Basic mechanic
"Encounter" is introduced as a formal mechanic. Hits are per loc and per encounter, Wounds are global and per day(so you have 7 numbers to track, but 6 of them don't need tracking for long and the seventh doesn't often change). Whenever you're hit, you lose hits to that location. If a location reaches zero hits, it's unusable for the encounter. At the end of an encounter, you lose a wound for each location you had zeroed. If you reach zero wounds you're incapacitated, if you reach -1 wounds you're dead. So if you go into a location on 1 wound and have both your legs broken, you've been mortally wounded, but can fight on til the end of the encounter (but if someone zeroes your torso you go down).
Status effects are freeze, strikedown, silence (as currently), knockback (as repel, but the implication is that it's instant rather than durational), root (you cannot move your feet, but can fight and cast as usual). No halt, no durational repels.
There are damage types, like "red single" or "spiritual single" or "reptilian single". None of them do anything different to most people, and you can ignore any you don't recognise. Some people take special effects from some of them, but this will be in the brief of the taker, not the user. To keep the callspace clear, vulnerabilities will be common but resistances will be much rarer, and most sources of typed damage will be "you may add this tag to your call if you wish" rather than "you must add this tag"; typed damaged will rarely be relevant but will be strictly superior when it is.
Character skills
Your default stats are 4 hits per loc, 7 wounds, single with any one weapon of any size or any two short weapons. All characters have
- 3 Major skills
- 2 Minor skills
- 1 Signature skill
Major skills are
- Crunchy fighter I-III
- Slashy fighter I-III
- Stabby fighter I-III
- Caster I-III
- Archer (can be taken only once)
Minor skills are
- Streetwise (grants the ability to disguise yourself effectively)
- Wilderness (grants tracking)
- Social status (you're probably rich; you may well be a noble or someone in the mayor's office; you certainly have access to such people).
- Alchemical lore (grants lesser rec alchemical and the ability to use exotic ingredients)
- Priestly lore (grants lesser rec spirit and the ability to perform rites)
- Magical lore (grants lesser rec magic and ritualism)
- Special skill (e.g. bard, craftsman, sailor etc) - no hard skills, but will be acknowledged in downtime and in refcalls on relevant actions in uptime.
Minor skills cannot be double-bought; everyone who is awesome at something is equally awesome at it (possibly modulo signature skills). ''(Or possibly they can be, and people who specialise are slightly more awesome. But I think probably not, becase I don't want single-buyers to feel second-best). It explicitly is possible to take lore without the appropriate major skill (you're probably a splashadin, a splashlock or similar) or to take the major skill without the lore (maybe you just do it instinctively, with no grasp of the theory or fancy bits).
Each character gets one unique signature skill, chosen in discussion with the refs after they've been played for a few sessions. Examples might be "come back as a vampire on death", "go berserk 1/day, gaining +1 unnatural damage for an encounter", "donate my wounds to other people, at a limited rate" or "extra good at rituals/rites".
Skill Effects
- Crunchy fighter 1: +3 hits, shield use.
- Crunchy fight 2: +2 hits, double effect all healing, ignore 1 status effect per encounter.
- Crunchy fighter 3: +3 hits, +1 damage grade, ignore 1 status effect per encounter
- 12 hits, double by blow, double effect healing, ignore 2 status effects.
- Slashy fighter 1: +1 hit, disarm/strikedown/knockback 1/encounter by blow
- Slashy fighter 2: +1 hit, +1 damage grade, ambidex long weapons.
- Slashy fighter 3: +1 hit, +1 damage grade.
- 7 hits, triple by blow, 1 status effect per encounter.
- Stabby fighter 1: +1 hit, +1 damage grade when backstabbing
- Stabby fighter 2: +1 hit, +1 damage grade when backstabbing.
- Stabby fighter 3: +1 hit, +1 damage grade, disarm/strikedown/knockback 1/encounter by blow
- 7 hits, double from the front, quad when backstabbing, 1 status effect per encounter. Note that I'm envisaging counting every blow between the shoulderblades witha short weapon as a backstab, to avoid counting til it resets.
- Archer: quad plus your choice of strikedown/knockback/disarm by bow.
- E.g. 9 hits per loc, ignore 1 status effect, single by melee, quad + effect by bow, double effect healing
- Caster 1-3:
Each level of "Caster" grants 5 power. You regain 2 power per level of caster you have at the end of each encounter, regardless of how much mana you spent in that encounter, up to your maximum. Power of different flavours is interchangeable (this makes limited sense IC, but balances much better. If you want a fudge for it, mages and priests are capable of supernaturally empowering alchemical ingredients for themselves and alchemists can brew potions of revitalisation. But "don't poke it" is a better answer).
- So a pure caster can average about 7 power of spells per encounter on a linear. Compare with a present, a mage with 40 mana, regen 4 useable only on spells from that encounter, who might average 8-10 mana of spells, or a priest with 42 spirits who might average about 4 spirits an encounter. So, roughly, 1 power should equal 2 mana or 1 spirit for balance, I think. But I want to buff combat-healing a lot.
Rather than having separate rules for red magical attacks, spiritual attacks, brown magical defences, spiritual healing, etc, there are four major and four minor trees of effects, each with two levels in it (so every caster will have to have abilities from at least two trees):
Major trees
- Damaging
- Buffing
- Healing
- Status Effects
Minor trees
- Cleansing
- Inflicting
- Divining
- Necromancy
Each level of caster grants one slot in a minor casting tree and one slot in a major casting tree. Each level of caster must be also designated as a colour of magic, devotion to a god, or alchemy, and there are restrictions on which trees each colour/god/alchemy can buy:
- Alchemists cannot learn damage, status effects, divination or necromancy.
- Mages cannot learn healing, inflicting or necromancy.
- Priests can only learn necromancy if they are Vivamortians or Balanceites.
So, for example, my "Caster 3" could be "Red 3, damage 1-2, status effects 1, divining 1-2, inflicting 1" or "Humacti 2, Alchemy 1, healing 1, damage 1, buffing 1,Cleansing 1-2, Inflicting 1". Note that it's not necessary to line up skills with sources - if I have healing 2, alchemy 1, Humacti 1 then I can do two levels worth of alchemical healing or two level's worth of humacti healing. But this does not allow you to use effects from a source that could not access them - if I have magic, alchemy and healing, my healing must be alchemical rather than magical.
It is not possible to use more than two daily abilities in one encounter.
All casts require a verbal or the administering of a potion.
/CasterTake2
/MinorTrees
/CasterTrees (tentatively rejected in favour of a simpler mechanic)
/AccessToTrees (rejected)
Comments, please. If I haven't answered a question, it may well be because I haven't thought about it. --Jacob
This is really quite cool. The general idea seems like it should work nicely. I'd be very interested in playtesting it. --Tea
The matching needs to be looked at - it's currently strictly better to be Stabby 2 + Slashy 1 than ever taking Stabby 3, for instance (I think Stabby is generally slightly underpowered). --ChessyPig
- Good catch; fixed by reordering abilities (I think), and an extra hit added to stabby. Also note that in a system where default is 4 hits per loc, quad >> triple. --Jacob
I think that a total reset would be decent way to explicitly allow necromancy outside a God's remit, leading to more conflict between necromancers, over the philosophy of why, when and where to use undead, etc. It's a tree that generates immediate conflict with PCs and obvious plot hooks, but it's monopolised by one Church, restricting concepts. Allowing it to Alchemy would allow the Dr Frankenstein/Spark? from Girl Genius/Herbert? West: Reanimator archetype, which IMO is just plain cool. It could be restricted to only work on corpses, maybe? I liked an idea Inquisitor mentioned about having some different pool of resources for noncombat healing to make combat healing more useful. I'm guessing that Wounds can only be healed by surgery or some expensive/slow resource and combat healing is about keeping you up and fighting? The other thing I'd point out is that currently Priest is balanced in having access to more stuff like inflicting/necromancy/knowing in that you can't regen Spirit Points like you can Mana, which means you can't pop up a zombie every encounter or interrogate every downed NPC for information. This would need looking at if Spirit regenned. --Jim
- Giving necromancy to other Gods is a setting decision, not a system one, but might be interesting. Wounds are not generally regainable - there's a greater healing spell that give the target one wound back, but if a healer casts it once every other encounter they're basically not able to do anything else. Healing is indeed meant to be about keeping people up in combat, to get around the problem it has at present where "hide one field back, heal people between fights" is currently a good strategy for a healer. My idea is to balance priest against mage against alchemist by using identical mechanics for all three; the balance issues will be between the three types of fighter and the four trees of caster; flavour of caster won't be relevant to balance. --Jacob
- Potions will need to be faster then. Current system is 5 seconds per ingredient, but you can get off even quite high level vocals faster than that, but then the trees are balanced to do different things. If they all work off the same mechanism, they're going to want comparable casting times. Would this be a case of "any spell of any level requires the same length vocal or 5s of application?" --Jim
- I'd want to make a crunchy fighter even crunchier and drop the damage buff at the top, really give some definition between your classes... -- ahdok.
- In a system for androids, I might well agree, but for some reason people (including me) seem to find tracking large numbers of hits harder than smaller ones, and so I don't want people having to track more than 12. Also, I slightly worry that "I am effectively immune to your blows but have to hit you loads of times" might lead to an unsafely aggressive fighting style. --Jacob
My thought is that the Special skills are extremely underpowered compared to a Lore or something. They sound like the 1xp background skills, but raised to the level of a 10-20XP tree buy-in skill and there's no place for languages. I'd suggest adding a separate set of slots for Non-Mechanical Skills and Languages. Education Skills maybe? It might make more sense once you've explained the levelling system. -Jim
- The special skills are intended to be less (in fact, pretty much "non") powerful options (all the minor skills are meant to be very low powered). I want to keep things simple for the refs, and that will be easier if more people take the standard than the non-standard skills. There is no levelling system, all characters are equally powerful. --Jacob
- I assume therefore that all the General Skills and Languages are removed from the system and briefings for Undead Lore etc are given on a basis of "explain to the DMs why your character deserves it"?. I would miss First Aid as a skill on account of the RP it gives on a major surgery or even smaller stuff. Also Conceal Item on account of it meaning you don't actually have to own a selection of little shivvy knife physreps and hidden pockets etc. Or would Surgeon or Thief be a viable choice for a minor skill or commonly taken Signature Skill? - --Jim
- Possibly there could be a 'Surgeon' minor skill that did some very limited slow healing, and meant you were generally competent to do Surgical Experimentation in noncombat situations? I'm not necessarily convinced that 'thief' skills actually add anything, though - 'conceal item' always seems a bit clumsy and immersion-breaking to me, light fingers is very ref-intensive and seems to cause arguments, and everything else is pretty much either a downtime activity or fairly well suited to doing with hard skills... --ChessyPig
- I've got a lot of use out of Conceal Item, and seen it used a fair bit too. Allowing it means you don't have to physically search people who aren't comfortable with it, they just report everything not concealed. I don't find it particularly immersion-breaking because the item must be hidden from sight to count, so you shouldn't end up seeing it while telling a player "I am searching your PC". Forgery and detect could be folded into Streetwise yeah. --Jim
- I'm not sure first aid having a mechanical effect fits into this system - its current purpose is to get people up between fights when they're down; that's explicitly not part of this system. I agree that surgery is awesome, but I don't think it comes up often enough to justify making people use a skill slot on it, so I think it would be "any character can do this with appropriate roleplay". I don't like Light Fingers; Conceal Item would be another side-benefit of Streetwise if we wanted it. --Jacob
Couple of points on weapons and armour. Should that starting character setup include SINGLE by thrown weapon? I find them rather useful on account of being cheap as a new player, and easy to carry a couple of. Also, how does armour fit into this system? Is it a case of needing a certain grade of armour to qualify for extra hits? So for example you can get up to 1 hit without armour, up to 3 hits from leather armour, if you want more you will have to have some form of metal armour physrep. That way a Warlock with a Stabby or Slashy splash doesn't need armour. A pure Stabby Fighter can wear leathers, as can someone with 1 level in Crunchy. Clank becomes necessary at Crunchy 2. --Jim
- Armour is purely cosmetic; the reward of wearing an awesome armour physrep is wearing an awesome armour physrep. --Jacob