Perilous System

[Manxome]

I've been doing some work on my own homebrew system, tentatively named "Perilous," and I think it's far enough along that I need more experienced people to laugh at it and tell me why it's hopelessly unplayable.


This seems like a generally good forum for that sort of thing, so here are the [counturl=78]rules (so far)[/counturl] and a [counturl=79]character sheet[/counturl].

[EDIT: And some [counturl=82]example characters[/counturl].]

As it says at the beginning of the rules doc, it's still short a lot of content, and the rules are fairly bare-bones, but I think there's enough stuff there to create characters (within a very narrow range) and run battles if you wanted to.

Potentially interesting system features include:

• Create your own custom spells and special attacks by combining numerous "techniques."
  
• "Peril" and "grace" resources provide unusual mechanisms for teamwork and help control the length of battles.
  
• Callings (somewhat analogous to D&D classes) add versatility in an area, but all techniques are theoretically accessible to all characters.
  
• Rough numerical parity between martial fighting and casting.
  
• Six primary attributes, of which 3 give direct or indirect benefits to martial fighting, 3 help with casting spells, and all have some defensive utility (Frank commented in another thread he liked the idea of a 6-attribute system but hadn't found one he liked, interested to hear his take on this one).
  
• NOT designed to be compatible with...well..anything.

For those who don't want to try to figure out all the balancing mechanisms just from the rules, here's a quick cheat sheet for how some of the less obvious mechanics are intended to be balanced:

• Spells take two actions (gather mana and cast); attacking takes one. Thus, spells get roughly twice the effect per success.
  
• Attacks use two rolls (finesse and damage); spells also use two rolls (gather mana and casting), just split across two rounds.
  
• Defending against an attack or a spell both (usually) involve using an attribute, a skill, and one type of damage resistance. Resisting a spell uses all at once, while defending against an attack splits them across two rolls, but you still have the same number and types of variables affecting your overall defense.
  
• Weapon bonuses boosting magical skills take double the proficiency points of those boosting martial skills, because proficiency points can be adjusted every round, so casters can devote 100% to gather mana this round then 100% to casting next round, while fighters must split between finesse and damage each round.
  
• STR, DEX, and VIT are to martial fighting roughly what ART, WIL, and SPR are to magic, respectively.
  
• No attributes or skills directly affect damage resistances, but you can layer an unlimited amount of armor for full bonuses, so the amount of armor you can wear (and therefore your damage resistance) is ultimately limited mainly by the amount of weight (for physical armor) and essence (for magical armor) you can manage, which are dependent on your STR + armor skill and ART + artifacts skill, respectively.

I'd particularly like to know:

• Based on this document, do you feel like you understand the system well enough to actually use it?
  
• Are there any major/obvious balance issues?
  
• Does this seem like too much stuff to keep track of, or do you think it's reasonable?
  
• Does the suggested shorthand look helpful, or just confusing?
  
• The current technique lists are sorted by skill rank requirement and mostly avoid shorthand. Would they be better using shorthand? Would they be better sorted by technique function instead of by rank requirement? Would it be useful to have more than one version of the list? Or should I just dump them all into an Excel spreadsheet so you can sort and filter however you want, but it might not be so printer-friendly?
  
• Is using this many bulleted lists in a forum post a bad idea?

Thanks, everyone, for your time and feedback.

[Catharz]

STR, DEX, and VIT are to martial fighting roughly what ART, WIL, and SPR are to magic, respectively.

So what do "ART, WIL, and SPR" actually do?

When I'm defending against a melee attack, I can choose to use DEX and spend my entire bonus against the first roll my opponent makes?


The first bit of Min/Max I see is maxing ART for spellcasting (where does SPR come in, anyway?), and having just enough Will to slowly gather mana enough to cast it.

Then every combat you can open up the first round (you're already full of mana) with the biggest attack anyone's ever likely to see.


Also, it seems like (due to the fixed DC for gathering mana) that the power of a spell will be a direct result of how much mana you invest in it.


The idea of 'grace' and 'peril' are interesting, especially where bluffing comes in. I can totally see the villainous "I have the upper hand now!", 'spend all my opponents peril to do something big, oops he wasn't in peril after all, crash & burn'.

Another system that might work is gaining grace by spending peril. That is, you take risks to fill up your grace meter during combat.

[Manxome]

So what do "ART, WIL, and SPR" actually do?

When I'm defending against a melee attack, I can choose to use DEX and spend my entire bonus against the first roll my opponent makes?

Making an attack requires that you make two rolls:
Finesse: DEX + finesse skill vs. target's DEX + defense skill (dodge/parry/block)*
Damage: STR + damage skill vs. target's resistance

Casting requires:
Gather Mana: WIL + gather mana skill vs. static difficulty
Cast: ART + casting skill + excess mana vs. whatever your spell technique says the target can defend with, most commonly WIL + deflection skill + resistance

VIT reduces the penalty you take for a given amount of fatigue, and allows you perform actions with a higher fatigue cost, so it allows you to make more attacks before incurring a penalty or to "go nova" and make bigger attacks. SPR does the same thing, except for exhaustion (mental/magical) instead of fatigue (physical).


*There's extra rules that tend to make a target's defenses easier to beat when several people attack him in a single round, but this is the baseline case.

The first bit of Min/Max I see is maxing ART for spellcasting (where does SPR come in, anyway?), and having just enough Will to slowly gather mana enough to cast it.

Then every combat you can open up the first round (you're already full of mana) with the biggest attack anyone's ever likely to see.


Also, it seems like (due to the fixed DC for gathering mana) that the power of a spell will be a direct result of how much mana you invest in it.

There's actually a number of safeguards making this generally impractical.

First off, if you're already storing some mana, then the difficulty for a gather mana roll is increased by half the amount of mana you're storing. So, if we ignore the "explode on 20" rule for a moment, the most mana you could ever successfully gather at one time is twice your total bonus on the roll (WIL + gather mana skill). On top of that, if you fail your gather mana roll, you lose all the mana you've previously stored. You can get an arbitrary amount of mana (in a single action, even) from explosions if we assume you're arbitrarily lucky, but there's a firm ceiling on the amount of mana you're ever likely to have at one time.

Next, every time you gather mana, you incur 1 exhaustion. Every time your exhaustion reaches the next multiple of your SPR, you get another -1 penalty to all mental tasks, including gathering mana and casting spells. So if we assume 6 seconds/round, gathering mana every round for, say, an hour is going to net you 600 exhaustion, with which a starting SPR of 8 means that you're now at a -75 penalty on every roll you make to gather mana or cast a spell. Note that as long as you're gathering or storing mana, you're not considered to be "resting," so none of that goes away naturally until after you discharge, though there are some spells in the restoration school which you could have a friend cast on you to try and make some of that go away.

Now, once you have some mana, it doesn't cost any exhaustion to store it. However, every round you're storing it, you need to make the same roll to control it that you would make if you were gathering more (recall that the difficulty is increased by half the amount you have). Since this is a roll against a difficulty, rather than an opposed roll, you automatically fail on a natural 1, no matter what bonuses you have, and when you fail, you lose everything you've stored, and also incur 1 exhaustion.

So even if we assume you only fail on a 1, and that you only try to store 1 round's worth of mana, you can expect to lose it 1 round out of every 20, costing 1 exhaustion (and need to spend another round gathering more to replace it, another 1 exhaustion), so your exhaustion isn't going to hit 600 in an hour, but it will still hit 60. If you know that battle is about to start, it's completely fair and reasonable to gather mana for a round or two and try to hold it so you can cast on the first round of actual battle, but walking around all day with any mana stored is rather impractical, regardless of how many bonuses you can get.

And if someone ever does get a quadruple explosion and ends up with 100 mana at level one, he has no reasonable expectation of being able to store it for even one round (-50 penalty), so that only lets him cast an awesome spell in the very next round, not at some future time of his choosing.

However, having high WIL and gather mana skill directly affect the amount of mana you're likely to gather from a single roll, so they affect the average power of your spells every bit as much as your ART, so simply maxing your ART isn't necessarily the best character build.

The idea of 'grace' and 'peril' are interesting, especially where bluffing comes in. I can totally see the villainous "I have the upper hand now!", 'spend all my opponents peril to do something big, oops he wasn't in peril after all, crash & burn'.

Assuming that all the rolls in your game aren't secret, players will be able to track how much peril they've inflicted on an opponent pretty easily, and I'm imagining that in-character estimation of someone's peril isn't much harder (for someone trained in combat, like every PC) than estimating their wounds, so this situation doesn't seem very likely to me, though I can imagine situations in which it could happen.

Another system that might work is gaining grace by spending peril. That is, you take risks to fill up your grace meter during combat.

I've been using the term "spend" to mean that something is going down, even if it's a bad thing to have. I would use a verb like "gain," "incur" or "suffer" to indicate your peril going up, to avoid confusion.

The key thing to remember is that peril goes away between combats, but it takes hours to fully replenish your grace from resting, so if you've got something that restores grace at the cost of peril, you need to consider that players will try to use it to fully recover their grace after every battle. This is also the reason that there's a "desperation" technique for fighting but not for casting.

Currently, I've made a couple spells that can transfer grace between allies, but nothing that increases the party's total grace except time.

[Catharz]

Alright, that makes sense. I didn't realize it was that involved.

A more basic suggestion is that you better define "grace" and "peril", or rather 'enemy' and 'ally'. Grace is easy: You get to choose if someone can tap into your good graces. Peril is more difficult, in that letting anyone choose to tap into your peril violates the 'no allies tapping peril' clause.

An alternative is to allow characters to choose whether they are going to allow someone to tap into their grace. If not, that person can automagically tap into the character's peril.
This could be abusive if a party chooses to divide up who each can treat character treats as an ally, so peril could be restricted to making bad things happen to the imperiled character. Which it may already be, I have no idea.

[Manxome]

If there is one notably fuzzy part of the combat rules, that would be it.

Peril is mostly restricted to doing bad things to the targeted character, but I still don't want allies to be able to use it up for some ineffective bad thing before enemies get the chance to do some effective bad thing with it. For example, using up a bunch of an ally's peril to damage some attribute they don't currently need before an enemy uses it to kill them.

I think strictly defining enemies and allies will have to come down to GM adjudication, though. Anyone who's immediate intent is to benefit you is an "ally" (even if they plan to betray you later), and anyone who's immediate intent is to harm you is an "enemy" (even if it's a mock battle), and the GM knows the intentions of NPCs, so that just leaves the players, which will usually be allies, but if you want to play with intra-party hostilities, I think you'll need a healthy dose of either the honor system or rule 0 to prevent problems.

[Catharz]

"There's no free lunch." If you treat ally use of peril as a healing, and as an action, it can still be balanced. Balance issues would only really come up if it were possible to 'dump' all of an ally's peril as a free action.

And seriously, watching somebody's back or throwing them a rope makes sense.

[Manxome]

Peril-healing could indeed be balanced, and does make a reasonable amount of story-sense, though doing it by making peril-fueled attacks on your allies does not make sense (at least not in my mind).

But the main reason I don't want to include either is that the buildup of peril is supposed to be one of the key factors limiting the length of a battle. You can build up lots of peril on one opponent and then spend it to take them out in a small window, without giving them the chance to employ countermeasures (like healing). I want to make sure that battles tend to end, even if both sides have lots of healing, and that they do so in a relatively predictable timeframe. The fact that peril is hard to get rid of during combat is one of the mechanisms supporting this (the fact that grace is hard to recover during combat is another).

So, currently, you can wipe out all of your own peril at essentially no cost if you can find or create a safe place to take a breather for a round, which I'm sure will lead to some interesting tactics, but I don't intend to make "peril healing" line of spells or anything like that. There are a few techniques that can reduce peril (e.g. the "dismissive" martial technique), but I'm trying to keep them fairly limited. You can, of course, reduce the amount of peril you're likely to take by improving your defenses, giving enemies disincentives to attack, etc.

[Catharz]

OK, so what situations 'imperil' a character? Any round you use an attack or are attacked? Any time you 'can't take 10' (to use D&D terminology)?

Both definitions seem like they would work fine as long as you include mental attacks (like diplomacy/intimidation).

[Manxome]

If you mean "when can you recover from peril?", that's described in Recovery: Peril (p. 18)

Any character may erase her entire accumulated peril by taking time to relax and regain her composure. This requires that she do nothing (no movement or combat action) and remain off-guard for one round. During this round, she may not actively defend herself in any way (she may not add any attributes or skills to any rolls to avoid damage or peril), and may not control mana (any stored mana must be released). If anything happens during this round which would cause her to sustain damage or incur peril (such as being struck by an attack), her peril increases by 50% instead of being reset to zero.

If you meant "when does a character's peril go up?" it's usually a result of being struck by an attack or spell, though it might include other situations.

There's currently no formalized rules for diplomacy or intimidation; hadn't really thought much about them thus far.

[rapanui]

Interesting system.

I need a couple of clarificatiosn though:

1. Is someone penalized for attempting to resist several spells, like they are when attempting to evade various attacks? If not, then it may change optimum party composition to benefit multi-fighter parties. Particularly multi-ranged attacker parties.

2. Is there some cap on skills? If not, then the game quickly becomes "who can pump their primary attack skill highest" because as we know, attack is always superior to defense in thse kinds of games because attacks can actually take your opponent down. My suggestion is to not link weapon attacks to skills at all. link them to techniques (or similar system) just like spellcasting.

3. How will stealth play into all this?

4. Fatigue and exhaustion require division. I know that's grade-school level math, but it's not as intuitive as addition/subtraction/multiplication. Try and fix this somehow or create some sort of table.

5. I don't like "advancing a class". The rules are too vague, and it's the sort of thing where GM favoritism can come in.

Clarify these things and I'll give the rules a much more thorough reading. I like what you've got so far.

[Manxome]

1. Is someone penalized for attempting to resist several spells, like they are when attempting to evade various attacks? If not, then it may change optimum party composition to benefit multi-fighter parties. Particularly multi-ranged attacker parties.

Currently, no, they're not. That's partly a flavor thing, partly because there's multiple ways to defend against attacks and usually only one against spells, and partly because casters only cast on alternate rounds and I don't want to penalize them for being out of sync. Also, casters have an alternate method for piercing strong defenses (spending multiple rounds gather mana).

I could imagine that difference causing problems, but it's one of many tactical differences between martial fighting and casting, and it's hard to predict where everything balances out. For example, casters are likely to have a wider range of effects they can produce. Of particular note, pure fighting specialists won't have access to effective in-combat healing.

2. Is there some cap on skills? If not, then the game quickly becomes "who can pump their primary attack skill highest" because as we know, attack is always superior to defense in thse kinds of games because attacks can actually take your opponent down. My suggestion is to not link weapon attacks to skills at all. link them to techniques (or similar system) just like spellcasting.

First of all, both martial fighting and casting currently rely on both skills and techniques. Both allow you to add skills to your rolls, and allow you to learn and apply techniques, and correlate your available techniques to your skill ranks. So I'm not sure in what respect you want martial fighting's advancement to be more like casting's advancement.

Second, I don't think the game becomes "pump one skill to max," even with no caps, because of diminishing returns on skill ranks. If you have enough skill points to raise a single skill to 20, you could raise two skills, not just to 10 each, but to 14 each (with skill points left over). This means the person who raises both attack and defense skills actually ends up with more total bonuses than the person who specializes, which in turn means that he can probably kick the specialist's ass.

However, if there really is a need for them, there's not any particular difficulty in slapping on level-based skill caps. Limiting skill ranks to roughly level + 5 (or maybe a bit lower) would probably be a good first pass.

3. How will stealth play into all this?

I don't know yet. It will probably involve techniques that grant varying degrees of concealment and possibly ambushing bonuses.

4. Fatigue and exhaustion require division. I know that's grade-school level math, but it's not as intuitive as addition/subtraction/multiplication. Try and fix this somehow or create some sort of table.

There are special tables for tracking fatigue and exhaustion on the character sheet; their use is described on page 24 of the rules.

5. I don't like "advancing a class". The rules are too vague, and it's the sort of thing where GM favoritism can come in.

There should probably be a note in there saying that failing to keep the entire party in the same class is going to result in severe power discrepancies rather quickly. I was certainly imagining that the entire party would advance at the same time (or possibly at the same levels, if the party's level isn't kept in sync).

If you want to eliminate GM discretion from the process, you can just flatly say that everyone advances a class every 10 levels (of course, the GM always has pretty much unlimited power to screw with levels, but it eliminates one variable). I just like the idea of the GM being able to synchronize it to a pivotal moment in the plot, or offer it as a reward for completing a campaign.



Thanks for the feedback so far, let me know if there's anything else I can clarify.

[rapanui]

I could imagine that difference causing problems, but it's one of many tactical differences between martial fighting and casting, and it's hard to predict where everything balances out. For example, casters are likely to have a wider range of effects they can produce. Of particular note, pure fighting specialists won't have access to effective in-combat healing.

Run a few combats with extreme circumstances. My guess is that multiple low level weapon attackers will be somewhat more dangerous than multiple low level magic attackers. Not necessarily a bad thing, given that low level mooks tend to be thugs more often than mages in the literature.

Second, I don't think the game becomes "pump one skill to max," even with no caps, because of diminishing returns on skill ranks. If you have enough skill points to raise a single skill to 20, you could raise two skills, not just to 10 each, but to 14 each (with skill points left over). This means the person who raises both attack and defense skills actually ends up with more total bonuses than the person who specializes, which in turn means that he can probably kick the specialist's ass.

OK, I see this now. Nonetheless, the argument stands that there's definitely a way to optimize your skills points and ways to be really inefficient (my way happened to fall on the inefficient side of things). This can lead to severe character disparities. Adding some guidelines (have at least one attack skill above Charater Level + X blah blah...) and some caps can make sure most characters are within the rough range of power.

Also, when and if you write up social/profession/knowledge skills, don't have them compete with skill points with combat skills. All characters should be competent in combat and outside of it, so keep these things as separate as possible.


Like I said previously, it looks interesting. I do like the Grace/Peril system.

[Manxome]

Also, when and if you write up social/profession/knowledge skills, don't have them compete with skill points with combat skills. All characters should be competent in combat and outside of it, so keep these things as separate as possible.

Yeah, I saw some previous discussion about that idea on this forum, and I like it in principle. The problem is that I think most "non-combat" skills are liable to provide fringe or circumstantial combat bonuses. Climbing, swimming, or tumbling can provide maneuverability or positional advantages; social skills can avoid combat, split up opponents, recruit allies, or let you engage at the time/place of your choosing; knowledge or information gathering skills can reveal enemy weaknesses and exploitable features of the environment; etc.

So I'm a bit torn. One option would be to give characters separate "combat" and "non-combat" skill points, and live with the fact that the categories are not air-tight. Another option is to assume that all characters are combat-specialists, but that the diminishing returns system will eventually make it worth investing a few points into non-combat skills, even if only for the situational benefits (which can be played-up in the skill designs), and then just set the difficulties for "non-combat" tasks with the assumption that "non-combat" skills will always be around 1/3 or 1/4 the rank of "combat" skills for a given level. A third option would be to handle non-combat abilities with something entirely different from the current skills system.

For now, though, I'm just focusing on stuff that ties directly into combat.

[rapanui]

Here are my suggestions:

Have Athletics encompass Running, Swimming, Jumping and Climbing (and Digging/Flying for creatures that can do so). It should be a combat skill that pertains to speed.

Have Acrobatics encompass Tumbling and Balance. It should be a combat skill that pertains to Mobility and avoidance.

Handle Stealth and Detection separately, or integrate it carefully with combat system so that they can be combat skills.

Ride can be a combat skill too.

Here are the things that virtually never play a role in combat and can be handled completely separately to my reckoning.

- Profession/Craft (even if by crafting you can create weapons, your ability to use them will be balanced by STR and ART)
- Knowledge skills (except maybe Knowledge of Monsters or something like that)
- Artistic skills (unless the player selects "Musical Magic" calling or something similar)
- Social skills (Bluff can be a combat skill though)

Avoiding combat through social interaction is an option virtually every character should have, only the way they go about it should be different depending on the character. Some may be diplomatic, others threatening, others may use bookish knowledge to persuade intelligent opponents, others may eavesdrop on nobles and plant items on their person to incriminate them, etc. These things fall outside the scope of combat 99% of the time.

Another option is to assume that all characters are combat-specialists, but that the diminishing returns system will eventually make it worth investing a few points into non-combat skills, even if only for the situational benefits (which can be played-up in the skill designs), and then just set the difficulties for "non-combat" tasks with the assumption that "non-combat" skills will always be around 1/3 or 1/4 the rank of "combat" skills for a given level.

That creates the problem of players accusing each other of being "roll players" or "munchkins" or "useless" which you will want to discourage through your mechanics. It could work if you place strong guidelines.

A third option would be to handle non-combat abilities with something entirely different from the current skills system.

This is another idea. You could simply have feat-like descriptors that give a general sense of the character's non-combat prowesses. The real question is how deep and complex you want to make your social system. Generally, most people like to act out character-to-character interactions, with as few rolls as possible.

[Manxome]

So, I did a little number crunching to ballpark the hit rates and expected damage for low-level attacks and spells.

It's difficult to get an accurate picture, because there's a lot of variables, and a lot depends on individual builds, tactics, and synergies. But I think I'll want to change the per-round defense limits so that they only interact with melee attacks, not all weapon attacks (I was looking for a reason that melee fighters wouldn't just use ranged weapons at point-blank, anyway), and also reduce the baseline difficulty for gathering mana from 20 to around 15.

With those changes, for a single attacker, I believe a martial fighter should pound out a little more total wounds+peril than a caster on average (assuming equal physical and magical defenses on the target and equal offensive skill ranks), with a little less reliance on techniques, while the caster has better reliability (the fighter has a significant chance to fail either of 2 rolls, the caster only 1) and more flexibility in what the spells do.

Adding multiple attackers, melee fighters get a significant boost to average hit rate and peril per hit by ganging up, but casters working together have more flexibility to make use of synergystic effects, like resistance debuffs, and can operate at a range, which makes it easier to focus fire and makes them less susceptible to various counter-tactics.

Still haven't figured out whether there exists some mana threshold below which the casters are better off (on average) gathering more mana rather than immediately casting a weaker spell. I believe it has to exist for at least some sets of numbers (particularly when the spell has a high probability of being resisted), but I don't see any way to determine what it is without a lot more case-analysis...

[rapanui]

I am going to run a few random combats with your system in the next few days and let you know if I run into any problems. I'm not exactly a master of Game Breaking Cheese Fu, but I might be able to sniff out more problems by actually playtesting it.

[Manxome]

Created some [counturl=82]sample characters[/counturl], which may or may not be helpful for you.

There's one of each of the 3 callings created so far, though the casters are a bit myopic on account of only 2 schools of magic having any techniques so far.

Note that they're designed to be general archetypes and not optimized for going nova in big battles or for fighting with/against each other. There's also probably more room for optimization in general, but I think they're pretty good given the current list of techniques.

[Manxome]

Updated the [counturl=78]rules[/counturl] with a bunch of warding techniques, some basic advice on skill point distribution for new characters, and numerous minor changes.

Any luck with the random combats, rapanui?

[rapanui]

I'll be honest: I haven't crunched them yet, but maybe this weekend.

[Manxome]

Updated rules with geomancy techniques.

Does anyone actually care at this point? Should I stop posting about it until it's actually "done?" Just stop posting about it entirely?

[Catharz]

I'm still reading it, and I'd be sad to see this go the way of so many other systems which didn't get off the ground.


[Edit]
Are exhaustion and similar costs applied before the 'gather mana' roll, or after? [/Edit]

[Manxome]

The fatigue/exhaustion cost of an action should be applied after the roll--so if you do a really big attack, you get a penalty on future attacks, not on that attack itself. I'll add a note to the rules about that.

Though this should never make a difference of more than 1 on the roll, so that decision is based more on flavor than balance.

A related issue is that the effects of an action can be applied in any order the actor chooses, and even interleaved (though I can't think of an example where interleaving would be useful at the moment). For example, if you use Jinx and Blast in one spell, you can spend some of your successes (using Jinx) to add peril to the target, and then spend the peril you just created (plus more successes) on Blast to inflict wounds.

I also don't see any reason why an effect that removes fatigue/exhaustion couldn't remove some that you incurred (as a cost) in performing that selfsame action, although I'm not sure off-hand whether there are/will be any techniques for which that question could come up.

[Catharz]

1186637413[/unixtime]]
I also don't see any reason why an effect that removes fatigue/exhaustion couldn't remove some that you incurred (as a cost) in performing that selfsame action, although I'm not sure off-hand whether there are/will be any techniques for which that question could come up.

That's actually another thing I was looking for


So, are there going to mechanical distinctions between books, wands, staves, and holy symbols? Staves, for example, seem to sit somewhere between "martial weapons" and "arcane weapons", while trying to parry or smack someone with a wand or book would be using an improvised weapon at best.

Right now I'm thinking that with all things equal, the classic cleric route of armor, shield, and holy symbol might work very well.



Also, it all seems very equipment-driven. Will there be any allowances for characters desiring to be completely EQ-independent? Or will it be suggested that they wear less obtrusive items, such as bracers and rings?

[Manxome]

I'm of the opinion that having some character types (e.g. fighters) derive more of their bonuses from equipment than others (e.g. casters) is A Bad Thing (tm). If people get the expected level of equipment, then it doesn't matter, and if they don't, then there's a power disparity. And it's often difficult to figure out what the balanced level of equipment is in the first place, if it isn't clear exactly what traits the non-equipment-dependent characters have that are supposed to make up for equipment, and what level of equipment they can compensate for in practice.

However, while both fighters and casters get comparable bonuses from weapons, you have some flexibility in deciding how many skill points you're going to put into your weapon skill versus your other offensive skills (damage/finesse for fighters, gather mana/casting for casters). Similarly, you can choose to protect yourself primarily by wearing a lot of armor (requiring a lot of armor/artifacts skill) or primarily by deflecting/avoiding attacks (using dodge/block/parry/deflection).

A sword with a +50/50 finesse bonus isn't any better than a +3/3 finesse bonus if you've only got 3 ranks in sword skill, and thick armor isn't much help if the weight penalties are too severe to wear it, so if you advance your equipment-dependent skills more slowly than your equipment-independent skills, you won't need (or want) to upgrade your equipment as often. A character that's planning to use zero equipment will probably be woefully underpowered, so you want to keep them roughly in balance, but you do have some choice regarding how much of your power comes from equipment and how much comes from raw skill.

Also, I've got no objection at all to slapping whatever flavor text you want on your equipment. There's no reason your weapon can't be called a hand wrap or light-eater instead of a sword, or that your armor can't be called a talisman instead of a breastplate, if that's in line with your character concept.

So regarding staves/wands/symbols/etc. there's no hard-and-fast difference, but absent any need to tailor equipment flavor for a particular character, I'd tend to call weapons with a mixture of magical and fighting bonuses "staves" and weapons with strictly magical bonuses "books" or "symbols," just because I think that makes more sense flavor-wise.

The key distinction between martial and arcane weapons is actually not what bonuses they have, but what techniques you can learn from the associated skill. If you happen to know fighting techniques from a martial skill, you can still apply them to attacks made with whatever weapon you happen to be holding, even if that weapon is arcane or exotic (though it still needs to have the appropriate attack type in terms of melee vs. ranged and slashing/piercing/crushing, if the technique has a restriction on it). In fact, if you wanted to make some sort of fighter/caster hybrid, dual-wielding a martial weapon and an arcane weapon might even be a good idea.

And yes, I think a healer with armor, a shield, and a holy symbol should be completely viable.

[Catharz]

Heh, I didn't mean a healer >:-)