Ideas on other Race/Sorcery Priorities

[Morfedel]

I was thinking of possible alternate priority schemes for Race/Sorcery, and thought I'd ask for feedback.

Idea 1:

Replace the bottom three humans with the following:

D: Superior Human - gain all positive and no negative modifiers from your nationality
E: Human - as normal
F: Inferior Human - gain only the negative modifiers for your nationality type.


Idea 2: For playing a completely humanocentric game, such as the Black Company setting.

A: Can cast any spell of any level.

B: Can Cast Spells of One with the level of any vagary of any level,  Spells of three where any vagary can be of any level, and Spells of Many where any vagary involved may not exceed a level of 2.

C: Can Cast Spells of One with the level of any vagary of any level,  Spells of three where any vagary can never exceed a level of 2, and Spells of Many where any vagary involved may not exceed a level of 1.

D:Can Cast Spells of One with the level of any vagary never exceeding 2, and Spells of three where any vagary can never exceed a level of 1.

E: Can Cast Spells of One only with the level of any vagary never exceeding 1.

F: Non Gifted Human

In this case, this would be a permanent choice: once chosen as level E, for instance, one could never cast spells except spells of one, and never exceed a vagary level of one. That is the gift they were born with, and which they can never exceed.

[Valamir]

D: Superior Human - gain all positive and no negative modifiers from your nationality
E: Human - as normal
F: Inferior Human - gain only the negative modifiers for your nationality type.

I like the concept, but I don't think it works out mathematically.

Since these bonuses relate to attributes you'd have to compare it to the attribute scale.  If you dropped attributes by 1 priority in order to bump race by 1 priority, I think you'd be giving up way more attribute points than you'd be getting from the race.

Meaning in all cases you'd still be better off taking F in race, in which case you're just dropping everyones attributes and no one would get the bonus.


To work, you'd have to come up with some other benefit to give D and E humans that you can't get from any of the other scales.

Such as, allowing an E human to have one SA that caps at 6 instead of 5 and a D to have 2.

Or, if one treats Luck as a completely seperate Non SA item (a not uncommon suggestion) an F human might start with 1 point, an E with 3 and a D with 5.

Or, if playing a high social level campaign where each character is a minor noble, the E and D levels could represent ones followers/retainers/vassals being more loyal than typical.

That sort of thing

[The Heretic]

I was thinking of doing something similar to what you describe, although I was thinking in something more like the Heroic Paths of Midnight. frex:

D:"Heroic Path" Human (Warg, Dragonblooded, Ironborn, etc)
E: ?
F: Normal Human

Although this may make humans more powerful than your average Seelie character. I havent played the game so I dont know.

A.S.

[Brian Leybourne]

I let players take any priority they like, with D-F being a "normal human" as usual, but if they choose a higher priority than F I bring something interesting a a bit different into the game for them.

One character with an E ended up being a Weire, for example (just without sorcery), and is slowly learning that he's really some weird kind of "animal friend". One character who put in D started off by never having to sleep, seldom having to eat, and has slowly been finding out mysterious things about himself, like when he really concentrates he can influence peoples minds through some kind of mind control, etc.

In other words, rather than telling players what the benefits are of D or E, I tailor the benefit to them to suit the character and the campaign. It works really well.

YMMV.

Brian.

[Ingenious]

The general message of this post to me is this:
'We need a good reason to use insight points that give us an extra E, or D'
Because nobody in our group over here ever uses insight points until it moves something up on the priority ladder other than race.
What's the point in using insight at the lower levels then??
I see none currently. A bonus E that moves race from F to E does nothing at all currently.

Good ideas guys, just hash em out some more.
-Ingenious

[Edge]

unless of course you don't play a human and then not having to choose F priority for anything really helps

[Morfedel]

I just saw it as a kind of gap. I mean, what if I wanted to play a slave, like a kind of Conan just as he is getting free from his bondage?

Sure, I could just DO it, but its kind of disappointing to through a D or E in race and get the same thing as you would an F.

I think its right that my initial racial ideas for D and E (superior human, etc) may not be all that great after all. I'll have to rethink it.

As for the sorcery mod, it was designed to give different levels of sorcery, to represent different levels of the gift; it would only really be used in an entirely human game. What did you all think of it?

Brian, I like how you do it. that sounds very interesting.

[[MKF]Kapten]

I usually let the character start with some small supernatural ability (non supernatural abilities are covered by gifts for the most part). This might be something like Evil eye (give a person -2 dices for some action), eyes of different colours (let's the character make pretty accurate divinations with the right skill), healing (the character can reduce pain by 2 by applying his hands for a minute).

Nothing big but pretty useful.