Ending TNE Work Stoppage

[JonSetanta]

OK. Dick. Mockery. Something about BAB. Got it.


Here's a phrase that succinctly describes K's plan:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... khovsSkill

Actually, I didn't search this, but encountered it when reading TV Tropes about http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... Superpower, as it applies to RPG design and fantasy standards in general.

[Crissa]

My point was that BAB applied to all the combat minigame, just like Diplomacy did to its minigame. Perhaps he's suggesting we get away from level-based BAB, which I don't have an opinion of either way. But the point about abstraction and skills - hand-waving them away - can be applied to combat.

And combat is abstracted to nothing in some games.

I just don't like my skills to be abstracted.

-Crissa

[Koumei]

I'd prefer that skills be divided into "This isn't useful - just have it." and "This is useful. It's an ability, you can't fall behind the curve due to not putting more ranks in, and you can't sneakily shoot ahead with '+10 to a skill because they're just skill' items/spells."

That way, getting a free beer is either "Charisma check, go." or "Whatever, he gives you a beer." or "He's a dwarf, you'll never get a thing for free." or "I use my level 1 power, 'Gimme a Free Beer'".

And that has no effect on your ability (or lack thereof) to talk the crowd into a frenzy or get the king to hand over his kingdom (or to talk the bandits into putting the hostage/crossbow/bunny down). Because that's a separate, higher-level ability designed to work at a specific stage in the game.

And I see no problem with combat working the same way - there are things you can just do (swing a sword, stand up, walk without falling over), and things that you gain as level-appropriate abilities.

So I still don't entirely see your point, Crissa. Or rather, I'm not sure what you want skills to be.

[Crissa]

So I still don't entirely see your point, Crissa. Or rather, I'm not sure what you want skills to be.

If you don't see my point, then you probably can't see it no matter what I wrote.

What do I want for skills? A chance for them to be useful descriptions of characters. I don't want skills to be fluff.

What do I want for fluff? For it not to cost effective value. Fluff is what you wear, what color eyes you have, and maybe if you get free beers for existing.

D&D uses one skill for swinging swords, firing bows, stabbing with daggers, and throwing boulders. It also uses one skill for getting a free beer and finagling the crowd. I fail to see how that's very different.

-Crissa

[Calibron]

Hey, Crissa just gave me a great idea. Instead of just making skills that would be effectively useless to an adventurer in any practical sense, such as basic crafting, into pure fluff; let's completely abstract and divorce from leveling everything that isn't combat! I find this to be a infinitely better idea than K's general jist of making potentially useful skill-like abilities attribute tests upgradeable through selectable abilities.*

*totally not sarcasm

[Amra]

Surely there's a middle ground? The fact that we're just giving away things that won't amount to a great deal in the context of greatly influencing the game world doesn't mean that those things have to be made of fluff and handwavium, does it?

I'm with Crissa; I don't want to play Magical Princess Tea Party with my skills. If I can just turn around and say "My character can build really frickin' awesome boats" I want that to mean something; it's no good if every other player around the table can just say "Yeah, mine too".

Being able to inspire hordes of soldiers into following me blindly in the face of certain death is different, for sure, and a major game-influencing ability... but that doesn't mean that the small stuff shouldn't have proper rules as well. I don't believe that K is saying it shouldn't, either.

Even if we end up with something as lightweight as 2e nonweapon proficiencies, we still need to make "stuff your character is great at" a limited resource, and have some way of saying how great at stuff that character is.

[Calibron]

If your character can makes boats so good that it actually amounts to some sort movement power or world changing ability then that a selectable power(a weird selectable power, but a legitimate one). If they can just make, like, I don't know, masterwork rowboats or something then that's just fluff you got free with your back story or picked up during an adventure. There really is no reason that your character's ability to churn out ox-carts five times faster than mortal men should cost you character resources.

[Koumei]

Of course, characters could seriously start with a limited number of "we don't really care about this" skills, such as the aforementioned nonweapon proficiencies. That way, you won't have everyone being great at every low-importance task, and it still won't cost the same resources as "skills that are really important" and "new ways to kill tonnes of dudes".

[Calibron]

I actually disagree with that Koumei; IMO, The Golden Child/Mr. Right Tool For The Job/Jack of all Trades should be a viable flavor of character and we should have non-game effecting abilities able to support this fully. Maybe your character is just naturally good at absolutely everything they try their hand at(which is why they started adventuring), maybe they pulled a Wesley and studied everything in the coupla years everyone thought you were dead/everyone else was on vacation/it was just downtime.

[Amra]

There really is no reason that your character's ability to churn out ox-carts five times faster than mortal men should cost you character resources.

I quite understand that this is entirely an individual perspective, but I feel that there very much is a reason. If everyone can just pull things out of their arse in-game, the things you've decided your character can do don't feel *valuable* enough.

I don't see what's wrong with us giving characters resources specifically to to spend on the non-world-shattering stuff. That way, both crowds are catered for.

If the Personable facet allows you to get your free beer and remains unrelated to the Inspiration ability that lets you lead armies, everyone's happy. There's no particular reason why these should be the same thing. If the Shipwright facet lets you build masterwork rowboats and occasionally gives you an in-game frisson at the fact that you can be all knowledgeable the first time the party has to take to the water, maybe with a circumstance bonus or whatever on performing certain tasks, that's great. It feels like a proportionate return on an investment rather than complete hand-waving.

I also totally get that some people will never care; but I do think that enough people do care that it's a worthwhile exercise including such things... or at the very least, a decent framework to allow people to create their own.

[Calibron]

It doesn't seem fair to me that because player X wanted the Blacksmith and Veteran Facets and specifically nothing else that player Y can't have Personable, Shipwright, Trader, and Aquatic Culture Expert. The inverse, to force player X to pick up two more facets, seems equally unfair.

And I agree that letting people literally pull fluff skills out of nowhere in the middle of an adventure is really stupid and cheapens the, already admittedly cheap-as-free, fluff-stuff of the other characters. You either get a skill from your background, develop it in down-time(provided there even is down-time) or you get it as part of the story. This last event can even give abilities that matter, but they are almost never(or never) level appropriate combat abilities and very rarely(or never) level appropriate world-shaping abilities.

[Amra]

I think it's fair to say that you could get a number of "whatevers" to spend on character elements that are largely fluff and spend multiple whatevers in a particular element if you want a less diverse set of background talents. Putting more of your whatevers into a single thing just makes you extra awesome at it.

We could do this without going down the "skill for every conceivable out of combat activity route" simply by providing a solid framework for the creation of same, along with a few examples. If we put good parameters around what a character background facet can and can't do, describe some sample bonuses for when those situations come up and create a couple of solid examples that put flesh on the bones, that ought to be OK.

It'd be a nice middle ground between exhaustive (and probably abusable) skill descriptions at one end of the scale and Magical Princess Tea Party at the other. That'd be my preference, anyway.

[Calibron]

Eh, your proposal sounds good enough to me, but I still don't think we need to nail down and balance the fluff traits for characters.

[Username17]

Which fluff traits are going to be Quest important is not going to be known. Aside from trivial examples like meeting the Turnip People of Tcho, there's really basic stuff like ship navigation. Quest involves piloting a ship through rocky shallows? Being a good navigator suddenly makes you the star of the show. On the flip side, imagine for the moment that your adventures are on a sea of grass and the only vehicle for thirty leagues is a covered wagon. Now your shipmanship is worthless, just a side note on your character sheet like the scar on your back or whatever.

The thing is that unlike combat badassery, there is no way to know what abilities like blacksmithing and navigation and logistics are going to be quest important, nor are there clear delineations as to what "level appropriate" even means.

Low level people should not be automatically detected by giant monsters. Having children escape the notice of the Anka by hiding under a table while it flies past freezing everything to death is totally classic. And it shouldn't automatically detect them just because it is powerful and they are not. High level people should not automatically be able to pilot boats and cook fabulous crepes just because they are high level.

I am perfectly fine with the high level characters getting a lot of things to be good at, but the degree of goodness should not be tied to level in any meaningful fashion.

-Username17

[Crissa]

It isn't fair that one character is great at four things and another is great at only two things.

Why? Just because we don't know what will be of more importance. It's like having a d6, and doling out four numbers to one guy and two numbers to the other guy. It's not fair.

-Crissa

PS, on children hiding... Perhaps level difference could be part of the difficulty of spotting? If you're going to be different in awesomeness, you're probably going to assume you're looking for awesome and not non-awesome others.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

That's a very arbitrary but extremely cool mechanic concept, Crissa.

Frankly, if characters wind up in a scenario where one of their 'fluff' abilities is completely devalued, they should be allowed to pick up another, non-useless one to complete it. Being able to revise your character is a lot more straight forward than trying to make one that works perfectly in all environs.

[Neeeek]

It isn't fair that one character is great at four things and another is great at only two things.

Why? Just because we don't know what will be of more importance. It's like having a d6, and doling out four numbers to one guy and two numbers to the other guy. It's not fair.

That was sort of the point. However, it is equally not fair to enforce a rule that says you must be great at 4 things when your character concept only is great at 2. And it's equally unfair restrict the person whose character concept requires that the character be great at 4 things to be restricted to 2 things because one of the other players only wants to be great at 2 things.

There is a whole lot of not fair. But it doesn't go away regardless of how you manage it.

[Tydanosaurus]

I'm not so sure that

Low level people should not be automatically detected by giant monsters.

and

High level people should not automatically be able to pilot boats and cook fabulous crepes just because they are high level.

are necessarily connected. I think we all agree that a good game should have Jack be able to hide from the Giant - sometimes. But IMO some skills, after enough investment, should just work. I understand your point that sometimes an adventure might depend on winning a Crepery contest, or outcrafting a dwarven weaponsmith, or researching lost knowledge. But IMX those are pretty rare events. Most of the time, those sorts of things are either fluff, or addons (if you make a cool crepe, the King likes you more sort of stuff).

Would it be possible to have a basic "skill just works" system for run of the mill stuff, and then add on a "challenge" system? Something like 4E's system, except one that works?

[CatharzGodfoot]

However, it is equally not fair to enforce a rule that says you must be great at 4 things when your character concept only is great at 2. And it's equally unfair restrict the person whose character concept requires that the character be great at 4 things to be restricted to 2 things because one of the other players only wants to be great at 2 things.

Actually, it is fair. It's pretty much the definition of fair. That doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do.



As far as children hiding, making spot and hide checks not level-based and giving a bonus for small size would do it.

What I want to hear more about is the abstract positioning system.

[Crissa]

So it's their character concept to be an unbeatable sword fighter that doesn't use magic or magical items or magical bonuses in a magical world. That doesn't mean we need to coddle them.

-Crissa

[angelfromanotherpin]

That was sort of the point. However, it is equally not fair to enforce a rule that says you must be great at 4 things when your character concept only is great at 2. And it's equally unfair restrict the person whose character concept requires that the character be great at 4 things to be restricted to 2 things because one of the other players only wants to be great at 2 things.

There is a whole lot of not fair. But it doesn't go away regardless of how you manage it.

I don't see what the problem is. If both players have 4 slots, and player A chooses only to fill 2 of them while player B chose to fill all 4, that's totally fair. Both were given exactly the same opportunities, and both made the choices that they wanted to. And if player A still has the opportunity to fill those spare slots later if a new thing calls to them, then she hasn't actually lost any opportunities.

[Ice9]

I think it'd be fine to have a certain number of slots, with a few options for those who need less/more:

1) Slots that are left empty can be filled later by in-game activity, and it takes a lot less in-game time/effort to fill an empty slot than to develop an extra slot.

2) There are multiple skill levels, for those that want to specialize. Doesn't have to be many, maybe just Skilled/Master/Legendary.
And it doesn't have to apply to every single skill either.

3) There should be a "Jack of all Trades" type skill for people who want to be skilled at more things than they have slots. Gives a benefit better than not having a skill at all, but not as good as having it for real.


I also don't think it's necessary to make skills 100% "fluff only". They shouldn't have a huge effect compared to full abilities, but it's not going to break the whole system if they provide a moderate boost in some situations.

After all, combat usefulness isn't completely predictable either - your excellent skill at blasting hordes of people with fire is going to be less useful in a campaign arc about fighting single tough fire elementals and demons. And your slow build-up mind control powers won't do any good against kamikaze minions.

[JonSetanta]

I'm still with K on this one at least until someone finds a better alternate (open mind, etc).
K's seems the better idea, but then again I prefer to keep NPC and RP type activities separate from combat ones.

[Crissa]

I'm fine with combat minigame stats being paid for from a pool separate from 'fluff' or 'noncombat'.

But, I don't want 4e where combat is the only thing which is a statted minigame.

-Crissa

[PhoneLobster]

But, I don't want 4e where combat is the only thing which is a statted minigame.

I think it would be useful to know that given a situation where you had the right fluff skill (or trait or power or whatever it is) to contribute what the heck that actually achieves?

(or rather what you want it to)

Now I know there are people here who will want that to mean a bonus to a check that is made against a number pulled out of the GMs ass (which I for one despise as a concept).

And Crissa clearly wants that to mean a mini game, which presumably you either gain access to or are better at.

But you know, personally I'd STILL rather having Navigate in the "rocky coast" scenario just mean you get to avoid the attribute check vs bullshit number out the GMs ass that an unskilled character would make and you just get to succeed because you have Navigate written in the "whatever" section of your sheet.

I mean you've invested something you presumably have some limited amount of, you've found a scenario where it applies and that may lucky to happen at all, and a success ultimately will have almost no impact on the game (making a sword no better than you can have anyway, getting a hint you don't need, avoiding a boat crash that changes your mode of transport for the other half of the adventure, etc...)

It's just plain anticlimactic to go through all that then roll against a number the GM is thinking of and fail. I really don't want that to happen, especially to the more esoteric shit like driving a god damn boat.