[Nevercast] - Truth through Mastery
dindenver:
RK,
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I wouldn’t want trust to be a granted quality of play between player-characters.
And to be clear, when I say trust I just mean willing to fight side by side and share in the rewards of adventuring. Not like, a deeper trust that involves secrets and opens a character up to deeper betrayals.
The trick is, roleplaying is a group activity. So, you need to have something for the group to do together.
Now, that might be PC vs PC conflicts over rights and resources. Or that might be PC vs NPC rivalry or hostility. One of these two require trust between PCs and the other does not.
I won't go out on a limb and say you have to address this issue. But, I will suggest that you consider how it should be if people are playing your game correctly and then design the game to produce that sort of play.
I hope my comments are helping you with your design, that is my intention. Again, I have read other posts about it and it seems to be shaping up to be pretty cool.
horomancer:
I'm happy to see you're back working on Nevercast. I look forward to when you'll have something play test-able.
Couple of thoughts-
It seems so far that only the martial artists has any true systematic regulation on what skills/powers they are allowed to access. Systematic may not be the right word even, as it is really upto GM discretion from you description of the medicine walk.
All other archetypes seem to boil down to skill selection. Are you weighting the skills in such a way that characters specialized in different fields will have different skill point totals? Will the merc have fewer skills total than the emissary, but have a much higher cap on combat related skills?
I ask this, since archetypes that do not impose some mechanical constrictions (like the martial artists) seem pointless.
It has been my observation that the archetypes for any game goes as Special 1, Special 2, Rouge, where S1 caters to what ever combat system is in place and S2 caters to what ever special sub-system the game has (magic use, technology, diplomacy, etc.). Rouge then takes up all the slack on all perfectly viable actions that don't fall directly into these two Special categories, but the system does not have an adequate sub-system to regulate. This can lead to interesting results when you think about what goes into having a '4' for stealth and a '4' for Metalworking. Ones a fairly straight forward skill that has very real limitations and most people (players and GM) can make reasonable assumptions about, the other is a trade someone can spend lifetime in and never fully master, and most people really don't have a clue on how it actually works.
I do not know enough about your system to say it will have such a short coming, but I feel it needs to be a point you address. You do not need a complex system of crafting-time/resource management for that one player that is hell bent on being a gunsmith, but you need some way to address various skill values for the time and energy it would take to have 'x' in one skill as opposed to another. You will also need something akin to combat maneuvers for various non-combat actions, or you will be shortchanging any character that is not combat centric.
It is my view that players and Gm's will twist character concepts and intentions to what ever suits their desire, and building a character type with play restrictions (such as paladins from D&D and Martial artists from your game) is futile. The only reason for making a character type is to confine their actions with numbers.
I've played with alot of powergaming dicks, so my perception may be slanted.
Ar Kayon:
Quote from: horomancer on December 31, 2010, 10:48:49 PM
It seems so far that only the martial artists has any true systematic regulation on what skills/powers they are allowed to access. Systematic may not be the right word even, as it is really upto GM discretion from you description of the medicine walk.
All other archetypes seem to boil down to skill selection. Are you weighting the skills in such a way that characters specialized in different fields will have different skill point totals? Will the merc have fewer skills total than the emissary, but have a much higher cap on combat related skills?
If the Master of Martial Arts seems more conceptually developed than the other roles, then that is because it is! I’ve spent over a decade developing the game, and they are essentially a refinement of all those years of rules development and redevelopment.
However, I intend to make the other roles more elastic as well, meaning that the system will prevent a player from expanding past certain levels of tension without first developing his character in some meaningful way. Therefore, existing roles that prevent me from devising such a dynamic will be scrapped or re-imagined.
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I do not know enough about your system to say it will have such a short coming, but I feel it needs to be a point you address. You do not need a complex system of crafting-time/resource management for that one player that is hell bent on being a gunsmith, but you need some way to address various skill values for the time and energy it would take to have 'x' in one skill as opposed to another. You will also need something akin to combat maneuvers for various non-combat actions, or you will be shortchanging any character that is not combat centric.
Maneuvers don’t apply to just combat. For other skills, you have abilities, which is the same concept but with a different name. I’ll provide a more detailed description of how skills work in my Mechanics Reference thread.
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