[Starry Messengers]
Paul Czege:
What skills were attached to the humors?
Thor:
We cribbed the skills list from Flashing Blades and assigned each skill a humor based on our understanding of the humors. We found a breakdown equating the humors to Meyers Briggs personality types and ran with it.
Humour Modern MBTI Ancient characteristics
Blood/Sanguine artisan SP courageous, hopeful, amorous
Yellow bile/Choleric idealist NF easily angered, bad tempered
Black bile/Melancholic guardian SJ despondent, sleepless, irritable
Phlegm/Phlegmatic rational NT calm, unemotional
So for example Bargaining would be Choleric and Brawling Melancholic.
Paul Czege:
So, the skills were all just color. If I wanted to impress a woman, I could choose to display melancholic martial skill, or sanguine poetic skill? If I wanted to stop a burglary, I could choose melancholic swordsmanship, or phlegmatic negotiation?
If individual actions define a character, the incrementing and decrementing of the humor pools is telling the players that their characters are going to have to do all of these things. The characters are going to have to be poetic, and martial, and unhinged, and cautious. In essence, the players are all playing the same character. So, why should they care about setting up any individual future action enough to take a failure on a current action?
Thor:
Skills were chosen as appropriate for the character type. And the humors were consistent throughout. My sword skill and yours have the same humor.
Yes this is a game about being renaissance men (persons). That said I think this is a fairly straight forward little adventure game. You want to do this thing because it is either cool or on your way to doing something cool.
The ecology of the humors will in effect keep players from hitting the same note every turn. Or, if they do they will receive diminishing returns. I also think that in the long run there will be parts of every skill set that are governed by one of the humors.
Paul Czege:
I think the renaissance man concept is compelling.
My theory would be that when we're all aspiring to be renaissance men, all basically playing the same character, that what we actually care about is outcomes. So maybe what the various humors do is make spheres of outcomes available. I simply can't achieve success in violent situations without using my melancholy. I can't achieve success in artistic spheres without using my sanguinity. But maybe what I can do is accept consequences in an artistic sphere to move dice to whatever sphere sanguinity feeds into, so I can try for success in some endeavor I couldn't otherwise succeed at.
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