Orion wrote:Prak wrote:Read... ANY of the fucking times I've talked about my mechanics. I'll grant you that they weren't all that solid at first, but the shit I posted in the fifth fucking post of this thread are some pretty solid mechanics to go by for offering advice here. If you need something more solid than that, then go fucking read my past posts.
Wow, I somehow didn't notice your rageout/meltdown when I was writing my first reply. I would have been significantly less respectful.
Look, asshole, I've read most of your rule threads in the past. I don't remember all the details, but I'm sure as fuck not going to go back and study them now. You know why? Because you're re-writing (or rather promising to re-write) your core mechanics on the fly
in this thread. It's equally funny and sad that you think throwing down a new regime in your fifth post is a
good sign. You may feel that of the fifth post you have things pretty well locked down, but for an outside observer there is no reason to believe that's true. The history is that every time you talk about these things you change them. Until you take the time to actually revise your shit to reflect the ideas you throw out in offhand comments, nobody will take you seriously, and nobody would be able to review your shit even if they wanted to. For fuck's sake, even if the core mechanics existed, the content of these races doesn't. You mentioned in one of your subsequent posts that you're probably changing the saves humans get, but you didn't edit the OP. If someone dropped in and said "humans are too strong/too weak," how would you even know what version they were talking about?
Post all the links you want, all it proves is that you have vomited words. It doesn't show that those words actually
mean anything.
My point is that I have mechanics. They may be shit, I may need to revise them, and I may forget parts when I spitball stuff like Quickhands, but they're there. So, yes, I had a melt down. I've got five threads because I never know what the hell the procedure is here. Some people keep all their game design to a single thread, some people make a new thread for each segment of their design. And then there's the fact that I was putting the threads in IMOI, but then there was a thread some time where the prominent, more experienced in design people said they consider it the place for finished products and don't really look at stuff there. Also, I tend to not go back and edit shit because that then removes context for extant posts. Maybe I shouldn't do that. Or maybe I should keep my OPs up to date and keep the old versions in spoilers. Fuck if I know.
The last time I made a thread about Midgard in general, I made a thread for set mechanics, and a thread for workshopping things still in flux. Which of course fell apart immediately, but what the hell was I expecting.
When you say I'm rewriting on the fly in this thread, I don't even know what you're talking about. Do you mean the reaction thing? It's a pretty standard action economy idea talked about here, and if I didn't write it in my vomitorium of mechanics, mea culpa.
Look, a lot of you bastards who are more experienced with design got through your "Dog with a chem set" phase off the internet, or at least somewhere other than here. I have no fucking clue what I'm doing, or well, only the barest clue what I'm doing, but I'm trying to learn. I've been talking about this, literally, since Desolation of Smaug came out. I've mentioned it here and there. If you'd said "I have no clue what version of your mechanics you're using at this point, sort that out" I'd have... ok,
maybe I'd have just sheepishly said "Oh, um, it's this." I'll cop to having at least one melt down per project. Because I'm a shitlord like that.
Anyway, no meltdown, no intentional revisions, these are my mechanics for Midgard as they stand:
The Basics
Midgard is intended to be a 10 level sword and sorcery hack. Characters don't advance in classes, they have a creature type and a race, and a character level. Skills and feats are gained per CharLv. Class Abilities are eschewed in favor of open ability selection by theme (yes I realize how shitty that sounds, what I mean is there are prerequisites to abilities but you don't have to have Barbarian levels to rage, you just choose the Rage power). Characters get a feat and a specialty at each level, and specialties are things like Rage Dice or Sneak Attack.
Skills
Skills advance by tiers that amount to "I don't care about this" (0), "I don't care, but it might come up" (1/4 char level, costs 1 point), "I want to be competent in this" (1/2 char level, costs 2 points), "I want to be good at this" (char level, costs 3 points) and "I am all about this" (char level+3, costs 4 points). Each tier defaults to the number of points spent on it, so there is actually a point to the first three tiers being different at first level.
| Level | Trained | Proficient | Skilled | Focused
|
| 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
|
| 2 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 5
|
| 3 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 6
|
| 4 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 7
|
| 5 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 8
|
| 6 | 1 | 3 | 6 | 9
|
| 7 | 1 | 3 | 7 | 10
|
| 8 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 11
|
| 9 | 2 | 4 | 9 | 12
|
| 10 | 2 | 5 | 10 | 13 |
this is as much for my benefit as anyone else's. It makes me realize that low familiarity is fucked and I need to go back to the drawing board. Again, I'm open to suggestions as to what would be better.
Magic is skill based. You get magic by putting points in a magic skill (Binding, Crafting, Divination, Healing, Naturalism, Necromancy, Runes, Skald, Necromancy, Trickery). To cast a spell, you must have a sufficiently high level (spell "circle"[read level]x2) and a sufficiently high training (spell circle-1 points spent on skill). More skill training and more levels makes lower circle spells more level appropriate, for example-
Ice Armour
Water Magic 1, Hagalz 1
Somatic, Vocal
Casting Time 1 Full Round
Duration 1 round per Skill Rank
Resist No
Chilling the vapor of the air with your magic, you create thin plates of ice on yourself. This behaves in all ways as Full Plate. Enemies in melee also take 1 Cold damage per round they are adjacent to you. While this spell is active, you are unbothered by extreme cold.
Skilled: For each skill rank you possess beyond the first, you may increase one of the following Damage Soak by one point, increase the cold damage by 1 die type (1>1d4>1d6 etc). For every two skill ranks beyond the first you possess, you may increase the range of your cold damage by increasing your effective size one step, or increase the duration of the spell by 1 time unit (rounds>minutes>hours, cannot increase beyond 1 hour per level), or decrease the casting time by one step (Full>Std>Move>Swift).
Mighty- 7: A 7th level character who casts Ice Armour gives off a frightening pall, turning the terrain within the reach of their cold damage aura into difficult, Greased terrain, and receives +3 AC while they are in contact with the chill earth created by this spell.
When you buy familiarity in a magic skill it gives you a spell list of ten spells- two of each spell circle. Additional spells can be bought as five spell lists for a point.
Each magic skill will allow you to choose your base spell list from a set. For Trickery this is stuff like Illusions or Charming, for Naturalism it's stuff like Animals, Plants, Fire, etc. For Runes, it's individual runes, which have spell lists based on what the rune represents.
Character Creation
Characters begin at level 1 with a Creature Type based HD and saves based on type/race. They select a profession which gives them some baseline training in skills- like Woodsman gives you Trained Perception and Brawl and a discounted Proficient Naturalism that gives the wilderness survival function but not spellcasting, though giving you the option of picking up the spellcasting buy paying a point to bring it up to full Proficient Naturalism.
[Disclaimer- Professions are prioritized after races, this is a spitball example to illustrate what I mean. It occurs to me that every profession intended for player use should include a combat skill to avoid some shmuck playing a pure face with no attack skill and getting rolled immediately]
Characters select one feat at chargen. These will not be bullshit feats like "+3 to a skill" or "+1 to a weapon." Metamagic feats, Tome Necromantic Feats, and possibly some of the later 3.5 feats like Reserve, Devotion and Tactical feats seem to be the model I'm interested in, where feats represent additional options rather than taxes to make abilities viable.
Characters select one specialty at chargen. These are things like Tome Barbarian rage dice, sneak attack, and so on. They will scale. Some D&D feats will conceptually work better as specialties, like the various bad-touched feats./
Each level, including first, gives the character two skill points to place as they please. Cross-class skills aren't a thing.
Combat
Instead of a base attack bonus, characters buy combat skills- Accuracy for ranged and finesse, Brawl for melee, Wrestle for grappling. Attackers roll 1d20 and add the relevant skill and it's appropriate ability mod (might, agility and might, respectively). Defenders have static defense values which use the relevant combat skill for whatever weapon they're wielding, plus the appropriate ability mod, plus seven. This is then modified based on the circumstances of combat, so that defending with Accuracy on a turn where you've moved at least 10 feet gives you a +3 to your defense.
Other than the source of the numbers, combat works like D&D, though Grapple needs to be simplified.
So, things I still need to write-
- Races (the point of this thread)
- Professions
- Feats and Specialties. Though in writing the above mechanics, it occurs to me that making these separate things is probably stupid. What do people think? Feats and Specialties as separate things and you get one of each at every level, or just Feats covering both ideas?
- Combat maneuvers for non-magical skills
- Grapple rewrite
- Spell lists
- The actual spells
And of course monsters, setting, etc. That list is my rough prioritization of those things, but I'm open to being told I'm ordering them wrong. What more do you want to see before you feel you can evaluate races? What spells are going to do?
Omegonthesane wrote:Prak wrote:Ok, sure, but both of those would be equivalent to like 5th level characters. Or Jotun would be, at least, I'm not sure what would make a Valkyrie.
"We start at level 5" would make Midgard stand out from Heartbreaker #37B.
Fair enough. I considered the "Everyone starts at level 4" idea that
Avor floated but never settled on it. It would be a good way to tackle low-level mortality. Everyone's got inflated hp, but at least you're less likely to get one-shotted. It would also mean Lokin can be actual giants.
Night Goat wrote:Prak wrote:
Lagrkin (shortarses)
Lagrkin are the obligatory short race of Midgard, as well as the slightly-furry race which will appeal to a good number of players. Catfolk would be more broadly appealing, but I like the idea of them being more rabbit-based, which also fits nicely into making them hobbit expies, what with the vegetable diet and burrowing.
No. Nothing is obligatory. You can make the best game you can or you can attempt to appeal to as many people as possible, but you can't do both.
People like their scrappy midgets. I wouldn't say that such a race is necessarily inappropriate for a norse-themed game. In truth there's a lot of meta-reasons I have a midget race- it's expected, I do like the idea if not 3.5's execution of it, this project started out as a Peter Jackson Hobbit wannabee... I think I've also just had the idea of a rabbit race kicking around in my head for awhile. Would nine races be too much? That would allow me to have one tied to each world, and I could possibly stick with the rabbits.
Gnorman wrote: I would also submit a narrower point along those same lines: in your desire to appeal to both catfolk and hobbit fans, you might end up appealing to neither.
If I implied I was trying to appeal to catfolk fans specifically, I was stupid. It's not really meant to appeal specifically to catfolk fans, more people who like furry races in general, rather than catfolk specifically.
Orion wrote:Yeah, I was going to bitch super hard about the lack of Jotun. I didn't because I thought that humans as the super warrior giant race was a cool idea.
EDIT: Also, it's really weird that your elves and orcs are basically the same. I mean, orcs as the master manipulators was probably a bad choice anyway. Your contrarianism ran away with you there. I'm totally in favor of having a race that looks "monster-ish" or has an unsavory backstory be the diplomats and organizers; that's an interesting inversion. I don't understand why they're specifically orcs, though. This whole game has a weird hybridization of myth sources and D&D, and I thought the point of the D&D was to make it familiar to gamers and let them quickly grasp what was what. If you make orcs favored class: bard, then that gains you nothing.
Don't make your master manipulators green. Nothing in the sources is green, and "green" doesnt mean "face"in D&D; it means "barbarian." A Nordic/D&D mashup is not the place to deconstruct D&D tropes. It's just not. I recommend making them look like something actually norse, such as jotun. You can still indulge your contrarianism by making the playable jotuns be faces instead of fighters, by declaring that the playable Jotun are all specifically descendants of Loki and they inherited his magic more than his size. All you need to change is to make the Lokin blue-skinned (possibly with icicle hair) instead of green-skinned with tusks.
The Lokin were originally concepted as giant-kin, and thus intended to take the "savage race" niche of orcs, but when I sat down to write the races, I realized I had five races and five stats, and I needed to figure out whether Lagrkin of Durskin (the previous name for Lokin) got the presence bonus. Loki is a giant, so making them specifically kin to Loki, rather than Jotun in general, was a good explanation for giving them the Presence bonus. So, this is another case of my dangerous stupidity when I was writing this thread, because the intent is closer to what you're talking about, but some of the old Durskin ideas clung on.
While you're at it, you should probably consider doing something different with elves. Either: (a) make them the skalds and illusionist and totally scrap the Lokin concept. (b) axe the whole social theme from the alfar, and play them up as hunters with terrifying speed and stealth, or (c) scrap alfar and play up that business about fates and mysticism by replacing them with Nornoer or something.
What if elves took the "dangerous, untrustworthy savages" role? It diverges a good bit from the quasi-angelic alfar of norse myth, but then they're also sort of just nature spirits, so I could make the savage bit more of an alien morality thing. I actually wasn't aware there were more than three norns, but I could see doing something like that. I guess they'd have a choice of being able to hand out bonuses or penalties?
I could also do something with Valkyries, having taken a quick look at them as a mythological creature. I suppose they could get a permanent Status or Deathwatch effect and, again, the ability to alter rolls a bit.
I guess Norns would have the ability to give people buffs or debuffs with durations, while Valkyries would be able to modify rolls after the fact- "yeah, that's actually a hit" and the such.
EDIT 2: Electric Boogaloo. Let me make clear: I actually like the rabbity short dudes. They're cool. I'm not such a fan of outright furries, at least not rabbit furries, but I think leaning on a more subtle resemblance to an animal is a cool design hook for a fantasy race. Save that writeup and use it for something. I'm just not 100% sold they belong in this project.
Fair enough. I don't recall how I settled on the idea of rabbit folk. Like I said above, I've had the idea for a rabbit race kicking around in my head for a while now. I started thinking about rabbit fera for Werewolf back when I was playing that and read about some of the folklore associated with rabbits, and I think the idea's just still up there. Plus, Usagi Yojimbo, Ursula Vernon's latest painting, etc.
Also, sorry for my stupid melt down. I don't even know.
