage differently. First of all, you only take Incapacitation from Physical wounds. Second, normal attacks don't inflict Physical wounds on you, they inflict wounds to the necromantic magic that animates the Vampire in its hideous mockery of life. This manifests as suffering Death wounds. When the Vampire suffers 10 Death wounds, additional damage starts acrueing as Physical wounds (this essentially gives a Vampire a substantial margin of damage from normal weapons before she starts being noticeably slowed down). Weapons made out of Wood inflict Physical damage on Vampires even if they haven't suffered 10 Death wounds yet.

Secondly, a Vampire has an amount of Blood running through her undead veins. This is represented by the amount of Life wounds she has accumulated. A full Vampire has zero Life wounds. A Vampire with 10 Life wounds has no more blood to spend, though she suffers no direct harm from this fact.

A Vampire can spend her own blood as fast as she wants (to a limit, of course, of her entire pool of 10), and the effects of doing so are based on her Power Level. A starting Vampire has a Power Level of 2, and generally gets a +2 bonus every time she spends Blood. Blood can be spent to heal wounds, temporarily raise attributes, or activate vampiric powers (called disciplines). Humans also have blood, though they can't actually do anything with it except such trivialities as "stay alive". Sucking a point of blood out of a human removes one Life wound from the vampire and inflicts 2 physical wounds on the human. Power Level also affects the basal abilities of a Vampire, and it is added as a bonus on most tasks.

...blah blah blah...

OK, that's the very basic set-up. All forms of damage count the same direction, so you aren't left scrambling over the fact that blood and willpower count down while wounds of various types count up. Humans are paralyzed with fear and rendered incoherent when their minds are mastered by vampiric powers. Vampires are not.

In a Vampire game, you really don't need to ever have people move stats around. You can just have people increase in Power Level, which is something that you ambiantly add to everything you do. You also gain funky powers appropriate to your blood line and increase in skills over time.

That's an example of scaling complexity and genre requirements to the game's setting and intended audience. And it's quite different in places from the fantasy genre's basic assumptions. In Gothic Horror, you are attempting to make the undead seem mysterious and distinct from mortals, while in fantasy you have to deal with all kinds of crazy magic crap and you are trying to rein in all the crazy and get every supernatural creature to use the same rulesset so that the game doesn't descend into the madness and despair that is unchecked Gygaxian legacy mechanics.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

I wouldn't call the benefit of complexity learning curve.

I don't really give a damn how long it takes players to pick it up. (well beyond the practical limits)

But I DO care if the system has so few attributes or mechanics that the characters feel flat and lifeless, or combat options are identical and flavourless.

Complexity brings potential for greater detail, variation and involvement.

Reality simulation is a mugs game, but learning curves? Well, I just don't care either way. Mastery? Who cares, just give me a managable but involving depth of interactive detail.

[dbb]

1117026098[/unixtime]]
But I DO care if the system has so few attributes or mechanics that the characters feel flat and lifeless, or combat options are identical and flavourless.

I wouldn't say this is a problem of complexity per se, but a problem of design.

For instance, the Amber DRPG has four attributes. Yeah, four -- how much ass you kick, how long you can kick ass for, how physically strong you are, and how powerful your magic powers are. If you have less of one attribute than someone else, you lose, unless you can convince the DM that you have some roleplaying reason to gain an advantage big enough to overcome the difference. Plus there's around ten binary magic powers that you can either have or not. In terms of mechanics, it's incredibly non-complex -- but is it flat and lifeless?

Or take Everway -- four attributes (the four elements), and the way contests are decided is that the DM picks a tarot card and decides what level of random factor it introduces. Dead simple. Flat and lifeless?

I think some people would say yes, and they're not wrong, but these systems are some of my favorites, because by restricting mechanics to such a high, abstract level, they help me focus more on the actual characters and on the actual experience of combat, or climbing a cliff, or sneaking into a palace, or whatever.

--d.