FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1113843335[/unixtime]]
That's honestly the worst idea I've heard this year.
People are only "an archer" in a board game. In a role playing game, people are only an archer if they happen to be holding a bow right now. Do you intend to somehow refund peoples' points when they leave their bow in the closet? Do you intend to penalize peoples' other abilities when they pick up a damned rock to throw?
Well quite simply you can add enough penalties to make certain actions not workable. If someone wants to be a melee flyer, then you can simply have them suffer a bunch of huge penalties when they use ranged weapons in the air to the point where they can't really do anything effective.
As for leaving the bow at home, that's their problem. If they paid points for bow proficiency, they're considered an archer and abilities need to be priced as though they were an archer.
That's just not workable. People have a dynamic interaction with the world that cannot be sumarized effectively into combat roles for the purpose of making some sort of crazytastic algebraic formulae to determine the costs of individual upgrades. With this proposal, you are going to have situations where archers are going to buy extra points in battle axe skill to get themselves to count as a less archery oriented character category in order to save net points on their flight. Fvck that!
No, buying battleaxe doesn't really save you. If you have any ranged ability whatsoever, you pay more for flight. It'd be like that. If you already had flight and wanted to pick up archery, you'd pay more for archery. Anything else you had that didn't synergize with flying or archery wouldn't matter. And the same would be true of movement speed increases. If you wanted to be really fast, but you just used a melee weapon, you'd buy speed cheaper than a guy who didn't.
And that's the only fair way to do things. The problem with things now is that someone is either getting screwed or someone is gaining benefits for nothing. Flying is priced either for an ability for missile users or an ability for melee users. That's what a static cost does. It's priced for one or the other or somewhere inbetween. However, missile users get more out of it.
This isn't a workable idea. It's an idea which is way too complicated for a non-computer based system, and one in which there are going to be algebraic breakpoints that allow you to make characters that are better than others all over the place.
Yeah, simplifying it would be difficult. And I wouldn't really want to try to get some formula. I was thinking of just having broad tags. Certain abilities give you the [ranged] tag for instance, and if you have the [ranged] tag, abilities with the [movement] tag cost you more points to get.
The goal is to make a system in which people taking anything from Column A is actually roughly as powerful as anything else in Column A and then letting people take anything out of Column A.
The problem is that this totally ignores synergy. A guy who has incorporeality but can't attack while incorporeal is a lot weaker than a guy with incorporeality who can attack while incorporeal. And if you charge both the same amount, the guy who bought it and doesn't have attack forms for it is getting screwed.
Flying and movement boosts help ranged attackers more. So if you charge melee and ranged the same amount, you're actually screwing meleers, since they can't just go kill the dire bear by hovering over it pinging it with arrows.
And you need a sliding scale of some kind. It doesn't have to be that complex even, it can simply be binary. Either you have a certain ability or you don't and if you do, you have to pay more to combine the two. If you want to run fast and shoot arrows you've got to pay more than if you wanted to do either of those individually.
Abilities just can't exist in a vacuum, because in tactical combat, they don't. If you have a crappy attack and damage, getting karmic strike just isn't a big deal. If you are really good at those, getting karmic strike should be more expensive. And charging people the same to get it regardless of how good they are with it is a mistake.