Supporting organic character development

[Mistborn]

I'm going to chime in to agree with Frank.

Listen PL you've failed to sell me at stage one. This mechanic is going to skullfuck anyone who wants combat to be over in less than an hour, for what no tangible gain as far as I can tell. Making characters develop more "organically" is a fools task from the start.

[PhoneLobster]

Sigh.

Look it's fucking pretty simple. You have brought your rules set to the table.

Your players want to play NOW. They have not seen the rules set before.

Using "downtime" character creation you now must sit there for X amount of time creating characters. And X is gonna be MINIMUM 30 minutes for a relatively fast character creation system, probably more like an hour.

Breaking this time up into small 1-3 minute intervals and peppering it through actual game play is actually CLEARLY beneficial. Yes. Having the odd 1-3 minute slow down in combat is problematic. But this is NOT happening every action, it just plain can't you have two many actions and two few advancement resources, even in complex character creation systems.

Yes it's an at the table time cost, but so is supposed down time. And depending on the implementation in play advancement could even lead to less over all time AND has numerous other advantages.

If you don't want ANY increase in time costs in SOME combat actions then this clearly isn't for you. But the fact is the "costs" for in play resolution times are not nearly the issue Frank is shitting himself, and my perfectly good thread, over.

SOMETIMES a player is going to say "crap, my sword attack is just not good enough for this situation." Refer to the "Attack bonus cheat sheet" see three abilities he qualifies for and take a minute or two to select. If he is a total ass he will make everyone wait rather than doing this like other complex action resolution while everyone else is getting stuff done.

Even in such a bad situation, it's a small cost, it's a cost we pay sooner or later anyway, and its a small cost that is only paid OCCASIONALLY.

[Koumei]

You have brought your rules set to the table.

Your players want to play NOW. They have not seen the rules set before.

That this happens with your groups is actually weird. Over in Victoria, and on the Internet, and apparently in Sydney-proper, and apparently over in America, and probably in Zimbabwe (though not in South Ausfailia, much like the PS3 there are no games) that doesn't happen. You pitch the idea, get people sold on it, then you agree to make characters in your own time and meet up to play on X day. People don't just rock up and go "Sure, we'll play a new game we've never heard of, right now."

Which is why nobody else can fathom it actually working like that. But I recall the thread where that is literally what you do over your direction if you don't want to spend 6 months just making lots of character sheets for a handful of games.

But it is weird. And I wouldn't just up and join some random game where I haven't studied the rules and gathered an idea as to what it's about and where it seems like the MC did no planning and it's all being made up as we go along. Organic development can work, I certainly prefer free-range characters, with no pollutants, but the sticking point is "Surprise! We're all playing this! Right now. Make a character. No you can't look at how the game works."

Using "downtime" character creation you now must sit there for X amount of time creating characters. And X is gonna be MINIMUM 30 minutes for a relatively fast character creation system, probably more like an hour.

Just remember: everyone else is assuming this downtime is actually *down* time. So, you say "Hey guys, we're playing Hungry Hungry Hippos d20 (revised edition) next Thursday" and they go "Cool, sure thing" and make their characters at home, probably on the weekend before.

Breaking this time up into small 1-3 minute intervals and peppering it through actual game play is actually CLEARLY beneficial.

Have you seen what happens when people get bored at the table waiting for other people to do shit? They start doing something else. And then when it's their turn, they're still doing something else. Often showing their phone apps off, or showing people youtube clips (and then more people are distracted by that). According to Frank, it's playing Smash Brothers. I consider myself the paragon of patience and tolerance*, but I'd be turning my DS on to level some pokeymanz up after fifteen seconds of that shit, and not putting it down until I had a good spot to rest and save.

*Just kidding

[PhoneLobster]

People don't just rock up and go "Sure, we'll play a new game we've never heard of, right now."

Happens approximately 90% of the time here.

You might have noted that the actual original post of this thread one of the primary reasons I wanted to push this is because this is an excellent way of teaching people a new system during game play.

Simple fact is most people, even with a system like 3.x D&D that they can actually GET well presented documents and materials for in advance, need to actually play it to learn anything and need to have the GM/experienced person/rest of the group brain storming new rules right there for them DURING character creation.

And regardless of that, even with experienced players, I have had people bring me characters created in down time all of ONCE ever, which is actually documented in a thread here. Every other game in 20 years has REQUIRED character creation AT THE TABLE.

I have the books. I have the documents. I have the experience. My players some times have some of those things. But that's about it. And every single observation I've made of the other groups in my local community suggests that this is exactly the case with them, and frankly plenty of stories from other communities and the internet suggests that "down time" for ability shopping, character creation and leveling up happens AT THE TABLE, all the fucking time, and people complain about this down time being down time all the time "It took us 2 hours to make characters and we hardly got to play" is a COMMON COMPLAINT.

So really your "lol, no one makes characters or levels up at the table!" is pure crazy talk as far as I'm concerned. It happens, to me, to basically everyone. I want to stream line it so it's better. If you aren't interested, you are in denial, or you think it is GOOD for a system to require home work then clearly trying to do that is not for you. Though then one has to wonder what IS for you...

[hyzmarca]

You know, instead of giving players a list during game play, you could just treat skill points as a flexible metagame resource that can provide bonuses to any action, and then go back after the session and figure out what new abilities they get based on how they spent their skill points in game.

Thus the player just declares that he's going to spend a skill point to wear the armor he found, and you can look up the armor skills after the session and add Heay Armor to his sheet.

Or you could let him spend a skill point to jump over the 100-foot wide Chasm of Zanzabeth, then at the end of the session find out that the only available jumping ability only lets him jump 50 feet, but that's okay, he can take that or take the 100-foot teleport instead.

[PhoneLobster]

Your description was a bit vague, but you are basically saying, give players points of "do anything" power, let them well, do anything with it, then at the end of the day spend time doing homework giving them the closest matching formal abilities permanently.

I don't particularly see this working well outside of a rules lite informal system, at which point they may as well just write a permanent "1 point forever in jumping 100 foot chasms while on fire" the moment they do it.

But hey. At least you have a suggestion that could WORK with organic advancement rather than just being in denial about the very existence or value of such a concept.

So that's a gold star for you.

[Koumei]

No really, it's really weird that it works that way for you. Most people prefer to know what the fucking game is before they play. Most people are actually okay with doing a tiny bit of what you call homework, particularly given making characters is all part of the fun, same goes for levelling up. The bit where they then don't have to sit and watch other people do the homework makes it even better.

So if you want to do something where people stop every now and then and pause for a few minutes, and have a way of stopping everyone else from getting bored and wandering off, then that's grand. Yeah, in your case you do need something that prevents "Everyone rocked up to play 'a game' and now you have 'a game' and they all want to play but now we're going to spend half an hour making characters together, and one guy finishes it in ten minutes and goes to have a smoke while waiting on the others, and by the time they're done he's already been scouted by another group."

But for those cases I'd suggest literally giving them pregen characters with a handful of "Pick this or that" options. That way they spend a couple of minutes looking at the sheet and figuring it out, a couple of minutes making their choices, and they're ready.

"Choose as you go" has some benefits, but "We take all the time spent making characters, chop it up, and scatter it throughout the actual game" isn't a benefit.

[PhoneLobster]

No really, it's really weird that it works that way for you.

No really. I am prepared to bet actual money that if an actual survey of TRPG gaming was done the majority of Player Characters will turn out to be made at the table.

Further if you exclude bullshit on the internet forum RPGs since they don't actually HAVE "at the table time" at all I will be prepared to bet that the number of characters made AT the table will exceed 80%. And that's leaving bullshit like living Greyhawk and organized convention crap IN the figures.

There are A MILLION fucking TRPG systems out there. RPG gamers tend to play a lot of them. Commonly every new campaign will involve a new system, a new setting, a new GM, new house rule variants, or an a least partially new group of players.

The basic demographics and the sheer number of rules sets alone utterly undermines your apparent claim that the vast majority of gamers come to the table familiar with the rules set, familiar with the setting, familiar with the house rules AND already carrying characters created with all that knowledge in mind and ready to use.

I've gotten heavily involved in local RPG and Board Gaming communities in recent years, and the way you organise entry into a new rules set/campaign in such communities is ALWAYS "Bob's bringing the new Firelfly the RPG rules with him and wants to run a game. You guys gonna turn up?"

AT NO POINT. Does someone say "Bob bought the new Firefly The RPG rule book. He now wants all of you to buy it, learn it, make characters, and then turn up with them to play his game. Also. You are expected to level up outside of game play without any form of guidance or supervision for what will SURELY be an ongoing campaign what with how certain you all are you want to play this before you even buy books and invest extensive time outside of the table".

Sorry Koumei, EVEN among dedicated RPG gamers the majority are still sufficiently casual that they assign time to PLAY rpgs, and don't assign additional time, and additional resources like books, to mere preparation for that sort of thing.

We have a name for people who DO assign additional "down time" to the game. Those people are called "GMs". The vast majority of actual players do not do that.

And even THAT is outside of the large number of GMs who insist on babysitting character creation in person for reasons that range from very good to very very bad, but which are EXCEPTIONALLY common.

[Koumei]

Most of those games you include are bullshit ones that have like five groups to have played them ever. People generally learn one or two systems they actually like, go out of their way to speak ill of all others (for instance I heard there's this place called the Gaming Den) and then basically stick with what they like. So yeah, if I heard "Bob got the new Firefly rules" well actually, I'd barely contain the urge to make a sound as though I were snoring, because you have to fake some level of etiquette.

But I'd flat-out say "Not interested". Same for any dozen stupid systems you mention. If someone says "Okay, so I'm thinking of running a D&D game, I know you like that. Interested?" I can quickly ask the questions needed (level, stat generation, books allowed, general theme of the game) and have a character made by the time they actually get the game started. And in my experience, people do that.

And people who play Derp Herpesy and friends tend to do the same for that. Or have like ten character sheets because they know they'll get killed.

And people who play Shadowrun will ask "What are the others playing?" followed by "Any special rules?" or whatever and then make a character before the session.

And people who play World of Darkness, once they figure out what flavour is being played, do the same.

What they don't do is jump into every fucking game they hear about, regardless of if it sounds like a good idea or they even know what it involves, and then just hope the first session works out well. Because they have more game offers than time available and can afford to just pick their favourites.

And besides, the kind of place where people do randomly buy gaming books and show everyone else? About the one occasion where you actually do have all the time in the world? When you're at Uni. You spend all fucking week at the cafeteria there playing card games and talking about stupid shit, so when someone buys GURPS: The Sooty Show, you have heaps of time to read their copy before the game starts.

[PhoneLobster]

Now you are just being excessively stupid trying to defend an indefensible claim.

People DON'T buy RPG systems, or write them, and ask people to come play them when they have some free time to do so?

People DON'T agree to play any RPG other than their favorite? Really? BULL-FUCKING-SHIT. There ARE some fairly dedicated crowds out there like D&D only and White Wolf only, but even those (minorities) of RPG gamers, between house rules, differing editions, a different white wolf game for every monster on earth, pathfinder and other spin offs... EVEN the ones who play "only their favorite" play like FIVE different RPGs, and that's not counting all the other RPGs they "have had a go at".

And APPARENTLY its a favorite which they are already familiar with and already have all the books they need for (even though no one buys books unless they are at uni?) and already know your setting and house rules for and can make characters for. No one EVER learns their favorite RPG they are simply BORN with the preference and the knowledge. Which kinda sucks for anyone say, interested in writing NEW rules since, you know, no one EVER learns OR tries new RPGs according to you.

You are wandering now firmly out of "I am mistaking my own experiences with the Gaming Den crowd and internet forum BSDM space nun RPGs with all experiences with RPGs ever!" into outright crazy town. Back the fuck down and realize that only the most extreme obsessed nut jobs do extensive rules research and home work away from the gaming table. Sure WE here at the den fall into that category, but WE are a minority.

[Koumei]

If you really view character creation/development as homework, then I wouldn't want to play with you anyway. Games are better off without people who think of it like that, so if the only two options were literally "Make games more accessible to these people, at the cost of everyone else having to sit and wait for them to make their mind up" and "You didn't do some research and turned up with a blank sheet? Well see you next week, we're not waiting", I'll pick the latter.

But even if we accept your idea that people show up all the time to try some new shit they haven't heard of, and that there is no magical way to learn about the rules of games and character creation on these newfangled interwebs, you're still not solving the problem where people walk away from the table because they're bored waiting for everyone else to decide what to do.

Unless you nail them to their chairs, confiscate all other sources of entertainment and taze them every time they speak about unrelated things. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure you take a dim view of DMs who do that. On the other hand, that's pretty normal behaviour for NSW, so it could go either way.

As for how to make this work without committing assault, just use classes. Offer a broad variety (or a bunch of classes and then subclasses) and make people pick a Class along with their Name right at the start, and then when it comes to "Combat time!" they can look at the list of "Combat powers this class offers me right now: Set dude on fire from a distance, set the floor on fire to burn everyone's feet, set the air on fire to lightly burn everyone's face, blind everyone with a flash of light" and pick one.

So yeah, the "small lists" thing that Frank suggested. And that actually solves the problem at both ends because character creation is as quick as saying "I want to be a necromancer who controls undead legions" and you only need to select from between a couple of abilities at any given time.

[Winnah]

Bullshit. Compunded by PL's own special brand of hyperbole. "Millions of TTRPG systems..." "80% of players..." Do you honestly think the things you pull out of your arse are of any interest to anyone? For fuck's sake, flush that shit already.

If you're going to run an introductory module for a group of inexperienced players, baby stepping though character generation and basic rules can be an advantage. I'll cite most modern CRPG's featuring a tutorial as an example.

That approach will chaff against the expectations of an experienced group of players, most of whom will have a concept in mind when they turn up to the first game of a new campaign, if not already on paper.

Personally, I would rather run a pre-gen character while learning a new system than be forced to sit through your marvellous voyage of self discovery, every fucking time I wanted to make a character.

[Ice9]

There is some truth there. IME, you can tell people to make characters ahead of time and they'll agree. And you can tell them to level up between games and they'll agree. But then they'll show up at the table with a blank or mostly unfinished character sheet, forget to ever level up in advance, and just basically annihilate the existence of the campaign from their mind between the end of one game and the start of the next. Not every single player, but a fair number of them.

The only way I've actually gotten char-gen not to happen at the table is a hard-line stance: Show up without a finished character? You get a pre-gen. Forgot to level up? That's fine, you can keep playing the lower level version for now. Only works if:
A) You're playing a system everybody has access to, like Pathfinder.
B) You're fully prepared for some people to still be playing a pre-gen at the end of the campaign, because they never got around to finishing a character.
C) The players will put up with it.

[PhoneLobster]

you're still not solving the problem where people walk away from the table because they're bored waiting for everyone else to decide what to do.

At the table character creation by traditional means as espoused by Frank's "Down time" preferences involved significantly longer intervals of waiting around for everyone else.

I am literally suggesting breaking that up into small manageable pieces, largely the whole POINT of which is to shorten that waiting. And indeed, breaking it up like that... does shorten the length of any given interval of waiting around.

You have it totally ass backwards on the terror of waiting around point.

Offer a broad variety (or a bunch of classes and then subclasses) and make people pick a Class along with their Name right at the start, and then when it comes to "Combat time!" they can look at the list of "Combat powers this class offers me right now

So I don't know basically identical to the abilities on a cheat sheet that match your preselected skill sets. Because, you know, a Skill Set is a sub set of ability options, you know. Like a fucking class.

So yeah, the "small lists" thing that Frank suggested.

No. What you described is significantly closer to the predefined sub sets of Skill Sets, and a lot LESS like Franks idea where you pick 4 skills out of 400 in "free downtime" then maybe buy them in play. THAT does not really resemble a predefined skill set/class system particularly much in this specific regard.

Since everyone in Frank's version is writing their own class. And has to stop the game (with "free down time") and write their own class selecting out of the entire system four abilities at a time on a regular basis.

[shadzar]

Look it's fucking pretty simple. You have brought your rules set to the table.

Your players want to play NOW. They have not seen the rules set before.

they need paper, pencil, some dice, and their imagination. that is all they need. you tell them whatever through play, when to roll dice, what they see. and let them try to do anything.

they want to swim across the river, just let them. check for any undertow if called for, if not they made it across. welcome to 1975~1981, you just had them play D&D for the first time.

they had NO list to pick through, they were able to do what they needed when they needed. they were able to play RIGHT NOW, no downtime at all.

[Koumei]

Okay, so let's step back a bit. In your games, you need and want to start play immediately, and splitting character creation up through gameplay is what you want to do. Sure.

So you want to give people cheat sheets with lists to choose from, so as to cut out everything they can't take ("We're at level 1, so you can't take level 2-99 abilities"), and probably to stop people from taking all of those weird edge-case powers you rarely use just so they can go "Oh, I can do that!" and take the spotlight ten times, and then have no abilities left when it comes to "everyone needs to participate here" occasions. And also to make things quicker.

You (as the GM) want to make the cheat-sheets, that way you're doing it and the players aren't spending table time doing it. You've stated that.

...I think that's where we're currently at, if we remove the arguments. So what else do you particularly want here? Is there something that needs to be debated? Did you just hope that Frank would argue with you? That I'd insult you? That everyone would see your brilliance and make a create-as-you-go subsystem for every game ever? If you're actually making a system from scratch, then I think you've reached the next stage where you do something before more debate happens. You seem to already know what you want to do, and there isn't much to say about it.

[PhoneLobster]

edit: Double post? Well thats a first.

[PhoneLobster]

So you want to give people cheat sheets with lists to choose from, so as to cut out everything they can't take ("We're at level 1, so you can't take level 2-99 abilities")

And etc... yes. I in fact have actually done that for levels 1-6 of 3.5 and I think levels 1-3 of Tome+Houserule+3.5 for various games.

Gave a particularly good kick off to game play. This sort of stuff can be done with fairly complex systems.

So what else do you particularly want here?

New ideas that help.

I certainly do NOT want Frank coming in here yelling "don't believe your LYING eyes, everything you have already done successfully is not just bad wrong fun, it's IMPOSSIBLE! So stop talking about it, Argle Bargle!"

And frankly I've gotten to the point where I believe Frank has so little to contribute in the way of new or actual useful ideas to me or any would be home game designer that he is no more welcome on any thread I have started or care about than Shadzar is.

[Avoraciopoctules]

So you want to give people cheat sheets with lists to choose from, so as to cut out everything they can't take ("We're at level 1, so you can't take level 2-99 abilities")

And etc... yes. I in fact have actually done that for levels 1-6 of 3.5 and I think levels 1-3 of Tome+Houserule+3.5 for various games.

Gave a particularly good kick off to game play. This sort of stuff can be done with fairly complex systems.

I might be introducing a new player or 2 to my 3.x campaign this weekend, and this sounds like an interesting idea. Have you posted these sheets anywhere?

[icyshadowlord]

Twilight was a new take on vampires.

We can all see how coming up with new stuff can go horribly wrong.

Also, your dismissive attitude and wanna-be hero antics make you hard to take seriously, Lobster.

[PhoneLobster]

I might be introducing a new player or 2 to my 3.x campaign this weekend, and this sounds like an interesting idea. Have you posted these sheets anywhere?

No. It's been years. Only reason I knew I ever even did it is I stumbled across like one sheet out of a set in my scrap paper pile the other day while running a game.

[Orion]

PhoneLobster's experiences are similar to mine. Most of the D&D games I have run have included more than one player who had never played D&D before, more than one character who didn't make their character before the first meeting, and at least one person who was in both categories and thus learning the rules for the first time during the actual first session. I've long been thinking about the kind of system PL is talking about, for similar reasons. Where I part ways is that I don't think this is a good fit 3rd Edition D&D. All the relevant lists are too long; too many feats, too many spells, even too many classes. Too many of the game's mechanical elements are intended to interact synergistically across a character, so evaluating the usefulness of an ability, or even calculating the fucking +to hit with at the table is a nightmare waiting to happen. Basically, to make it work you would need to pare down the options and streamline/simplify things that you would basically be writing a new game.

Designing a game with such a mechanic in mind has some promise. There are a couple of challenges, and a couple of opportunities. The big problems are that you necessarily need to make character options less numerous and less complicated to facilitate picking abilities during play, and that you need to come up with some more efficient way to let players access the info and update their characters than flipping through a stapled handout and copying stuff onto their sheets. However, you also have one major advantage, which is that you can get away with less complicated resolution mechanics and less mechanical depth to PCs because the character building system itself generates some of the interest and tension.

Option A: The Placemat
You could print everything available in the game on each player's character sheet and just let them check off or circle things as the game progresses. You'd want to have a minimal number of numeric metrics at the top of the sheet, followed by a number of boolean abilities and a section with gear. For example, a urban detective/spy/horror game might give you something like:
Combat 1 2 3 4
Stealth 1 2 3 4
Athletics 1 2 3 4
Computers 1 2 3 4
Lockpicking Y/N Stunt Driving Y/N First Aid Y/N Russian Y/N ...etc.
Car () Gun (X) Cash () Credit Card (X) Drugs (X) Smartphone ()
The placemat offers the best possible ease-of-use but limits the breadth of scope pretty severely. For games in genres that want more archetype differentiation, you could draw up a number of different placemats. The placemat for "Psion" would have like 10 powers written out on it which you could check off as you used them until you hit your max of 4. The "Superspy" placemat could do the same with gadgets.

Option B: The Deck
After Sundown has an advancement mechanic where several cards are dealt out at the end of each session and you choose which ones to use to upgrade your character with new powers. It's auction system requires the cards to be distributed all at once, but imagine if you switched to fixed costs. You could deal out the advancement cards at the beginning of the session, and let players claim them as needed throughout the night. This is a house rule I've considered using before, but if you wanted a system where all character design was done on cards, rather than just character advancement, you wouldn't want to do it that way. In particular, random advancement works well as a way to adds new tricks onto an already defined character, but you probably want to give people actual control when establishing their character's basic competencies. So what you'd do is give people a pile pennies at the start of the game, and lay out all the cards on the edge of the table for anyone to browse and buy what they fancied.

Going with cards has a lot of upsides. You can do "modularity" really easily. Leave it up to the MC to decide how many and how complicated cards to make available depending on your group's experience. If the MC know that swimming, or diplomacy, is not going to be relevant to their game, they can just quietly remove those cards from the deck. You can enforce role protection by just only printing one of a certain card, or making the additional copies more expensive. The DMG could introduce themed card "bundles" like "teleportation and its countermeasures" and talk about the effects of including or not including that card set in your game. When you sold adventure paths, you'd include a recommend character deck for each path that steered people towards appropriate archetypes and genre assumptions.

Using cards only has one downside that I'm aware of, but it's a big one: a pile of cards just doesn't feel like a character sheet, and it's substantially harder to retain physical possession of and find information on a pile of cards than on a single sheet of paper.

Skill Resolution
Even if you follow my advice, and pare things down so nothing numeric comes in more than 5 ranks, prereq/upgrade chains are 3 cards deep, and so on, this still risks slowing the game down. Adjusting your character on the fly introduces a whole bunch of new decisions and mechanical operations, which could drastically compromise your ability to get through the adventure in the available time if nothing is done. Fortunately, you can remove a number of the mechanics that currently chew up game time, beginning with the almighty Skill Check. The thing where you roll d20+bonus or Nd6 and hunt for 5s is gone. There are two ways to replace it.
Option A: Nonrandom
Most of your game's abilities can "just work." CHoosing to spend character points on Disable Device only to fail your lockpick roll would feel shitty, just don't let that happen. If you buy the lockpick ability, you successfully pick locks. This works especially well for shorter games, and for things your genre cares less about.
Option B: Random DCs
Take the typical d20 mechanic and reverse. A PC doesn't have a dice pool or a skill bonus, they have a fixed Skill Value. When it's unclear whether something should be successful, the MC should roll to determine how difficult the task is, and thus whether the PC can complete it at their current skill level. Suppose your character has "lockpicking 1" as a result of their established background in petty crime, and used it earlier to break into somebody's apartment. Now they're trying to break into a vault, and that sounds like a task beyond their thus-far-demonstrated expertise. The MC should roll a d4, and compare the result ot the PC's skill. In this case, the MC rolls a 3, and says, "The locks here are pretty advanced. You'd need Lockpicking 3 to break them" and let the player to decide whether spend points to reveal their PC as a master thief or save points and play a frustrated petty crook. The established difficulty of that particular door should be written down, and the same requirements offered to anyone else who comes by and wants to try their luck.

[...You Lost Me]

Twilight was a new take on vampires.

We can all see how coming up with new stuff can go horribly wrong.

Also, your dismissive attitude and wanna-be hero antics make you hard to take seriously, Lobster.

I'm sorry to make this look like a shitpost, but oh my god icy stop it.

Every single post you put in any PL thread is a troll/inflammatory/lol-didnt-read piece of nonsense that calls him a bad person and barely (or doesn't) address the content of the thread at all.

Stop. Just stop. It's like you're actively looking to get mad about something and without actually reading and then spleerg all over the thread. Ugh.

@PL, I have done this, and it does poorly with D&D (surprise) but well with a lot of lite RPGs. I think that kind of works as intended, because I play lite RPGs just to play them and not to read.

If I use it for anything, it's to pump numbers. Choosing abilities seems really damn slow.

[PhoneLobster]

With 3.x games it does in fact have a fairly poor fit. You can do it if you are running fairly limited options from core only for the lowest levels only. But it hit's obvious limitations pretty rapidly.

Even then you largely want to do it with branching choices and separate hand outs. Envisioning it as stapled sheets is bad, you really need to get your summary notes down to single sheets, ideally dominated by large amounts of spacing and only short ideally single lines of text. The player gets one at a time. They shouldn't be leafing after the initial class choice.

If you started throwing in 3.5 splat books, or bothering to note the later levels of Tome feats, or bothering to put in the feat options you regarded as suboptimal, or writing more than super summarized spell details you are going to go over size already.

(as an aside, note that 3.x uses actual cheat sheet summaries of the spells as a sort of aid for rapid spell selections written right into core, note how useful those are even though they are examples of summaries that REALLY leave out a lot of vital details of sometimes VERY complex options).

And even then the cheat sheets I used in 3.5 were generally character (or mostly class) specific and not in any way sorted by situational relevance. And even aside from complexity 3.5 can manage helpful cheat sheets but can't do contextual ones because it's feats/spells/skills aren't broken up in any remotely equitable manner and all the options are always on many contextual cheat sheets would end up going to wizards and druids. Not to mention that broad level based advancement also somewhat undermines contextual choices like this since for a broad range of effects the "choice" is commonly just "go up a level and get better at everything".

Of course, I'm not suggesting actually continuing to push 3.x into a pretzel to make this work. I have my own system, it's closer to requirements already. If you take the time to look that and the potential of how you can make a new complex system with different constraints to 3.x are largely what I've been talking about.

[Orion]

I'm not sold on using summaries that way. I'd rather have the entire ability text spelled out on the handout than force people to refer to a separate book to copy out the effects of the spell they just picked. Especially because if they look at the full writeup, decide they don't like it, and then start doing their shopping with the summary in one hand and the PHB in the other, that's a disaster for ease of play.