Building things from scratch: Design Principles.

[User3]

Under WW, you always have at least one die(chance roll), and you can get three extra dice with a Willpower point expended.

So rather than having the old system of the soak eating all the damage(which it could very quickly do in the old system), you always get a chance to do at least 1 health box.

I ran through some scenarios with my investgator character, and got consistantly killed by a combat monster with Dex 4/Firearms 4/Quickdraw. Defense(lowest of Wits and Dex) was 2, but that doesn't apply to firearms, so he was whipping out 10 dice (Dex+Firearms+weapon dice) vs my 0 dice and doing lots damage. If I'd had a flack jacket, I could have reduced it by 3 dice and converted the damage to bashing, and if I'd gotten in melee range I could have used my Defense(2) and a can of mace(on a hit, reduce dice pools by 5 for the rest of the scene).

In review, I found that he was basically killing because he was getting initiative all the time and not losing an action to draw his gun(and cacking me on one shot).

Basically, its a system where investigators get killed by elite combat troops(which is not unreasonable).

[RandomCasualty]

I'm also thinking with regards to attack rolls, that you'd be better off doing an attack roll and a damage roll instead of a soak roll. The damage roll would basically be the same as the soak roll, except you'd want to roll high, and every 2 points you succeed the resist DC you'd inflict 1 damage.

The reason for this is because when you've got characters with a lot of attacks, it slows down the game a bit when you've got to pass the die roll to the DM. That way you can go, attack/damage, attack/damage, and that seems to be a faster method because there doesn't have to be pauses between each attack roll to see how the soak roll went.

It's not really going to change the mechanics themselves at all, but I think it'd promote better game speed.

[Username17]

Fundamentally, noone likes it when their character goes down without them being allowed to do anything about it. Going down because of a failed save is frustrating, but nothing in contrast to going down because some other fool nailed you with a critical hit.

By forcing both the attacker and the defender to make rolls during an attack, it increases participation. The player is no longer tempted to drift away and go find Mountain Dew between turns, because he actually has something to do while the enemy is attacking.

It's a very minor point, and of course it's exactly the same from a probability stand-point. But it feels very different when the DM rolls a bunch of dice and your character goes down from when the DM rolls a bunch of dice, tells you that you've been hit with a fire bolt, and then you roll and see that 3 come up and groan knowing that you've probably just been felled.

It's the same odds, the same number of dice rolls, and the same end result, but it involves more player participation and that means that it is better.

-Username17

[User3]

Y'know, since the probabilities are the same you could just do it both ways. When the DM rolls attacks, the players resist. When the players roll, they roll the damage roll simultaneously to save time.

[Username17]

There's a certain disadvantage to that, which is that you are always going to be trying to roll high. This means that to have the PCs roll a damage die when attacking, and a soak roll when the PCs are being attacked, you'd have to define your DCs differently depending upon who was being attacked, or have there be times when you were trying to roll low on one of your dice.

Far easier, I think, to simply have the DM roll the monster's soak roll at the sam time as your attack roll is being rolled.

-Username17

[Dragon_Child]

Any ideas on what element goes with what ability and what material yet? You seem to have some ideas, but I'm wondering if you've already goten that all worked out... it all seems very interesting.

Also, have you happened to play the video game Saga Frontier 2? Its sort of similiar to your system, element wise (and yes, I know you came up with it from whatever book). In it, you'd equip weapons and armor with an element, and they'd add to your resistances spells for that element, as well as providing usual bonues. It was also interesting, as it had a "magicless" matieral- steel. Steel would provide considerably larger bonuses then everything else, but would screw you magic wise.

[Username17]

OK, here's the rough idea on damage types:

Physical Damage: Can also be inflicted to inanimate objects by most methods. Penalties acrue to physical actions, and if enough accumulates your character becomes mostly dead or all dead.

Charm: Non-cumulative. Penalties acrue to your resistance to Charm (so if you get hit by a four point Charm, the next one will on average be a six point charm), as well as your resistance to social tests (primarily important if you are an NPC), and to an Awe effect that it also causes (ie.: you need to make an increasingly difficult roll to act against the charmer even if you are a PC). If enough accumulates you are dominated or thralled.

Petrification: Penalties acrue to your speed of foot and thought, but you become tougher against physical damage. If enough accumulates you become a frickin lawn ornament.

Sickening: Penalties acrue to your strength. If enough gets through you become an invalid and eventually die.

Fear: Penalizes you by essentially forcing you to fight defensively, and you have to make checks to avoid running around. If enough accumulates you become catatonic or even die.

Confusion: Penalizes your accuracy and movement. May cause you to pick incorrect targets. If enough accumulates you become a drooling idiot or vegetative. This can accumulate on you from your own actions if you use conjuration beyond your means.

Polymorph: Makes you all bestial and penalizes your motor skills. At 10 points you turn into a newt (and may get better), at 20 levels you're a mouse or some damn thing, and at 30 you turn into a swine completely and don't even remember who you are.

Fatigue: Good old fashioned Fatigue. It accumulates on its own if you try standard actions beyond your means (such as powerful spellcasting). It slows you down and weakens you. Eventually you pass out or even die.

For weapon materials:

Fire: Obsidian (includes other glass), Solid Fire, Sulphured Lead (AKA: Uranium)
Water: Silver, Mercury
Air: Copper, Bronze, Brass
Earth: Stone of any kind
Life: Wood, Claws
Death: Bone, Lead
Void: Iron

I've never played Saga Frontier.

-Username17

[MrWaeseL]

How advantageous will it be to partially petrify yourself to benefit from the damage resistance?

[Username17]

1096877949[/unixtime]]How advantageous will it be to partially petrify yourself to benefit from the damage resistance?

It's basically all bad unless your opponent is conducting all physical attacks that are pretty much always hitting and you are conducting all mental attacks. Even then the fact that you are taking less actions means that it's going to be a losing proposition most of the time.

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

Frank, do you believe in just having those status conditions, or are you searching for some unique ones?

Some from other games stand out in my mind:

Sense-impaired- You become deaf/blind, numb, and then catatonic.

Berserk- Use certain physical abilities too much, lose ability to use certain powers, lose the ability to distinguish friend from foe, eventually go into a mindless rage.

Faithlessness- You gain resistance against mind attacks but your own powers don't work, then eventually lose all of your abilities and become a commoner.

Taint- Something like in Oriental Adventures.

But then, it's your own game.

[Username17]

The exact list of conditions is currently up in the air. Really up in the air. And blindness/deafness is really difficult, actually.

It's essentially a binary state. I don't need to see well to swing a battle-axe, but if I can't see at all, that presents something of a problem. I don't actually have a good game mechanic in mind for inflicting it on people. Blindness seems like the kind of thing that is going to end up being used as a "hail mary" type play - since if you were reasonably close to your opponent you wouldn't bother and would go for a real attack.

I might just have things that dazzle or blind technically cause "confusion", since the effect is largely the same.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

What about giving an opponent concealment and limiting effective vision to a set number of feet. It goes something like 60' max, 30' max, 10' max and then totally blind.

[MrWaeseL]

Yeah, but that would make a sword that inflict blindness on hits pretty dumb.

[RandomCasualty]

1097053254[/unixtime]]Yeah, but that would make a sword that inflict blindness on hits pretty dumb.

Maybe throw in a growing AC penalty too. Assuming you want to make being totally blind a really bad condition you could easily have AC penalties of like -1,-2,-3,-4 and -5 for totally blind.

That would make the sword slightly better.

[Lago_AM3P]

That is a potential problem for premade characters, but it's supposed to be a feature (not a bug) in organic play. You're supposed to be able to be trained by different factions to get 1337 powers as quest rewards. That part is intentional.

Frank, YMMV, but one of the things I liked /most/ about the D&D multiclassing system is that you didn't need any goddamned reason at all to pick up a level of wizard or bard or whatever. The rules said that you could take a level of a class whatever and whenever you wanted to, so a DM who didn't want a fighter to multiclass into a barbarian (to be a hardcore Aztec temple warrior) or a rogue to multiclass into monk (to be Spike Spiegel) actually had the rules working against him.

I support this sort of independence from a DM's hand. I mean, if you wanted to learn the skill Sword Dance so you could be Peter Pan, that would require the DM to put in a Lost Boys tribe. You have to then pass two hurdles in the game to be Peter Pan (one is whether the DM wants a Lost Boys tribe and one whether the DM even wants you to be able to fly around and poke people with your dagger), and I can't approve of that too much.

Why isn't gaining advancement tokens in the course of normal heroic RP enough for me to totally start flying around with a dagger?

[Username17]

Well, you actually need DM permission to become a Sacred Exorcist or Eye of Gruumsh or whatever.

The idea is that here, taking a level of "Fighter" is like taking a skill point in "melee combat", while-as taking a level of "Red Avenger" is like picking up the "Terrible Shout" ability that requires you to be a member of the Dog-eared Tribe or trained by someone who knows their secret techniques.

And they come out of different character points. So ideally, you don't get jacked over when the party is doing adventures on the other side of the world from the dog-eared tribe, because you don't actually get the melee combat bonuses instead of the Terrible Shout you actually wanted.

---

So the basic abilities can be had by anyone at any time just by spending skill points into them. The more "special" abilities are still reserved for in-character acquisition, but getting the normal abilities is no longer a punishment.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1097523910[/unixtime]]
I support this sort of independence from a DM's hand. I mean, if you wanted to learn the skill Sword Dance so you could be Peter Pan, that would require the DM to put in a Lost Boys tribe. You have to then pass two hurdles in the game to be Peter Pan (one is whether the DM wants a Lost Boys tribe and one whether the DM even wants you to be able to fly around and poke people with your dagger), and I can't approve of that too much.

I think DMs should control the sort of stuff PCs can take. Not all concepts fit every campaign world and in some guys that fly around by force of will might be okay, in others they aren't and the DM should decide if it fits his particular world paradigm.

Your character should have to fit the world. In a medieval world you can't just go off half cocked and create space marine with a plasma rifle, even though maybe that's what you wanted to play. Similarly certain magic concepts may not be possible.

DM limitations certainly make sense and allow for game worlds with their own flavor beyond "anything goes". If the DM wants to allow the anything goes world he can, but by default I think it should be limited so players don't feel like it's some kind of inborn right that their character can spontaneously pick up specialized techniques without training or justification.

[Dragon_Child]

I noticed that you constantly mention the abilities being restricted by area you were trained in. This seems pretty setting dependent. How would you go about making this; set up a list of areas you want first, or ability groups you want first?

In addition, where would be the 'starting place' with building this system? I'd really like to see this bear fruit... but it needs to begin somewhere.

[Username17]

Right now we've got a list of some groups, and we've got a list of some abilities we want in the game, and as soon as we get enough of them fleshed out to run playtests, we can start throwing them at each other willy nilly.

The current problem we are wrestling with is Active Skills, and most specifically how many to even have. Here's the scan on that:

* It doesn't actually matter how many skills we have. It might sound like it does, but it doesn't. A skill like "Survival" can have the "ability" of "mountaineering" that allows you to make Survival checks to climb stuff. Or Climbing can be its own skill, it's not actually important. The amount of skills we end up settling on can be made to work however large or small. Having more skills will increase the number of skill points people get and increase the amount of diversification needed to increase your cap, but doesn't actually matter from a game balance standpoint.

* Only active skills that have associated abilities in all cultures need to exist. Anything else, conversely, has no reason to exist and should just be a knowledge skill or removed altogether.

* We have to write abilities for all the cultures for all the active skills, because otherwise characters get shafted.

---

So where does that leave us? It leaves me personally leaning towards small numbers of total skills. Like maybe 12 or 16, total. Then abilities like "Flight" don't invalidate stuff like "Climb", because "Climb" is an ability that allows you to use one of your more general skills to climb with - it can even give you a discount on later learning Flight.

Some of the proposed cultures, note that some of them are human, and some of them are the hive people, who for want of a better name are being called Ormigans, also many of these cultures have an explicit elemental focus:

* The Sky Mages of Redarkhan have secret powers which only they know, which is why their cities are suspended from chains attached to giant stones which float fixedly some two kilometers into the air (drifting mysteriously at about 3 centimeters per year). These guys are currently "all special effects". Which is to say that we have not actually given a culture to the rest of the sky islands, just the feng shui masters who keep them aloft.

* Here's one for humans: The society is, at its core, based on legumes. That is, resources are extracted from the earth with blood magic and plants. Real Earth beans have nodules with real hemoglobin in them, and these guys have ones which are magically delicious and take that a couple steps farther. Blood Magic and Plant Magic are the orders of the day, with animals being raised so that they can be slaughtered and fed to the ground. In turn, the roots are coaxed into giving the people the resources that they need – food, metal, wood, fuel, etc. all come from the ground where the blood enriched roots erupt from the ground and give back to the people. These people have relatively little need for machinery and you won't see a water or wind powered mill anywhere. Animal livers are used for divinations, and conducting human sacrifice is something that is only done during extreme situations. Some people would perform human sacrifice on their own time, and this would be regarded as kind of like people who perform stock fraud. Naturally, such a culture lends itself to relatively small communities, as open space is at a paramount. So a road through this country would hit a hamlet every couple of kilometers, rather than going through a big empty space and then hitting a big city. People would tend to live in hobbit holes, sod, or root caves.

* Here's one for the as yet unnamed Hive People: The society, at its core, is based on eating extremely labor intensive, extremely high yield food crops – like subsisting on rice and acorns at the same time. Cities are extremely concentrated, and the people work long hours all year when working in agriculture (the fields need constant maintenance and the crops need massive handling before they aren't poisonous). The work ethic is applied to other people in the society as well, naturally, and thus everyone ends up extremely specialized and relatively industrious. Such a society would put great stock in labor saving devices, and would have a variety of milling techniques. Because each person is expected to be highly specialized, they are going to start specialization training extremely young. Since they are all sisters anyway, this assignment into castes is going to be either by aptitude tests or simply randomly at age five. They might even have some sort of magical ceremony in which the baby has to choose between a pick, a hoe, a hammer, a spoon, a bucket, a basket, and a sword – with its choice essentially determining the rest of its life as the society sees things. I see this society living in apartment complexes by occupation, with the people whose job it is to tend the prickle trees living near the prickle tree ponds, and the people whose job it is to mine coal lving near the dig, and so on and so forth. Production and consumption would be tremendous, but it would be difficult for such a society to spread. I could easily see them concentrated into like 3 big zigaraut complexes.

* Then there are some Water mages who do water magic in the place you'd actually want to do that - the middle of a windswept plateau. They use spells to collect dew from large areas for drinking water, and master the magics that allow them to live on drinking water alone. And naturally, of course, they don't even have other food. They just totally trick out their water magic until it they don't need food. As a result, of course, children breastfeed until they are about nine (and learn to survive by drinking water). Makes for a culture which is extremely hard to talk to, since they don't actually need anything. As a result they don't especially have a laborer class, and as a result of that they spend lot of time writing and thinking about stuff. I see them kind of like the way the Athenian rulers wanted to be seen - leisurely and totally into philosophy. However, unlike the Athenians they don't need a huge pile of oppressed people to pull that off because they actually don't have any needs (since they shrug of starvation, thirst, and cold). So they end up with a whole city of nutty professors with dangerous untested ideas, since they have all the time in the world to think them up and no laborer class to actually build the equipment they dream of.

* This one is actually Human, but structured socially along Ormigan lines. Their reason for this is because they were originally a displaced people, forced into areas which are astoundingly inhospitable, who thusly made a clean break with most of their own cultural norms. I figure they are probably now kind of like the Rom in their response to history, and that their explanation for why they live where they do and are who they are is simply "They came and took our land away." So they should totally do the whole thing where furniture, tools, art objects, even songs which are associated with the dead are all ritually burned and never spoken of again. They should probably have a language which doesn't really have a method for coherently speaking about any event more than a year in the past (also their language should be closely related to tongues spoken on the clear other end of the continent). The part where it all goes south, then, is their existence in the magical world. The land they live in is poisonous and hot, and nine parts of every ten people who grow to adulthood in their lands are sterile. Their population management program, thus, is to adopt the hive structure of the Ormigans. So reproductively capable people mandatorily become part of the council of queens or drone harem, with the rest of the people becoming "workers" or "warriors". Their people seem to have a natural aptitude for Fire and Death Magic, and use the yellow sands of their home to create nauseating elixirs of those magic types.

* Another culture I thought of is actually Ormigan, rather than merely influenced by them, and they are designed basically to just plain be villainous. These guys have decided to buck the traditions of other Ormigans, and consider being a Queen to be an affliction rather than an honor. So naturally, not wanting to be queens or have their loved ones become queens (but nevertheless needing them if there is going to be a next generation), they conduct raids (think Irish or Greek Cattle Raids here) for Ormigan children to turn into queens with the forced application of jelly. Naturally, these "queens" have no authority in this society and are trapped in a basement. When a clan of these guys steals a child from one of the other clans, there is a grace period where the other clan tries to rescue them, but once the transformation is complete they don't even want the kid back and they consider the whole affair done with. Obviously, however, when they pull this crap on any of the other Ormigan cultures it is seen as a act of heresy and barbarism so unspeakable and vile (simultaneously engaging in larva torture, unprovoked warfare, kidnapping, rape, queen desecration, and a bunch of other crimes we can't even really begin to imagine) that they would immediately declare war and never ever rescind it even generations later. Let's face it, if a human ever asked one of the other Ormigan cultural representatives why they were at war with these guys they'd have to get The Book that listed all of the crimes they considered these guys guilty of. So from their standpoint, these guys have a system which by default prevents accidental incest (since the queen always comes from far away), and a method of protecting their own children from a fate they regard as roughly equivalent to death. To everyone else, however, they are basically completely terrifying barbarians, worse than canibals. As such, I think they make pretty decent villains. You can understand why they do what they do, and at the same time you can feel pretty OK about stabbing them right in the face every time they show up. I'm not really sure who holds the power in that society, whether it's warriors or drones, or some weird hybrid of the two. This is actually a good opportunity to come up with some weird mutant Ormigans, because these are one of the few groups who have no problem whatsoever with using royal jelly on fully developed warriors to cause quasi-controlled growth spurts. I mean, they don't even consider this stuff to be sacred, so much as a torture implement they use on outsiders.

The idea is that villainous countries should be comprehensible. They don't do bad stuff "for no reason", they do bad stuff because they value different things than you do. They can be portrayed alternately as tragic or despicable, but they are always going to be somewhat horrifying and at the same time comprehensible, that's the goal.

The current proposed ability list is way too damn long to even post, since it's just a list of every single unique ability I found in like three different game systems.

-Username17

[MrWaeseL]

Those races are pretty cool. Mind if I use some of them for my own campaign?

[Username17]

Those races are pretty cool. Mind if I use some of them for my own campaign?

Thanks, and of course you can use them in your campaign, that's what they are for.

-Username17

[Username17]

Oops, left these guys off:

So Iron is being associated with the Seventh God, which a lot of people don't even acknowledge. This is useful in many ways, most notably that Iron has a really good excuse to be extremely effective against the Forces of Nature in a way that, for example, a thrown rock is not. We really want a Dryad to recoil in horror when you pull out a KNIFE That's Fvcking MADE Out Of IRON in a way that's distinctly different from when you brandish a bronze or stone dagger.

But while we are busily hacking Iron out of the coveted brotherhood of Earth, it has some profound social implications. Workers of Iron are going to have a stigma associated with them in many places. This can even be historically accurate if we assume Iron as "The New Metal". Smiths will be seen as workers of (possibly evil) magic and shunned/sought by a lot of people.

Enter: The Scrappers. Iron is in most civilized places used grudgingly, if at all. And the only reason most people will even consent to touch it at all, is that it is just so very, very useful. A hammer made of Iron is just really an extremely powerful tool that sets the sapiens up a notch over the beasts in a truly profound way, and even the most gods fearing of people are unlikely to turn their back on that fact.

But what of broken tools? A bent nail, a dulled blade, a blunted chisel.... these items are NOT especially useful. And people don't really want to touch them, and there's not a whole lot of reason for them to. So when people come through their village and take away all the useless Iron, the villagers are Greatful. And that's just what the Scrappers do.

They wander around with their bodies covered up like jawas pilfering away the rusted, the bent, the chipped, and the malforged. And as long as they don't really talk to people, or intrude into personal space, or take other things - noone seems to mind. Somewhere they have a scrap pile, where they take their tailings and there their master smiths take the junk and forge the finest steel on the planet from bits and pieces of refuse - using the flaws of one piece to reinforce the needs of another, creating weapons and tools beyond compare.

---

I actually don't think this society is even mono-racial. It's made up of the refuse of other societies. The criminals, the unwanted, the fourth children, etc., and I think that transcends species. The Scrappers don't really care who you were, and in that respect are kind of like the French Foreign Legion - only with Smiths and Trashmen instead of with Soldiers.

-Username17

[rapanui]

"Ormigans"... I love it.

Spanish

Hormiga = Ant

[Username17]

Unsurprisingly, comes from the latin. I mean, there's a reason that the D&D ant monsters are called "Formians". But yes, that place holder name came from Spanish.

-Username17

[User3]

Generally speaking, what are your thouughts on a broad/tight skill system similar (but not identical) to D&D?

It adds another level of complexity, but it seems to me that it would work as a method to let characters take skills like Profession (Chef) without shooting themselves in the foot.

How it would work: A character gets a set # of skill points. Each point can be invested in a broad skill (Stealth, Interaction, Craft, Knowledge, Weapons, Green magic, Blue magic, etc).

Each point invested in a broad skill gives a set number of points that can be distributed among it's sub-skills (Diplomacy, Bluff, Intimidate, Speak language, Sneak, Prestidigitation, Disable device, etc). The number of 'tight' skill points gained is based on some standard of the relative power and number of skills within a broad one. Then when making a check, you add your broad skill points to tight skill points to your relevant stat.

P.S.: What is your view on d20 vs. 3d6?