Trying to avoid currency issues

[damion]

Various comments:
I had a friend who tried to port Amber to Hero, including the action system.  The result was sorta a bust for a couple reasons
1)Most people plowed all their points into either stats or signature items. Also, all stats wern't equal.
2)Hero couldn't do the spell system effectivly
My point is, making a viable auction system is harder than it looks.

However, there seems to be no way of avoiding currency issues when creating character abilities. I'm deliberately avoiding
skills and skill lists. So abilities is the only area aside from deciding on character class where the player selects something as
opposed to rolling.

You have random skill rolling also. As long as you meet the goal of all skills being roughly equally usefull, it could be fun.

Another idea would be to have catagories of skills. Shadowrun does this, there are Active(Mechanical Effect) skills and Knowledge(Other) skills. :)  
In your case you could have catagories of skills.
You get X points for catagory A skills, Y for catagory B, ect.
so 'Resist Damage' and 'Climb Walls' would be in different catagories.
You might want to make sure there is no way to trade beween catagories either, or maybe you can only trade points in a higher catagory for points in lower catagories. (aack, currency!,nevermind)
This gives players flexebilty, but still balances skills(everyone has the same amount of the same 'catagory' of skills). You'd also have to keep this in advancement also, which might be harder. In DnD, you would get X catagory A points/level, Y catagory B points, ect.
Archetypes would work into this by simple haveing a seperate set of catgories per Archetype.

[Walt Freitag]

Because of the situation dependence, the system alone cannot balance skills.

I think I could dispute that. But for the purposes of this game, the statement is correct.

Yeah, that's what I meant. Thanks for clarifying.

What you get if you try to use this [skill packages that advance in synch] for further development are situattions like the following: perhaps there are three skills in the burglar package that it makes sense for my character to improve in, but not a fourth, as he's had no exposure to it whatsoever. In which case getting it as part of an improvement purchase makes about as much sense as, well, leveling up in D&D.

Yep, that's a weakness. But... I'm not sure it's such a bad thing, as the actions realistically required to improve skills are rarely something one would want to role-play. You can assume that a great deal of off-screen practice and training is going on, which often strains credibility ("how'd you manage to practice your swimming while we've been underground for the past three weeks?") but the same problem arises with individually purchased skills. Sure, with individually purchased skills the GM can require a plausible explanation for each skill added or improved, but that usually adds little to play and rarely adequately accounts for the timing involved.

The credibility problem is really inherent in great skill improvement during the game, regardless of what the system is (unless the setting provides a blanket supernatural or technological explanation for rapid skill acquisition, like wetware in the cyberpunk genre).

Nonetheless, new skill packages as I described them acquired in play would be harder than usual to swallow, even by old school RPG standards, because they have multiple components so there's definitely a sense of "where did all THAT come from?"

This is very much like old-style D&D classes before there were choices regarding skills and feats.

The comparison is useful up to a point. I see the skill packages as much narrower in scope, and unlike classes, characters would be expected to have several of them. None of the examples are character-defining (shape shifting is the closest), nor do they appear particularly difficult to justify in combinations.

However, if we look at these as mini-classes, it suggests a solution for the problem of plausibly acquiring new ones: don't do it (or do it rarely in special cases only where it can be justified by specific events). Instead, the individual abilities within a skill package could have a bonus or a negative relative to the level of the overall skill package. Such as, a fisherman's swimming ability is at -2 (they don't expect to fall in often) while an aboriginal islander's swimming ability is at +3. This could help when balancing the skill packages. But it could also be used to make a skill package act even more like a mini class, by including abilities that start out at a high minus which eventually is offset by the advancement of the skill, making those in effect abilities that are acquired over time.

I just realized that Pale Fire hasn't had a chance to comment on any of this yet, so I'm going to cut myself short until later.

- Walt

[Christoffer Lernö]

Ok, I wrote this yesterday before there had been like a million comments on the thread :) Just so you know.

But is this really helping in any way? Does it make the player any more happy that climb walls is cheaper? No it doesn't.  

I really can't see why you think this is the case (and I'm not being hostile -- just miffed). The player's goal is to have a character just as effective as those of his friends. If his single ability Climb Walls is inneffective in practice, his aims would be thwarted, I agree. But if you give him additional abilities as well, what's the problem?

What I mean is, I think the player wouldn't mind having the "climb walls" skill, it's just that he doesn't want it at the cost of other more efficient abilites.

Actually the same is true if we compare to fighters in a game which has combat abilities. Of these some will inevitably be more useful than others. Let's say there is a skill... mounted combat. We have two characters, one is a knight and the other is a foot soldier. Only the whole campaign is supposed to be someplace where there are no horses or other animals to ride. (This is just a hypotetical situation to illustrate the problem clearly, bear with me). This is known to all players.

Now say that the characters have bonus points to either put on mounted combat or combat on foot. If you're creating a knight from scratch, will you put any points into mounted combat which you know you will have absolutely no use for? Maybe, maybe not. It's all about whether you put priority on a consistent character (a knight who's supposed to fight from horseback should know mounted combat) or an optimized character.

Now in a system like this we'd be punishing the person who made a consistent character rather than an optimized one. Similar prehaps to our thief who in the name of consistency does train to climb walls a little and don't put every single point in backstab.

Anyway, what I mean is that no matter how cheap you make the useless skills, they will still be make the character less efficient to some extent, and that is a punishment of sorts.

If you're going to go the "abilities" route, the way to ensure some built in balance is to make sure, as Matt said, to make the abilities useful.

Maybe I should make it more clear what I mean with abilities so there are no misunderstanding. It seems like you operate under the assumption that they are more or less equal. They are not. They are special abilities, ranging from unusual skills to magical powers. Some of these can be learned, some are supposed to be advantages the character is born with. In fact, you can think of every single one of these as a special rule in itself. The skill system is simple enough. But this is not about skills.

Let's take an example from my character sketches:

The Human Archer (Bowmaster)
Missile Weapon Specialist
Stealth
Light armour
Crackshot
Sniper
Tracking
Hunting
Nature Lore

What do I mean with these (they were only really meant for my reference so it requires some explanation)

Well, Missile Weapon Specialist means this character probably has something similar to martial arts but for bows. I'm not clear on the details, but it could work like getting extra shots or being allowed other exceptions. It probably gives an extra bonus added to the general ranged combat skill which all characters have.

Stealth. Of course every character can sneak, they use the skill system for that. But having stealth as an ability means this is a major skill for the archer character. Everyone can sneak but the archer actually trained HARD and can do amazing stuff. Starting out really good and going to amazing abilities.

Light Armour. This is basically a note for myself on what they're trained at using, nothing more.

Crackshot. This would be some ability maybe having all ranges reduced one step when you calculate difficulty, or you don't need to aim or whatever. In any case, a rule-breaker.

Sniper. Here is one of those wide application skills. The archer can snipe. Everyone can of course, but the archer is GOOD at it. The archer knows how to shoot and remain unseen. This probably lets the archer find the best places to snipe from and so on. It works in reverse too. Since the archer knows where things come from he'd be able to find snipers easily.

Tracking. Everyone can follow tracks, but the archer actually knows how to get information from them. Like how many, how heavily loaded, how quickly did they march, how long time ago and so on.

And so on.

Second example is

Shapeshifter of the Witchpeople
*Light weapon
Ultimate stealth
Shapeshifting
Claw martial arts
*Nature affinity
*Animal Bond

Ultimate Stealth says they have stealth abilities which far outclass those of say the archer. They can't be compared even at basic levels.

Shapeshifting means that these characters are born with shape shifting abilities.

Claw martial arts, means they trained in using their natural claws and bites in shapeshifted form to fight with. This would lead into the martial arts system however that might end up looking like.

Animal Bond is a mystical ability to bond with an animal and communicate with them, like an animal soul mate or something. Again this might be a magical power that is learned or something they're born with.

Anyway

You see how these things aren't at all on the same level. Some things, like the crackshot ability of the archer might simply be a combat bonus. Others are rulebreaking abilities, then there are the skills and the very wide skills. And don't forget the mystical powers learned and the magic abilities the character might be born with.

Together they make a motley crew.

This is why I have problems with the currency thing. Because they are very unequal. It would have been one thing if everything was skills or something. But it's not, some are very specialized, some are very broad. That makes it hard to apply any general scheme to deal with them other than one currency based one or pre-determined ones AD&D style.

The game which comes closest to having the same kind of setup would be Earthdawn. But ED put artificial limits on their powers, or at least that seems to be the case (for example you can levitate using the airwalk talent when you do a ritual, but you cannot use the airwalk talent to levitate. If you use it to attack someone you can walk on air, but using the same talent to run over a cliff or something seems to be disallowed for no particular reason. This is similar to the artificial caps on AD&Ds spells, which for some reason never had any side effects other than those stated in the spell description).

[Christoffer Lernö]

Ok, I think I remember what people have been writing after only reading through it once. :)

Your suggestions, like the skill packages are good - for a skill system. It's just that I don't have one.

These abilities or talents or what to call them aren't all full-fledged skills, and some can't even be made into ones.

Let me explain a little more in depth:

To simulate combat moves I originally intended to give "combat"-picks every time a fighter type of character went up a level. The original planning is not important. What's interesting is the scope of these. It made a whole lot of sense that these were small.

For example you'd have "Mighty Blow" which gave you +1 damage die. Maybe you could upgrade that to level 2 and level 3 for higher damage. I was going to have the martial arts use this to, having moves like "Piercing Strike" which reduced the armour rating for the hit. Again maybe up to level 3 at the most.

Anyway, since I had created this feat thing I naturally wanted to use it with all special abilities. That's when I ran into problems.

If I could shift things up in scope I would. But if we look at the mighty blow skill. It doesn't scale up well. If I scale it up I have to include more specials into the skill, and might end up a palladium style of progression for the pick, something like:

Level 1 - Mighty Blow +1 damage
Level 2 - Heroic Leap
Level 3 - Mighty Blow +2 damage

and so on. Which is removing exactly the detail I was looking for to begin with, as well as leaving me with having to design some arbitrary skill progression chart for leveling up.

What I have is skills of varying scope and importance. I could make the combat skills pay for their usefulness, but that would make the fighters faceless... well fighters, and they'd only have a few of em anyway.

What could work would be to separate them into categories as damion suggests. I was thinking a little along these lines myself.

The only real difficulty in that lies in the amount of categories. To sum up what I have:

Inborn magical abilities
Special inborn traits
Learned magical skills
Learned magical feats
Combat feats
Non-combat feats
Combat skill
Stats
Normal skills
Specialized skills

I already was going to separate out the stats together with the general combat skill (it works well, but I won't go into the details), but grouping the rest of these together into some coherent groups with equal "value" seems hard.

I don't know if this makes the problem a little more clear? I mean if it was just simple skills it wouldn't be a problem.

[M. J. Young]

I've been watching this thread, and wondering how I could contribute. Maybe I do have something.

Multiverser has a very elaborate skills system, and allows advancement in any and all desired skills primarily by taking time out to practice them. The limit to how many you can practice really is how much time can you devote to practicing your skills apart from anything else you want to do. It also allows you to get credit on a skill by using it "in a new way" during play--thus your examples of the airwalk skill would devolve into a credit for using it to levitate in a ritual, a credit for using it in combat, a credit for using it to save yourself on the cliff, and so forth. I kept looking at all this, and thinking that perhaps some sort of unlimited skills system might work better; of course, such systems are easy to break if you've got people who want to maximize power.

I recall that there's a system out there that allows you to roll to see if you are permitted to increase any skill which you have "used" in the game; the problem that has been observed about this system is that in blatantly encourages generalists and penalizes specialists; that is, the player who changes weapons every round will be the better fighter with all of them than the one who always focuses on using the same weapon. But I think perhaps the system could be modified to work for you.

You would first have to define some sort of game segments. I hate games which divide action up into "game session" because I have been such an incorrigible gamer that a session could be five minutes over the phone or twenty hours straight on the weekend. But you would need some way to define the beginning and end of a section of the story, because that becomes your limiter.

Every skill that the player character uses during that story section would need somehow to be noted. This could include trying things he's never done before (for which there would have to be an incredibly low chance of success) or doing something he does a hundred times in ever combat. What matters is only that he must use, or attempt to use, the skill during that segment of the game. At the end of the segment, the player selects one, and only one, of the skills he has used or attempted, and gets a credit in that. You would need to determine how many credits add up to an advancement in level, and this doesn't need to be linear. (Multiverser requires one credit to reach levels of 1@, four to reach 2@, and twenty-seven to reach 3@.) You would also cap the amount of advancement possible.

The character thus would have ability levels in things which were commensurate to his choice of what he actually found useful in adventures and expected to find useful in the future. That is, if the level one Mighty Blow was useful, he would want to spend his credits on building up the level two Mighty Blow.

Note also that I'm not suggesting the character can bank points to spend on whatever he wants. I'm suggesting that he can get one point to apply on layaway to whatever he has used and expects to use again.

The aspect of this that I have not addressed is the concept of new skills. I suspect that to make that work, you would have to divide skills into at least two, possibly three, categories: 1) Things you have to be born able to do, and so cannot learn; 2) Things anyone has a chance to do, albeit a small one; 3) Things which must be taught by someone else (this is the dubious category--Multiverser permits a character to "figure out" how to do anything by trial and error, as long as he has the physical body required for anything that requires specific body parts).

Does this help at all?

--M.  J. Young

[Mike Holmes]

Does this help at all?

Well, though what you propose might keep people from being genralists, it might lead to everyone being the same specialist. If a particular skill is serving you well, would it not also be serving me well? And will we both not take it, then? And won't other skills get ignored entirely?

The idea of the previous discussion is partly about how to prevent players from just stacking up in all the same stuff, thus having them all make the same character, and lacking diversity. What the "increasing cost round-robin" that I suggested promotes is people branching off into new directions.

OTOH, we've been over this all before, and there are other ways to deliver protagonism than simple character skill effectiveness. Note hos in TROS, you have just two "classes" (fighter, sorcerer), and almost everyone plays just one of them. Doesn't matter, however, as the protagonism is not derived from the skills, but from the SAs. Which differ greatly from charcter to character.

So, maybe MJ's method isn't so bad after all. Except that Ygg, AFAICT, has no other method for delivering protagonism.

Mike

[Christoffer Lernö]

MJ: Like Mike says, it does unfortunately not help the kernel of the problem which is that people will be working on pretty much the same skills. So I don't see this scheme as really assisting. I think both the "player choice" and the "used skills" approach suffer the same flaw. And the combination of them (which seems to be your suggestion), seem to have the same problem.

What is lacking, I think is basically a "future" or a "destiny" of the character. The reason D&D doesn't have the same problem is because it defines both past-present-future as one single thing: the character class you chose. You were a level 1 thief, you are a level 3 thief and you will become sometime in the future a level 10 thief (if you manage to survive that long)

I think what I'd want is (in D&D terms) something like "You were a Thief", "You're presently a Fighter" and "you will be a Magic-User"

The player could have chosen these archetypes to begin with. They don't have to be the same, but I want DIRECTION.

I don't want the characters to evolve to neither the same generalist or the same specialist. I want them increasingly distinct and different from each other.

Note hos in TROS, you have just two "classes" (fighter, sorcerer), and almost everyone plays just one of them. Doesn't matter, however, as the protagonism is not derived from the skills, but from the SAs.

What are SA's?

Except that Ygg, AFAICT, has no other method for delivering protagonism.

I agree that fighting is a biggie in Ygg. In fact so big that I consider all characters more or less variants of the fighter archetype. (However, that doesn't mean I want their variations to get less pronounced as the game progresses). As far as combat goes, there is really no problem with variation as I'm following the AHQ system fairly closely. One of the reasons I adopted AHQ was exactly because combat profiles are encouraged to vary.

Or more detailed: If you make a fumbling but strong guy you will be as efficient as the fast, weak guy. Or as efficient as the medium strong, medium fast guy. So there is really no need to "give up" your niche. Besides, the progression system also makes it hard to do so as initial stats and skills also reflect aptitude.

Maybe I should take some lessons from that. But back to your comment Mike on protagonism. Aside from fighting prowess there aren't all that many ways to deliver protagonism in a monster hunting scenario, or is there (minor opportunities aside I mean)

[Mike Holmes]

Aside from fighting prowess there aren't all that many ways to deliver protagonism in a monster hunting scenario, or is there (minor opportunities aside I mean)

Sure there are. That's what SAs are. Spiritual Attributes. They are things that arre important to the character, and which, therefore, give him more ability when addressing those issues. For example, if my character has the spiritual attribute Passion: Loves Rosa, he will get bonus dice whenever he attempts to do something that involves, say, rescuing Rosa, or anything else where the character would be motivated by his passion.

In this way you protagonize the character withought just adding to typical skills or abilities.

And that's just only one game. Pendragon does similar things with its Virtues, etc. Thus a knight who is brave may do better in battle than one who is not. Makes sense, no? There are lots of things like this that you can put into a system.

I'd very much suggest taking a look at TROS, or Hero Wars, or Pendragon, or any of the many other systems that exist that protagonize characters via methods other than just pure physics and skills.

Mike

[Christoffer Lernö]

I've played some Pendragon. I'd like to look at Hero Wars but it's gonna be a pain to get hold of here.

Anyway, I never really felt the Pendragon stats was really characterizing my character. But the again, maybe I hold grudges because my pagan knight managed to succeed the chastity roll (or failed, depending on how you see it) and didn't stay and roll around in the hay like all others who were christian knights (and had failed their rolls).

In this way you protagonize the character withought just adding to typical skills or abilities.

Hmm.. yeah I expected it was something like that and honestly I've been thinking along those lines too. However, I'd like the skills to work too. But I started up a new thread about that.