Character Creation/Advancement and "Character Type"

[sirogit]

"Character Type" meaning profession, race, faction, or whatever such seperated character options that a game has.

I want a system combining Class-like options and point buy systems that has a very exact result from choosing a character type, such as, effecting every trait, and this effect's strength is much more if the character has a focus in such a thing.

For example, say the game features rat people who are supposedly to be extremely strong and dexterous. I'd like a system where, notably undeveloped physically or agile rat people would be pretty much the same as undeveloped normal people, fairly developed they would show a clear advantage over normal humans,, and with an excelling example, the rat people would have superhuman dexterity that by far outpaces human standards.

Or, say a character is defined as being in an academic profession, one of the high skills in the academic profession is "Geography", if the player spends no points towards developing geopgraphy, it would be nearly or just as low as non-academic characters, but the more the character would focus on it, the more it would outpace other profession's with the same amount of individual focus.

Know any systems that do this or a way to do it?

[Lxndr]

Rolemaster Standard System does this, though it's far from the only one.  Races have bonuses to attributes that are separate from the 0-100 scale that attributes themselves use.  So the 0-100 scale contributes a bonus, then the race/species adds a bonus on top of that.  These are then used in skills.

Similarly, the Classes (professions) give bonuses to particular categories of skills, and furthermore dictate how much skills within these categories cost.  A fighter, then, can learn his primary weapon skill at 1 point to go up a level.  An academic-type character pays 4, or 6, or 9 (I don't exactly remember).  Similarly in reverse.

Thus, a rat person who has bonuses to Strength and Agility (the RM attributes) would have, say +2 or +3 to both of those.  Thus an average rat person (50 in those attributes) would have a +2 or +3 bonus, while a human with the same score (50) would have +0.  And this is the same up and down the scale (a human with 100 has, I think +15, so the rat person would have +18).

An a person who picks the "Academic" class (called a "profession") can learn Lore skills (like Geography).  He gets a bonus to all Lore skills, so without putting any points in it, he probably has a +10 or +15 skill vs' a normal character's +0.  (I'm now pulling these numbers entirely out of my ass, so use them only for comparison).  Then the academic only has to put 1 point into the category to raise the skill, while the non-academic has to put 2 or 3 points into it.

Which adds up over time.

So, there's one system that does it, and I just vaguely spelled out the WAY it does it.  I've more than once considered adapting/stealing RM's skill category system for other games.

[HMT]

If I remember correctly, the Rolemaster rules had this effect, at least in part. It was achieved by having the costs in the point by system depend on the character's profession (or whatever it was called) and letting the preferred professions buy more ranks of a trait per level (it's a level based system).

[sirogit]

If I read that right, that doesn't seem to have the "Exponentially higher per focus strength" feature I was looking for.

That is, if you just get a 15+ geography by being an Academic, than the difference is most sharp between characters that do not develop geography aside from the profession, I.E. with an academic with a geography of 15 compared to a fighter with a geography of 0. Compared to both developing geography, so an Academic would have 95 and a fighter would have 50 I guess?

I'm thinking a way you could get that feature, is by having the expiereince cost to raise a skill equal it's level to the power of X, where X is a number gotten from the profession, low numbers good.

So an Academic's geography rating would be 2, where a fighter's would be 3.

For the academic, levels of geography would cost:

1 - 1
2 - 4
3 - 9
4 - 16
5 - 25

Where a fighter would cost:

1 - 1
2 - 8
3 - 27
4 - 64
5 - 125

Do you think this could be done simpler? Or with skill apitude be represented with higher numbers?

[Lxndr]

Well, Rolemaster is one of the best examples, even if it doesn't do extremes as well as you'd like.  Still, its basic pattern is a good one to adapt, as you've started to.

I'll have to think more to decide whether it's the "best" way to do it.

[sirogit]

Another idea that just came to me that doesn't require such high numbers:

Keep the same deal with "Character type"s providing a Difficulty to raise all of your traits.

The cost for raising Traits goes up by the Difficulty or the Trait, whichever is lower.  

So...

At Difficulty level one(Character type is prodigious at this), levels cost:

1 - 1
2 - 2
3 - 3
4 - 4
5 - 5
10 - 10

At difficultyly level three(Character Type is fairly ingrained towards skill), levels cost:

1 - 1
2 - 3
3 - 6
4 - 9
5 - 12
10 - 27

The only problem with this, is that it sort of falls apart for characters with higher difficulties than traits, making no mechanical distinction between the different difficulty levels. Something I'd like to avoid.

[M. J. Young]

I'm going to recommend you get a copy of Star Frontiers; the PDF was being given away free last year, so you can probably find a copy (I regret that I did not download it, as I have it in print and was hard up for hard drive space for a while).

It does a couple things that move this direction; see if these help at all.

First, there are racial differences. Apart from the fact that each race has a unique ability and some serious quirky differences (e.g., dralasites have a lot of interesting abilities, particularly strong hearing, smell, and taste, but they are color blind), each race gets specific bonuses and penalties on rolling attributes. The attributes are 1-100 range (for humans), and you roll d100, but the roll is then plotted against a bell curve which provides results 20-80 with strong centrist tendencies; but +10 on a roll tends to push a character's score way up if at the bottom end, while benefiting less but still significantly near the top end.

Second, rather than choosing a class, each character has a "primary skill area" (PSA). There are three of these: military, technological, and biosocial. You could buy and advance skills in any area, but it only cost half as much to do so in your PSA.

Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that.

There were more military skills than any other--projectiles, thrown, energies, rocketed projectiles, primitives, martial arts, one more that slips my mind--Oh, demolitions. If you were military PSA, it cost 3 to learn any one of these, six to get to second level, 9 for third, and you could go as far as sixth level for 18 points (on top of spending 15 for level 5, and so on). If you were not military, these cost 6 to start, then 12, 18, 24, 30, 36--thus it was a lot more difficult to get good at these things. (Each level was worth +10% on your chance of success; some, but not all, of these could be done without skill.)

If you had a technological PSA, the robotics, computers, and technician skills each cost 4 to start, increasing by 4 for each additional level; it cost 8, increasing by 8, if you were not tech PSA. Tech skills were important, as you needed them to do things like operate vehicles, make repairs, and work with a lot of the devices in the world; usually there was no chance of success without the skill.

A biosocial PSA covered the skills medical, psych-social, and environmental; the biosocial PSA character could buy these at 5 for level 1, and then similarly increasing by 5 per level; others had to pay 10. Without medical 1 you couldn't do anything for an injured character. The other skills were very useful in survival and contacting alien cultures, and had other applications as well.

The result was a strong tendency to choose skills in your PSA except to the degree that you needed the others, and for people in a particular PSA to be strongest in those skills. Note that even if you took the biosocial PSA whose skills are most expensive, you pay less for your biosocial skills (multiples of 5) than you would for military skills (multiples of 10).

The system did break down under heavy use. It was possible to devise a list of skills everyone should have, that would give you some chance to do anything (aided by the fact that a level 1 medical had a chance of succeeding at major surgery--the only skill I recall in which level made a difference in what you could do, as opposed to your chance of success, was that technicians would learn to operate more complicated vehicles as it progressed). Also, when the Knight Hawks supplement came out with the spaceship skills in it, the strong emphasis on tech prerequisites unbalanced the values of the non-spaceship skills, making a tech PSA the better choice. A lot of effort was made to tweak this in Zebulon's Guide to the Galaxy, but 1) I never played with those rules, and only know from reading them; 2) they looked like they had seriously complicated the system; and 3) a lot of bits in it were going to be developed in Volume 2, which WotC people have reliably informed me was never published. Still, the core concept might help significantly in what you're attempting, and it's worth a look.

--M. J. Young

[Andrew Martin]

I want a system combining Class-like options and point buy systems that has a very exact result from choosing a character type, such as, effecting every trait, and this effect's strength is much more if the character has a focus in such a thing.
...
Know any systems that do this or a way to do it?

Fudge is capable of doing this. Just define a Rat people species, and define their differences in respect to the human average. So taking your example and measuring on the Fudge word scale, Rat People would have:

Strength: Great
Dexterity: Great
Appearance: Poor (Looks like a rat! :) )

When generating a Rat Person character, the player still uses the full range of the Fudge scale from Terrible to Superb. So a "undeveloped" Rat Person's attributes could look like:

Strength: Poor
Dexterity: Poor

Amongst Rat people, the above character has Poor strength and dexterity. Though when arm-wrestling a average human, the contest would be 50/50 because the Rat People bonus of Great (+2) plus the Rat Person's Poor (-2) strength combine to form a effective total of Fair (0).

An average Rat Person of Fair Strength with the Rat People's Great Strength who arm-wrestles a average human of Fair strength will almost certainly win as the Rat Person has +2 (Great) over the human's Fair (0).

Similarly for the Academic profession, as compared to non-academic professions, though in a different way. Just have a Profession/Occupation/Career/Calling broad skill named after the occupation. For example:

Calling: Duelist
Calling: Geographer
Occupation: Computer Programmer
Profession: Civil Engineer
Career: Orthopaedic Surgeon

Then simply assign that broad skill a Fudge word, and all skills that would logically fit into that category are known by the character at that skill level. For example:

Calling: Duelist Great

This character knows how to duel another, taunt another into foolishly accepting a duel, knows the ettiquette of duels (and how to get around them), knows how to cure minor sword wounds along with a host of other skills that I wouldn't know, but a professional duelist would know.

Of course, Fudge has one disadvantage that it doesn't have a points buy system and is classless, which may be a disadvantage in your point of view.

[Autocrat]

Hmmm... I might be misreading this, so if what I suggest seems odd, please ignore or correct me.

  So, you have a Race/Species, Ratmen.  This R/S is superior to the Human R/S in Str and Dex.  
  Then you wanted it so that unless the Ratman R/S is uterly pathetic, it would still be considered as superior to the Human R/S in those two attirubtes/stats.
  Thus, though the Ratman Longwhisker is a puny little runt compared to his pack brethren, when compared to Rupert, a strong Human, he is viewed as still being stronger and more dexterous.

  Well, you could have any of the following;

1)
  External S/R Modifier.  Any and all tests/checks/rolls involving those attributes that are considered hi/low receives a Modifier.
  This means that a Test of strength for the Human with a Str of 20 would get a + 5 R/S Modifier, where as the Ratman with a Str of 12 would get a + 15 R/S Modifier.  So the weakling of a Ratman is still stronger.

2)
  Have S/R ranges.  The S/R have a base score when you allocate that S/R.  The Player can then hi'r/lo'r it to suit their taste, within the bounderies set.  Thus S/R's known to be physically weak would have a fairly lo average score, say 12, and a range of 4, (so that the stat could be 10 to 14), where as a S/R jknown to be Strong could have a base of 30 and a range of 10, (thus going from 25 to 35).

3)
  Have a scaleable Modifier.  Depending on the Species/Race, you divide the relevant Stat by a set number.  The resulting number is the modifier.
This means that Humans may have a divider of 4 for Strength, where as the Ratmen might only have a divider of 2.  This means that even if they have the same Base stat score, the modifier the Humans get will always be half of the Ratmen, (Base of 20, Humans get +5, Ratment get +10).

4)
  Allocated Species/Racial Traits.  All members of that species have a Trait that gives them a set modifier, no matter their base stat score.
  Whats more, you could permit them to choose from a variety of these Traits, so a Ratman could choose from 4 different types of Strong - Fairly, very, incrediably and unbelievably.
  The difference this makes will vary upon the species and interspecies comparison.  A very Strong human might not be as strong as a fairly strong Ratman, sa their Base stat is lower!

  Of course, all these things really depend on you system and the stats, the range of numbers you permit etc.



  There are many different ways of doing it, depending on your system, yet AD&D is a prime example of something simple.  If you are AAA, then you get 111, if BBB, you get 222 etc.
  Not very suave, yet it worked.... in most cases, Elves had higher Dexterities, Dwarves had higher cosntitutions and Halflings never had 18+ Strength!

[Doctor Xero]

This also reminds me of Corps' cascading skills system.

I don't have my copy of the system with me, so I'll make up an example:

A PC might have a +1 in melee combat, a +1 in bladed weaponry, a +1 in knife.
When using the knife, the PC applies a +3 bonus.  When using any other bladed
weapon, the PC applies a +2 bonus.  When engaging in melee combat without use
of a bladed weapon, the PC applies a +1 bonus.

With this system, giving one's PC a +3 in knife would require that one also give
said PC a +1 in bladed weaponry and a +1 in melee combat, building into the
system a spill-over proficiency with related skills (any PC with a +3 in knife would
have to have a +2 in other bladed weapons, for example).

Of course, there are bonuses other than +1 possible in the game, and each level
has a different character point cost.

This counters the tendency for one to give one's PC a +3 in knife that provides
zero bonus to other bladed weapons nor to other forms of melee combat.

Doctor Xero