Crissa wrote:I still want TNE to be more about how to make a balanced game for a setting than about a specific setting at all.
I'd like a girl friend, a fancy house, and a mercedes full of cheerleaders. But that isn't going to happen.
The fact is that the rules that evoke one setting and another setting are wildly different. Not a little bt different,
wildly different. DMH, AWoD, and Warp Cult all use the same basic action resolution and they don't even have the same
attributes. Your "game creation tool kit" goes about as far as
- Pick One:
- Roll a d20
- Roll a pile of d6s and add them together.
- Roll a variable number of d6s and count hits.
- Roll percentile dice.
Then compare to modified target number to determine success.
Seriously, that's as far as the "tool kit" takes you. It gives you an action resolution system. It doesn't give you a skill list, a power list, or even a combat turn sequence. Dead Man's Hand and AWoD
don't have three dimensional terrain on the board with an assumption that players are going to march their characters around it with tape measures. And Warp Cult does. Because it is a different
setting and it makes sense to do it that way.
Having a universal game system that does whatever it is that you want it to do is not an unreasonable thing to want. But it is an unreasonable thing to expect to actually get. Because the world straight up does not work that way.
d20s claim that it could generate anything from Romance of the Three Kingdoms to Arabian Nights to Iron Kingdoms to The Shadow to Forgotten Realms was a very attractive story. But it was a lie. d20 couldn't even generate the FRCS because internal contractions between the setting and the game system would tear the setting apart if placed under any scrutiny.
I'd object to going with just alfar, because it leads rapidly to build-your-own race territory in every game.
That's fair. I'm not super wedded to them. My thought is that humans from Senicia and humans from Hive Mosyna are so different that they fill in the void that fantasy players feel because there aren't any rhino-nosed-goblins or whatever. As such, you could throw down some cultures of Alfar with wackier abilities.
Some kind of racially malleable creature is an absolute
must. Because otherwise you can't have a good explanation for monsters of the week. My original thought was for Dragons that could voluntarily change their body around as they grew older. And as they grew older and largr they would all eventually go mad and start breaking shit. So you had dragons with poison stingers and dragons with lots of legs, and fire breathing dragons and winged dragons and whatever.
You need something like that or it becomes practically impossible to explain why you have a Couatl and a Sea Serpent and a Cave Drake in the same setting.
Rakshasa are more than just tiger people. The word means something similar to "ogre." The ones with Tiger Heads are the Palankasha. Other Rakshasa have other monstrous traits, like tusks and horns and donkey heads and stuff.
-Username17