Supporting organic character development

[RadiantPhoenix]

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.

Given that when it comes to spell selection, I generally have one finger in the spell summaries and the book open to a spell, I think that having the summary in a little removable booklet that tucks into the inside of the back cover would be an improvement.

[shadzar]

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.

Given that when it comes to spell selection, I generally have one finger in the spell summaries and the book open to a spell, I think that having the summary in a little removable booklet that tucks into the inside of the back cover would be an improvement.

what about just spell cards along with the book pages? like the original ones, but done a LOT better to sort from spell type, school, level, etc. there was a spell summary sheet for 2nd for various casters, but it was VERY miniscule and not what i would consider anything but a list to check which spell you had or not.

[PhoneLobster]

The existing spell summaries in 3.x are clearly an aid to play and ARE commonly used hand in hand with the full index itself.

They exist so that you have a quick, short list that just tells you what is out there and what YOU can pick right from right now at your class and level. They don't give you all the details, and a sensible advanced player may want to look at more. But if you are in a hurry, or simply doing a preliminary run to determine which minority of options interest you, they are clearly superior than trying to work from the full detailed index.

They speed up the process of choice immensely and are good example of using summaries and indexes to improve ability selection efficiency. They are not particularly well designed for in play selections, but they are clearly BETTER at supporting in play selections than the indexes are, and if I'm pulling an NPC wizard or something out of my ass in game, as I frequently do, I even as a GM will turn to the spell summaries and pick spells off them as I go in play rather than attempting to use the full material from the index.

Edit: and I think it's worth clarifying. If the material from the alphabetic index was broken up by class and level, but still in full detailed format, it would still be less useful for this sort of quicker selection, and if the class based spell lists were presented without ANY summary of the effects of the spells and with spell names only they would be LESS useful than they currently are.

These are tools we need more of anyway. And even aside from my goal of in play advancement/creation these things are good to have. I've been saying for instance for a long time now that all of us writing home brew rules and huge house rule modifications should be writing our documents in formats designed for useful piecemeal handouts rather than trying to present them as unbound home printed books.

[Koumei]

These are tools we need more of anyway. And even aside from my goal of in play advancement/creation these things are good to have. I've been saying for instance for a long time now that all of us writing home brew rules and huge house rule modifications should be writing our documents in formats designed for useful piecemeal handouts rather than trying to present them as unbound home printed books.

So, abusing D&D as an example again, if running a Tome game, you'd go "Here's a list of the classes". And someone reads "Barbarian: gets really angry and draws attention to himself by dealing ALL THE DAMAGE." and then "Assassin: uses poison, evades traps, hides, casts spells to do all of these and identify the real target. Hides out of battle... then makes the one killer blow."

Then they go "I want to be an assassin!" and you hand them a print-out just of the Assassin class, and not the entire Dungeonomicon?

I can see that working. I mean, although the hand-out I gave the players for Disgaeagame did have print-outs of all the races and classes, I imagine that what the players first did was flip through and go "Ooh, catgirl! -> Oh hey, samurai, let's see what they did with that..."

Specifically for your "Get this started quicker", I could even see it being "Okay, you chose ClubBlade as your class? Cool. Here's a sheet for a level one ClubBlade, with the ability scores already decided based on what would work well for a ClubBlade. I left the skills and feats blank for when you want to take those."

[PhoneLobster]

So, abusing D&D as an example again, if running a Tome game, you'd go "Here's a list of the classes"...
Then they go "I want to be an assassin!" and you hand them a print-out just of the Assassin class, and not the entire Dungeonomicon?

That is basically exactly what I did do when running games adapted off tome materials. I had a recommended classes short list and each class was a separate print out.

That is aside from "quick start" low level summary sheets, that was just what I did even for the FULL print outs of class rules. And for situations using more traditional "not in play", but still at the table, character creation.

Even an experienced player who isn't sure which class they want AND who for whatever reason might be at home doing their RPG homework in advance, benefits from a shopping list of classes with some quick tag line summaries to "sell" them to them, and for an inexperienced or non-advanced player trying to pick quickly because people are waiting at the table for character creation to end such summary lists are utterly invaluable.

Specifically for your "Get this started quicker", I could even see ...

...and that is basically similar to what I did for the quick start materials. Only I usually put at least several good feat selections/builds on the short list. And usually some items. And maybe some recommended spell lists. Skills could go suck it.

Tome+house rules was trickier than 3.5, and involved more specific builds, feats were not excluded but cutting off the higher level effects from Tome style feat descriptions was necessary.

But then... tome style feats with their multi-stage rocket descriptions were problematic in general.

[Koumei]

Okay, sounds reasonable. I like the bit about skills going off to die in a field somewhere. So when starting at higher levels you could basically offer people complete builds from a list, too.

[PhoneLobster]

Well. I wouldn't do that at higher levels. I would just plain NOT start at higher levels (level 9 starting characters everybody...er... NO!), and these days just use a different system that isn't as bad as that.

Still the whole idea of adapting a system to better smaller incremental organic advancement is somewhat contrary to the idea of dropping in and just starting with characters of a significantly high level. So I would generally suggest not doing that as much as possible.

If you REALLY wanted to combine the incremental organic in game character creation with high level starting characters, you wouldn't just start at high level, you would start at low level anyway and just massively accelerate the rate at which levelling resources were gained and spent.

[Koumei]

By higher I meant "any number higher than 1". So like, level three or something, where you're past that silly "hahaha orc-crit" spot but things are still small. So you can offer multiple things.

Now granted, I am well aware that nearly any other system will work better, and presumably has worked better for you. So for BESM you really can just offer abilities/grouped stuff in chunks. And if you were running Dark Heresy you couahahahaha, oh sorry, sorry. But seriously, Mutants and Masterminds you could go "You're going for a Supermannish feel. So here's 20 build points worth of things - Flight, Invulnerability, Super Strength. All packaged together. You? You're thinking Iron Man, you said? Cool, here's 20 points worth of suit powers."

If WW actually worked, then this would work so well for that, given you could literally say "This session you have three dots you can colour in at any point".

[InsaneWaffle]

In some games we used to have something we called forgotten ranks.
Each player starts with x(normaly 5) number of ranks they can apply to their character at any time. But they can only be applied to skills they do not have any skill in from before.

Just needs to justify with a simple sentence.
If you forgot perception or lock picking or some like that.

I did bird watching with x
I trained lock picking while working with the lock smith..

It worked for us