Level concerns

[Jeremy Cole]

A knight with no horse?  A pickpocket in a dungeon?

It seems to me these people may begin the game less effective compared to their born and bred dungeon hacking couterparts, but won't they learn the new situation better.

The only way to determine a useless skill is in play, and maybe that is where it should be remedied.  Perhaps characters with unused skills should be rewarded at experience time.

Maybe for every skill not used or under-used, the character gets bonus to skills that were used.  Or a percentage chance of developing an alternative useful skill.  Our poor unfortunate knight would develop some dungeon hacking skills (low light eyes, cave stealth, whatever) for free.  The dwarven fighter (used to the environment) would get no freebies, unless the campaign moves in the wilderness, and he would develop new skills quickly.

[M. J. Young]

First, an aside: any DM worth his salt knows that the pick-pockets skill in D&D covers a lot more than picking pockets. Certainly it's more useful in an urban setting, where you can steal objects off tables in a bazaar (as Aladin gives the merchant his own apple to pay for the apple taken) or do standard shoplifting in stores. It's also about stealing objects from someone's guarded treasure horde. The pick pockets skill is about the ability to stealthily steal something; it's not about targeting marks in airports or something. If the important papers are on the desk when you confront the villain in his office, it is the thief who notices and surreptitiously replaces them with some envelopes that were in the trash can. It is a more useful skill than has been recognized in this thread.

However, the objection overall is well taken.

One of the confusions I see here is the distinction between useful and useless skills, when what we're really discussing is the difference between character-defining and character empowering skills. And perhaps if we recognize that this is the problem, and not the other, we can take an unusual step toward the answer. Create two classes of skills, and two classes of points. One class of skills would be all those things that everyone has to take--combat abilities, mostly, but there might be other things here. The other class would be those skills which define a character but don't make him particularly more potent in most combat situations. The trick would be that since you had independent point pools, you could not spend the points which were given for these character-defining skills on combat skills anyway, so you are not disadvantaged by not doing so. Thus the thief has as many points to spend on combat skills as the fighter, but he has points he can only spend on other skills, and these will most likely go into those areas in which he specializes.

One of the snags would be finding skills for the fighter that don't actually improve his combat abilities; otherwise the character-defining skills pool is defeated because everyone will once again go for those. Riding, maintaining weapons and armor, fletching arrows, tracking enemies, and perhaps some others would work well here.

And to do something entirely counter-intuitive which would have the effect of encouraging specialization, make the initial level of any skill cost the most, with succeeding levels costing less. Thus the character who began with pick pockets and pick locks as initial skills could improve both of them, or pay more to take something else.

It's a rough idea, but maybe you can make something of it.

--M. J. Young

[Christoffer Lernö]

Walt, I believe your analysis is correct regarding currency issues. But is there some way to simplify things without entirely changing the whole game?

I believe I took one step towards simplification by declaring all characters "fighters" more or less.

Another was by trying to follow the suggestion to make every type of weapon choice equal on the average but that's another story.

What I'm trying to make for Ygg is to make characters equal in combat ability and then let the particular expression of it change.

Obviously some versions might be more advantageous than others - if you know unarmed combat you fight equally good without weapons for example, or if you are great with the bow you can hit someone from a distance.

The overall efficiency should be the same. That's the attempt anyway. You should be able to make this really cool and quirky character and have just as much to do in combat situations as the others.

Maybe others here are wondering why I focus on combat so much. Well, the whole point is that the characters are heroes helping people against danger. That usually (although not necessarily) involves fighting bad things at some point. What defines them as heroes is partly this ability to stand against the evil forces.

[contracycle]

Well, then combat effectiveness should be an attribute universal to all characters.  The detail lies in skills, but base effectiveness is universal.

[Christoffer Lernö]

Well, then combat effectiveness should be an attribute universal to all characters.  The detail lies in skills, but base effectiveness is universal.

Yes. Characters all have a "close combat" rating as well as a "missile combat" rating. These are rolled up just like the normal stats. Anyway, they provide the basic "do I hit the other guy?" answers. Stats like strength and toughness helps answering "when I hit, how much does it hurt?"

So theoretically you could play the game with a character who doesn't have any skills at all.

However, enter magic and unarmed combat. They both drive up the efficiency of certain types of professions. To maintain balance the other professions need similar advantages (I could have gone the other way and made each group self balanced by introducing disadvantages to the advantages, but I don't really like that approach) so that efficiency is kept across the board. That's the tricky part.

[contracycle]

However, enter magic and unarmed combat. They both drive up the efficiency of certain types of professions.

Do they?  A martial artists who is never disarmed never gets to use their martial arts ability - hence it is mere colour exactly like thieving skills.

[Mike Holmes]

I like MJs idea in this circumstance. A divided pool seems to be right up your alley in this case. It means that everyone will develop in the "important" skills, which will infom them about the important-ness of combat. And everypne will develop in less important skills as well, thus differentiating the characters. As Ralph pointed out, this is exactly what TROS already does (skills/proficiencies).

Note, however, that this does not solve the problem of Protagonism. All characters in this game will be protagonized similarly by their ability to fight, etc. In superhero games, this is solved by specialization in types of fighting. One character is a brick, another an energy projector, another a martial artist. In Ygg, it would seem that you have parallels in specializing in Fighting, Magic, and Martial Arts, etc.

In practice, and IME, this works so-so for creating protagonism. Beware the player who trys to make the Fighter/MagicUser/Martial Artist character, however. If he has to split points between all three, he will be dwarfed by any character who specializes. If he is not forced to split, then everyone will play this character.

Mike

[damion]

Well, balancing effectivness is difficult.
Say you equate combat effectivness to damage, then you have an equation like this

Damage Given=(# targets/attack)*(Damage/attack-target)*(frequency of attacks)*(chance to hit/attack).
All this is divided by Damage Take
Damage Taken=(chance to be hit)*(frequency of being attacked)*({damage/attack}-possibly minus a reduction)
Your combat effectiveness is Damage Given/Damage Taken. You want this to be big. Flip to avoid div by zero.
Then you equalize this for all professions. Now you've equalized combat, but now since everyone is equal in combat, imbalances in other area's show up. Magic generally has non-combat usefullness, so does pick pocketing. Martial artists can't be disarmed, always have a weapon, can bring it to parties, ect.  However, if the primary focus is combat, and everyone is equal there, well, minor disadvantages in other places may not matter. This is the point where the GM can try to make use of color skills, to keep everyone protagonised.

[Walt Freitag]

A divided combat-noncombat pool makes sense to me too in this context.

Some decisions would have to be made concerning combat-applicable magic. Do spellcasters use their entire combat pool on nonmagical combat ability, then add combat magic on top of that from their noncombat pool? That seems to give the spellcasters a combat edge and defeat the purpose of dividing the pools. But if combat magic comes from the combat pool, the possibility of specialist spellcasters with little or no melee ability arises.

This is partially, though not completely, resolved if magic is generally less effective in combat than just attacking with a weapon. (The magic would be very useful anyway, for special tactical situations such as exploiting vulnerabilities or targeting someone in the back ranks or attacking when weaponless, but it wouldn't be a perpetual advantage.) However, this might not be good from a pure "color" point of view, if the expectation is that magic should be powerful as well as impressive.

As for damion's effectiveness equation, there are many different valid ways of looking at this. I tend to use total damage given for as long as you can remain effective, rather than damage given per damage taken. That means including total damage that can be taken (before having to withdraw from combat or being put out of action) as another multiplicative term in the numerator.

- Walt

[Christoffer Lernö]

Do they?  A martial artists who is never disarmed never gets to use their martial arts ability - hence it is mere colour exactly like thieving skills.

In Ygg, weapons are supposed to end up being mere colour. Or to put more clearly: martial artists fight without weapons against monsters and do it well.

In superhero games, this is solved by specialization in types of fighting. One character is a brick, another an energy projector, another a martial artist. In Ygg, it would seem that you have parallels in specializing in Fighting, Magic, and Martial Arts, etc.

Yest I think so, although I'd dispute that there is a "Fighting" category in Ygg right now. As I laid it out though with classes, there is no way to do the martial artist/magic/fighter. Mostly because if you have raw power you haven't had the background training martial arts. The magic is kinda self balanced because the magic screws them up terribly.

You really only make a martial artist because you think it's cooler to fight without weapons. There isn't gonna be any advantages to combining them. Or that's the plan anyway. Someone suggested making something like "martial arts can make you channel power, but the bigger weapon the less power you can channel". So the only reason you'd want to max out making a martial artist/fighter would be to be better at fighting when disarmed.

That said, you're still right about watching out, and do am thinking about that.

[ADGBoss]

Ok my first point to be picky (yes picky my apologies but I must.) Technically any order fighting technique IS a martial art. Most of the traditional Oriental MArtial Arts that we mean when we use the MA term, have weapon techniques in them and a few are all about Weapons techniques. (Forgive my broadness as I am not expert by any stretch) This being the case, Fencing is a martial art, dagger fighting, garroting someone, etc... So what you have in Ygg are students, formally or informally, of various schools of martial arts thought, even if there is no formal "school."

I also am a little vague on the idea, as I am seeing it anyway, of equality in combat, especially if every one "fights". Even in a  game about fighters they will not all be equal, different stats, different skill choices. I aplogise if you have gone over that portion before, and I just missed it...

I do not like the split skill resolution idea despite many of the good arguments in favor of it. It breaks characters down, gives them a dual personality. It also is forcing them to put experience in color and fluff skills, OR put their time into combat which they may not want to do. Essentially it says "In the given time period, you MUST spend x% on learning to fight and x% on your leisure or occupationa skills".  Unless they are all in a military or psuedo-military organization then this really does not make realistic sense.

Unless of course there were no points for combat skills. Essentially at each step progression you gained +1 (for want of a better number) in your combat skills and possibly were allowed to learn one new skill.
That might be one solution.

Just My 2 Lunars

SMH
ADGBoss

[Christoffer Lernö]

I also am a little vague on the idea, as I am seeing it anyway, of equality in combat, especially if every one "fights". Even in a  game about fighters they will not all be equal, different stats, different skill choices. I aplogise if you have gone over that portion before, and I just missed it...

Yes, but the point is that this is a choice of the stats rather than profession. Many games have built-in setting limitations to stop magic-users and similar to become as efficient fighters as the "pure fighters". Look at AD&D's class limitations on armour and weapons for example.

Please check out the recent two ygg threads here and continued here

As well on my new ponderings in regards to the skills here