Philosophical/"Wonder Story" setting

[F. Scott Banks]

Styles huh...

Styles as in combat styles or am I misreading a game term?

[Palaskar]

No, not as combat styles. As general methods of doing things. A good example is the "faster, better, cheaper" modifiers taken by one of the game designers here. You pick two of the modifiers of faster/better/cheaper to modify an attribute.

I'm not even sure if I'm going to use styles, because I might be able to get away with just Broad Skills and Race. But I want someone else's input, to see if their approach is better.

See, I could go Broad Skills (Survival, Martial Arts, Area Knowledge, Etiquette, Knowledge, Medicine, etc.) but this means that I have to predefine some stuff for each race. For example, if a PC takes Martial Arts/Dragonlord I have to define just what's in that Martial Art. This particular example is not a problem, since I want to define Martial Arts for each race anyway.

But what happens when a PC picks, say, Cooking? I'd have to define all the different ways each race cooks. Now, granted, I'm going to write a lot of background on each race, so maybe this isn't a problem. But I think it would be a lot easier to have various "Styles" applicable to each Broad Skill, and say, "This race prefers Style X and Style B for such-and-such a Broad Skill."

[Palaskar]

Ok, I've come up with some more styles of doing things. Their names now are really non-flavorful, but I figure they can be polished.

The styles are:

Increased Initiative
Increased chance of User Success (ie, + to hit)
Decreased chance of User Failure (subtract this number from base failures)
Decreased chance of Opponent Success (ie, - to opponent's to hit)
Increased amount of User's Successes (ie, + to damage)
Increased base User Successes (Successes are equal to this or higher)
Decreased amount of Opponent's Success (ie, - to opponent's damage)

It's possible to combine one or more base styles to generate a race's preferred style. Also, each style can vary from -3 to +3. So, for example, stir-frying might be a Cooking Style with:

Increased Initiative: +2
Decreased chance of User Failure: +2

Hmm. It seems to me I'm just making things more crunchy. This is a good thing from a MMORPG point of view, but I wonder if I'm just complicating things that could be done with just describing each Broad Skill for each race.

Thoughts?