[Option] The core mechanics and basic idea.

[Kit]

Finally, and mostly thanks to Doug it must be said, I've managed to hack out a tentative base set of rules for Option. They still need a lot of elaboration and fixing, but at least now all the holes in the mechanic are little to medium sized rather than gaping great big `I have no idea how the mechanics should handle this' rifts.

A summary and set of design notes for the rules is available here: http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~drm39/summary.pdf

For those who don't know what Option is, and want a better reason to check out the link, I shall explain briefly. First, the following is the first paragraph of the summary:

Option is a universal system designed to support Simulationist play in a wide range of settings. It allows description of character abilities and specialisation in a lot of detail, while still allowing one to generalise without having to record a million different skills to represent this. Salient mechanical features are a player and GM customisable modifier tree (the core `stat list' for the game), allowing a much wider range of settings and games to be handled, and a unified conflict resolution mechanism which handles social infighting, psychic duels and poker games as well as it handles physical combat.



Basically I've had several design goals in making it: Primarily striking a balance between too much detail and too little, as well as a lot of flexibility in designing characters. I wanted to be able to handle jack of all trades and ultra focused research scientists next to burly warriors if needs be. Have I succeeded? I don't know. I think so, but it remains to see how well it will work in play test.

Another goal I've tried to work at is to come up with a single mechanic which handles essentially all situations in the same way. This is still ongoing, but I feel I've done a pretty good job.

Principal influences in designing this game: D20, GURPS, CoC (mainly for the character progression system) and FATE. I should be honest: The game started out as an attempt to bolt GURPS character creation onto the D20 system. It rather spiralled from there and has almost no mechanics left over from its creation.

So, in summary, Option is a system which lets you play a variety of skilled and flexible characters in most situations that you can imagine, with a sufficiently general mechanic that to worry about how new situations are handled mechanically, because they're handled in essentially the same manner as everything else.

Ambitious? Yes. Have I succeeded? Hell no. Do I expect to? No, probably not. But a lot of the interest is in the trying, and regardless of whether I've produced a game that lives up to my intentions, the progress that it has made towards them is I feel still enough to make a good and interesting game.

So, enough with the sale pitch. What do you think? :-)

I've more or less indicated what I think needs work and what I'm still wondering about over the course of the summary.

Thanks,
David

[Stefan / 1of3]

Interesting. Innovative Sim stuff is rare.

First I have 2questions:

- What exactly is an indic?

- What types of dice are used? d100?



Comments:

I like the general idea. The tree concept is very flexible. The possiblity to reflect organisations, etc. was the first thing, that came to my mind. You should go for that.

I would introduce a basic character level. This would be useful to handle groups.

Have you thought about, what happens, if several tree branches influence an Event?
If you want to use trees for several things, you might need to clarify how different types interact. For example is Using A Weapon part of a character tree or is the weapon a tree itself? If you choose the latter, you could handle the problem by attaching the weapon tree to the character tree at a certain point. I guess that would be a useful general mechanic.

Although you didn't explain what scale modifiers take, the expamples in the document made clear, that they have numerical values.
Have you thought about not using numbers? Considering the complexity of your approach it might be enough to give modifiers the scale "-" / "0" / "+".
"+0" could then denote, that the character has "0" in all modifiers on the next lower level. You could use this to approximate a tree.

[Kit]

Oh lordy. Did I not say what type of dice are being used? That's highly embarassing. I'm very sorry about that, and will fix the document after writing this post. Yes, they're d100s. The modifiers are then a direct addition to these rolls. (Note to self: In future wait for caffeine to adequately enter system before writing).

An indic is just a particular type of modifier, one that is more `temporary'.

The mechanical distinction between a `normal' modifier and an indic is currently very fuzzy. There was originally a much greater difference between the two, and they've sortof merged as the system progressed. Basically the two main differences are that much broader classes of events can affect an indic, while generally only learning rolls will affect non-indic modifiers, and that the relation of the indic to the tree is less well defined (I'm not yet certain if there is any tree structure at all to the indics. This may serve as a useful way of defining them actually).

What did you have in mind as a character level? If I understand what you're suggesting then I'm highly resistent to this notion, as it seems to go against the basic principle of `a character is described entirely by his options and modifiers'.

At the moment I see no inherent difficulty in just applying two modifiers on different branches to a roll. It makes the book-keeping slightly more tricky - you have to back track to a common origin in order to work out the totals - but not overwhelmingly so.

Hmm... Equipment. That's a tough one. It's one of those things that was handled in a perfectly straightforward manner by the original way of implementing things, so I basically ignored it. Then I introduced some of the more innovative features of Option and broke it without noticing.

Logically, equipment is part of the State of Play. It consists of the feature `X has this item' together with a package that gives X various new Options and modifiers.

So say we have a gun. When X has it, he now has the Option `shoot things' and modifiers to doing so. These modifiers may indeed form a tree, and what you suggest about attaching them to the existing tree definitely has merit. I'll have a think about that.

Also, use of weapons is indeed part of the modifier tree. An appropriate branching might be Physical, Combat, Attack, Attack with a specific weapon type (This may however be putting too powerful a thing too low down in the tree. It may be better to branch it as Physical, Combat, Attack with a specific weapon type).

I'm not sure I understand your suggestion about not using numbers. Could you clarify?

Anyway, glad you like it. Thanks for the feedback.

[Stefan / 1of3]

What did you have in mind as a character level? If I understand what you're suggesting then I'm highly resistent to this notion, as it seems to go against the basic principle of `a character is described entirely by his options and modifiers'.

I wanted to suggest to give a character a basic modifier, that influences all actions. A kind of root point for the character's tree to expand from.

The problem may be, that this way there would be a modifier before the options.

The advantage is, that with such a level characters can be easily handled as parts of higher structures.

I'm not sure I understand your suggestion about not using numbers. Could you clarify?

I'll try. ;)

My basic suggestion is to heavily narrow the scale of individual modifiers. For example to -1 - +1. That might be enough for what you want to do. (Of course d100 would be a bad choice in this case.)

[Kit]

What did you have in mind as a character level? If I understand what you're suggesting then I'm highly resistent to this notion, as it seems to go against the basic principle of `a character is described entirely by his options and modifiers'.

I wanted to suggest to give a character a basic modifier, that influences all actions. A kind of root point for the character's tree to expand from.

Oh. I see what you mean. This may be another example of poor communication on my part, as that's already there. That's what the `raw ability' modifier is intended to be (slight technical point: It doesn't apply to rolls to improve raw ability, but other than that it applies to everything).

I'm not sure I understand your suggestion about not using numbers. Could you clarify?

I'll try. ;)

My basic suggestion is to heavily narrow the scale of individual modifiers. For example to -1 - +1. That might be enough for what you want to do. (Of course d100 would be a bad choice in this case.)

Hmm. I'm unconvinced of the benefit of doing something so extreme: It doesn't look like it would still be able to handle the range that the current one does, and you'll just end up with far more modifiers to apply so it will be even more fiddly. What's your reasoning here?

Something in between might be worth doing, say scaling down to a d10, but I'd like to stick with the d100s for now and see what happens, as they do give a better range of expression.

David

[Kit]

Hoo boy. That's impressively broken.

Ditch the rules for burning indics for now, until I can come up with a better version. They are severely broken: Because you can keep burning, you can use them to push your rolls arbitrarily high for as long as you want. You just need to burn more each time.

[Kit]

So, a specific question I'd like to emphasise (this is mentioned in the pdf, but I'd like to repeat it here):

I don't currently have any good way of deciding which modifier applies to which rolls. At the moment it's little more than GM Fiat, which I really don't want.

Anyway, I'll stop replying to myself now. :-)

(Edit: Umm. The above is of course a statement, not a question. The question I'd intended was to ask if anyone had any suggestions as to what to do there. Apologies, really not with it today...)