[Song of Ethera] Preliminary Notes

[Selene Tan]

I'm a long-time lurker at the Forge, but never really felt like I had anything to post about. But I recently finished NaNoWriMo (I'm a novelist! Yay!) and the experience made me decide to knuckle down and try to make an RPG in a week. (Er, maybe two, since I started last Sunday and am not very far.) I'm calling it Song of Ethera because Ethera is a world I've fiddled with for a while, and because I like bards. (Clearly the main problem with D&D is that bards aren't cool enough. ;))

Right now I have a bunch of jumbled notes that need to get more coherent. I'm mostly looking for feedback that will help me get my thoughts and priorities straight, as well thoughts about the implications of some of my ideas.

Ethera is a fantasy world where everything has life energy, and this energy can be sensed and manipulated in various ways. It's kind of like the Chinese conception of Qi/Chi. The idea I've tossed out for the basis of the setting is that a long time ago, there used to be free-flowing magical energy that came from some source. Unfortunately, humans went wild using it and started challenging the gods and stuff, and finally the gods locked down the source behind a huge barrier. The barrier still exists, but now people just remember that a "great evil" was locked away. In recent times, there have been strange omens and creatures appearing, because people have been attacking the barrier and it's been leaking magic. The party is a group of people who're out to stop that. (Or they might be out to take the barrier down.) Actually I guess that's more of a campaign idea than a setting idea since it's not a very stable state...
One thing I thought of for Ethera is that everyone is born with a "naming note" (a term I stole from Elizabeth Haydn's books), which means they resonate to some part of the cosmic harmony. Semi-arbitrarily I decided that there were 5 notes, making up a typical pentatonic scale, which is easy to harmonize (this may not have been the best reason). I also decided to tie attributes to naming notes, which led to some cute diagrams involving harmonious musical intervals. I'm not sure they were a good idea. Then I decided that different types of occupations are aligned to the different notes, which of course meant that different classes were aligned to the different naming notes. And so characters are naturally better at classes whose notes are harmonious with (or the same as) theirs. (More cute diagrams.) I think the idea behind this was that you should be able to tell, based on a character's naming note and their class, the rough level of effectiveness of the character.

Anyways, I want to make a Gamist RPG with low competition at the Challenge level. I like the idea of having the party working together to defeat a bunch of challenges. I'd kind of like to focus on the puzzle-solving aspect.
I like classes, and I think the niche protection they afford would enhance the game. Bards will be a class, and I'd like them to be specialists. The tentative break-down I came up with is that priests can do stuff involving divine power (possibly they are given geases or taboos in exchange for the powers). Sorcerers are people who manipulate life energy in disruptive ways, like sacrificing people and re-animating corpses. Bards (well, maybe more like "artists", but that sounds too wimpy) can actually create energy, since their specialty is to create.

The mechanic I've come up with to emphasize puzzle-solving uses "specializations" or "areas of expertise" for the different attributes. If you're trying to do something that doesn't fall under one of your specializations, you make a roll based on the attribute at a heavy penalty. (I haven't decided on the exact dice mechanics yet, although I do want dice.) If it does fall under the specialization, then you roll using your attribute without penalty. I was also thinking of throwing in sub-specializations, where you roll using your attribute with some bonus, and which are cheaper to get than specializations.
Related to this, classes would act kind of like attributes, and would have specializations and areas of expertise. Adding more specializations (powers) would be kind of like "leveling up" in that class. I'm tempted to throw in "talents" of some sort that aren't covered by the attributes. I'm also tempted to ditch the attributes altogether and just have broad skill groups, but then I can't link them to naming notes.

I want some sort of system to encourage party cooperation. Some sort of group-wide karma pool? Maybe a rule that if someone thinks of a strategy to use but needs someone else to implement it, they need to spend some points? Wait, that probably encourages competition instead of cooperation. Maybe if the points are regained with interest when the strategy succeeds, and lost if it fails?

Anyway, this is as far as I've gotten, and I think it's at a stage where I need to have other people pointing out things.

[Alan]

Hi Selene,

Glad to see you working on game concept.

A quick response:

A great deal of Gamist play in DnD3.0 revolves around choices in character creation and improvement.  If you want to focus on in-play puzzles, you might want to keep an eye on where this focus falls.

Another thought: who will be solving the puzzles, the characters or the players?  It might be interesting to focus on having the players solve the puzzles and provide support for that ( an extensive GM section on creating good puzzles. )  This approach shows up in Tunnels and Trolls for example, though T&T doesn't provide a lot of support.

If yougo this route, then maybe rolling character abilities shouldn't be the primary focus of solving puzzles.

[Jonathan Walton]

A few reactions:

So all the characters are going to be "magic user" types of one variety or another, all with the power to manipulate this god-qi stuff in one of several unque ways, right?  And is a party going to be composed of a variety of different types of magic users, then, who probably have philosophical or just personal differences about how this god-qi should be used?  But then it's good for them to work together in order to surmount these puzzles and stuff.  Do I have it so far?

Basing the system around a pentatonic scale sounds cool.  Surely you could mine traditional notation systems from cultures where pentatonic scales are the way to go, and then come up with cool names for attributes and symbolic associations and neat stuff like that.  Some part of me also likes the idea of constructing "spells" according to note-based system and then having players sing them in order to do kewl stuff, but that would probably require playing with a bunch of music dorks :)

I agree with Alan that your die-rolling system + areas of expertise doesn't sound really evocative of the kind of puzzle-solving play that you seem to be getting at, but maybe I'm just not really sure what you want the game to play like.  Are these elaborate GM puzzles that the players have to work their way through by trial and error (visions of playing Zelda but with a group of people)?  If so, Alan's right that you're gonna need some support to set those up: something like the town-creation guidelines in Dogs in the Vineyard or the session-creation stuff in Rune (in fact, I'd suggest checking out Rune, since it does a neat kind of non-traditional Gamism with puzzles and stuff).

Another possibility: maybe start out with simple puzzles and let them grow more complicated as the players begin solving them.  So you have like a basic trap, and once they start disarming it they realize that it's much more extensive than they originally thought.  This way it doesn't have to all be pre-planned and can just complicate itself as you play, based on the interests and input of the players.  Or go the Donjon route and have the skills the players choose to bring into play determine how the puzzle complicates itself ("Well, I've can manipulate god-qi to make myself invulnerable to fire, so the chamber should have a giant lava flow with salamanders erupting out of it and then dark creatures that shoot flaming arrows...").

Hope there's something in there worth thinking about.  I look forward to seeing where you go with this.

[Selene Tan]

One of my influences for Song of Ethera was a martial arts fantasy comic I was reading (hence the qi). At the moment, each class has one primary attribute, and I figure that members of the class are specialized at channeling their qi through that attribute. So for the physical attributes you get things like most of the characters in that comic, or Shadowrun Physical Adepts. For the non-physical attributes, you get more typical magic users.
I hadn't thought of stressing philosophical differences between the classes, but I like it.

Thanks for the tips about Rune! I've taken a look at the freebies on the website and some of it looks a lot like what I want. The encounter design rules are especially interesting, if a bit heavy on the bookkeeping for my taste.

I want puzzles which involve a bit of lateral thinking and the GM and players trying to outwit each other. Something kind of like Donjon, but with the puzzles presented more formally and with more mechanics to encourage contests of wits. I posted the conflict mechanic I came up with in Conflict Mechanic to Encourage Puzzle-Solving.

I looove rolling dice, so I'm reluctant to let them go. ;) I just had the idea of making dice rolls dictate degree of success/complications when using specializations. i.e., when you use a specialization, you will succeed, but depending on the die roll there might be added complications. Of course, that's now tempting me to steal Donjon's success/narration mechanic...