For example:
I'm not confident that I'm thinking of the same Keymaker as you. If I am, I don't see how the example is relevant to the discussion. I don't even understand why the concept of salability is relevant to the discussion in the first place.Crissa wrote:The Keymaker.
The fact that you guys don't seem to understand that just being able to make a Hanzo sword is a salable ability, even if no swords are even made, depresses me.
I would appreciate it if you tried to make your thought process more explicit.
I don't think either of those sentences said what you wanted it to say. I suspect you wanted to say "transitive" rather than "all inclusive" and that the last word of the second sentence should be replaced with "the troll." If that's not what you meant, then I don't understand at all.virgileso wrote:These ranges are not all inclusive. A Troll can be Melee Range of Tordek the Fighter, Tordek can be in Melee Range of Sancho, and yet Sancho can remain outside Melee Range with Tordek.
The thing that concerns me with most of the gridless combat ideas so far is that they're tending towards requiring you to separately specify the relation between every pair of characters/objects in the scene, which means we need O(N^2) words to describe a scene with N important things in it...and potentially O(N) or O(N^2) work required to update everything when someone moves. My intuition is that this is going to tend to result in a lot more work than necessary much of the time.
I'm not sure exactly what to do instead, but maybe something involving dynamic groups of positionally related objects, or something where we don't need to know or care about the relative positions of anything but a few key pairs? It doesn't necessarily need to be efficient in all cases, just in typical cases.
First of all, I'm not sure everyone would like your given definition of level (as being related only to combat ability).baduin wrote:On the other hand, non-combat abilites cannot be in any way tied to the character level - this follows directly from the definition of the level, which measures only the combat ability. Since one of the main aims of an RPG is creating a plausible world, which seems to exist beyond the combat, the non-combat abilites should be constructed in such a way as to increase the plausibility of the world. In other words, they should be acquired exactly like skills are acquired in normal life: by training, learning, or by doing. Real people don't have any fixed number of slots for different skills. Their skills are limited by their talents (ability scores), their opportunities, persistence in learning and time used to learn.
Secondly, combat abilities in real life are acquired in pretty much the same way as non-combat abilities. But most people feel that verisimilitude should take a back seat to playability, and so we only allow player characters to acquire combat power in completely unrealistic fashions, because keeping everyone at a similar power level is considered more important. I don't think that deliberately giving some players more or more useful non-combat abilities based on their character's background or what they do in their off-screen time is a good idea; this is going to lead to people min/maxing their backgrounds and downtime.
That said, I think that it's true that we don't want awesome creatures to automatically beat children and mooks at mundane tasks, so something like "+level to all skills" may be a bad idea. But I also think we want to limit the number of independent metrics of character power and allow people to feel like their characters are becoming better at non-combat stuff as they play. Maybe as you gain levels, you don't become better at any given non-combat skill, but you become proficient in a larger number of skills? And maybe get the ability to swap out an old non-combat ability for a new, more relevant one, or some such.
