Please feel free to add anything these suggest to you
- At present three skill trees - warrior, priest, and wizard - clearly let you do more Stuff in uptime than alchemist, wilderness and scout; alchemist lets you do more stuff in downtime than wilderness or scout.
- WE DO NOT NEED TO BALANCE THE TREES. I think this is an easily-overlooked, but very important, point -what matters is that the optimum builds for different character archetypes are able to do roughly the same amout of Stuff; not how you use the trees to build those archetypes. We don't necessarily need to ensure that all the trees have the same amount of stuff in them
- Agreed. We need to balance the effectiveness of trees that do the same things, such as mage and priest. We do not need to balance trees for direct combat power, but we do need to balance trees for uptime spotlight time, and (and this is important) WE MUST NOT CONSIDER DOWNTIME-ONLY SKILLS AS EQUIVALENT TO UPTIME SKILLS. TT is not a play-by-email downtime game, and no IC skill can give you as much ref spotlight time as the OOC skill of doing interesting things. --Requiem
- Trees are something the system has mostly for historical reasons. It might well make it easier to build interesting characters if we got rid of them, although my only attempt to date, at /OperationDeforestation , is fairly crap.
- The wilderness and street trees are appropriate for many of the same archetypes, but not all; some warrior is also appropriate for many archetypes taking either, but not all.
- I like the idea of differentiating between "straight" combat skills - hits, armour, damage grades, DAC and "edges" - backstab, innate disarms, innate strikedowns, innate halts by blow (dirty blow), also DAC. Possibly the former could come off melee/warrior, and the latter could be street skills?
- Ideas for wilderness skills could include
- "Control animal/beast" - I think limited forms of this this are better than "talk to", and could be low-level without breaking.
- "Recognise animal/beast" - If used on an animal, it gives you the type and perhaps the stats.
- If you can get a certain distance away from anyone then unless you're in a setting where it's completely infeasible, e.g. another plane, with only one exit that needs the McGuffin? (ref's discretion) you can put your hand in the air and leave the linear, having escaped.
- "Camouflage others" - like the hide/sneak skill, but perhaps more limited.
- I would suggest "invisible while not moving from a certain area". --Valtiel
- Getting the ref to give you some information about the next encounter.
- Requires having a floating ref on hand all the time. Interesting alternative to finger-scouting, though. (Valtiel has no specific problem with finger-scouting.) --Valtiel
- "Wilderness Lore N" - a skill with no set benefits, but refs can write linears with "if you have Wilderness Lore 3, you will be told/will be able to do XYZ at this point"
- A skill that lets you make arrows - even if IC you've lost your arrows, if the phys-reps have been found you can get them back and reuse them; without this skill you can't.
- Not sure about this one. On the one hand, if you fire an arrow you're unlikely to get it back intact (or at least, much less likely than you are to retrieve the physrep), actual arrows are more portable than physreps, so an archer is likely to have lots of them.
- Sixth Sense - if something is going to shift in or become visible in your vicinity, you get n seconds warning (some variation on this theme - as written I fear it's unworkable, but I something like this could probably work).
- Make ingestive poison (using similar rules to whatever we pitch on for alchemy) - I'm inclined to think that for a wilderness (or alchemy, or probably any other) character, making (slow-acting)ingestive poison should be trivially easy; avoiding doing so possibly shouldn't...
Ideas for Street skills could include
- A "Street Lore N" skill, as above.
- "Contacts" - get n% extra for anything you sell, n% less for anything you buy, than normal prices, except for exceptional things (ref fiat).
- Innates of halt, strikedown or blind by blow (dirty blow - I think this should be street only, not warrior or generic).
- Strikedown and blind, yes. Halt by blow without any supernatural ability feels wrong, even if it's only very short duration. --Valtiel
- Brush n - you can use "touch" ranged abilities on someone from a distance of f(n), for some function of n, as your hands get more nimble.
- What do you mean by "touch ranged abilities"? If this includes miracles, it's a HORRIBLE idea, because it allows you to use all the Smiting the Body miracles at range. --Valtiel
- I would think it's things like 'light fingers' (and possibly the 'plant item' skill if we put that in). --ChessyPig
- Conceal armour n - you can wear n points of armour without phys-repping it.
- Income skills IV and V
- Tracking in urban environments only
- Bonus damage grades when attacking from behind ("by surprise/unawares" is horrible and nebulous; "from behind" is much better). Either first blow only or all such blows, perhaps with daggers only.
Ideas for generic "physical skills" (who gets which is not obvious to me: the reason I'm proposing them is because they could help build various wilderness and street concepts, but I don't think that it necessarily makes sense to limit them to those concepts if they exist).
- Call "negate" to one ranged attack or effect.
- Add n damage to one bowshot per day.
- Immunity to strikedown (sure feet)
- Some of the miracles are listed as causing strikedown by "compelling people to fall to their knees". How would sure feet help? Maybe "immunity to non-duration strikedown" would be more apt. --Valtiel
- More DAC skills (probably limited to prevent tanks taking them).
- Specialist knowledge - bonus damage grade when fighting one species (possibly wilderness only)?
- I LIKE this one. Call it "favoured enemy" and stick it in the Wilderness tree. Having "recognise species" as a prerequisite would be essential in case we're short on physreps and the characters aren't entirely certain what they're fighting, or in the case of some monsters for which the physreps aren't very consistant (Nightmares spring to mind). A few questions: Are "favoured enemy: human" and "favoured enemy: undead" allowed? The first might be unbalanced, and the second sounds like something that should only be available from multiple ranks of Undead Lore. Secondly, can you buy this multiple times? I say "no", because it seems to be going against the theme of the ability, which is for a specialist. Thirdly, can you ever change the selected species? I'd say "yes, with enoughd downtime" in case someone buys "favoured enemy: demon" just before the gateway to the demonic plane is sealed off forever, or something equally irritating. And finally, is this a bonus damage grade with ranged weapons as well as melee? I say "yes, why not?" And finally, does the infamous Swog Catcher Dave have "favoured enemy: Swog"? --Valtiel
- I prefer "species knowledge" to "favoured enemy" because I prefer "knowing where to hit species X" to "really really hating species X and berserking against them" - I'm not fan of berserking as a mechanic as opposed to as a roleplay thing. I would say that you can't change it, but you can buy it multiple times for different species; whether this should incur cost of double-buying is debateable - you know where to hit lots of different things. I don't think "human" or "elf" should be options, but "zombie" and "drow" possibly should be. --Jacob
- Does picking male or female human make picking 'human' less broken? --ChessyPig
- Only slightly - I reckon that both men and women are fought more often than any non-human species, plus it creates issues if/when someone is playing a role of the opposite gender, and it makes the ability more complicated (why gender only for humans?).