The Big Numbers Fantasy System

[caeman]

Greetings.

I have had an idea on paper for yet another way of handling RPG mechanics.  I like the idea of many attributes.  I also like using multiple types of dice in a game, even at the same time!  And like many a good gamer, I am feeling the need to share it with others for some sense of self-approval that I am not as crazy as the voices say I am.  *grin*

The basic premise behind these mechanics is the idea that players never really reach a maximum.  As long as an adventurer is still active and there is still a world to subdue (isn't there always yet another threat to subdue?), they keep learning and growing. Thus, this system has no cap on skill level.  As skill levels get ever higher, they take ever longer to increase, but that is okay, because there is no cap on character levels, either.

Here is version 0.1 of my idea.  It does not contain a combat system at this time.  That is for version 0.2.  Other missing aspects will be filled in as I get each step wrote up and debugged.

Any and all comments are appreaciated regarding:

Do the basic mechanics flow well enough for the average player to understand without having to re-read the rules each time they want to do something?

Are the current basic mechanics self-consistent?

Any other comments or suggestions are welcomed, too.

-Chad Wilson

**
THE BIG NUMBERS FANTASY SYSTEM
version 0.1

HOW THE NUMBERS WORK
Attributes and skills will have a numeric value of 0 or more.  These numbers (or levels) are compared to the Dice Chart to see what dice are rolled.

THE DICE CHART
Value   Dice
-----   ------
1   d4
2   d6
3   d8
4   d10
5   d10+d4
6   d10+d6
7   d10+d8
8   2d10
...etc...

PRIMARY ATTRIBUTES
There are six primary attributes: Body, Mind, Social, Divine, Psionic and Magic.

Each primary attribute has three abilities: Strength, Prowess and Endurance.

Each attribute ability has a value of 0 to 10 for normal humans.  A 0 represents no ability whatsoever.

Different races (PC and NPC) may have different maximums and minimums for attribute's ability.

(insert notes here on how many points the players gets to for placement into the attribute abilities)

SECONDARY ATTRIBUTES
Each primary attribute has a Health rating.  The health rating is calculated by adding up the three abilities that make up that attribute.  e.g. Body Health = Body Strength + Prowess + Endurance.

SKILLS
Each skill has a value of 0 or greater.  There is no maximum value a skill may reach.

(insert big long list of skills here)

USING A SKILL
To use a skill, take the value of the skill and add the value of the attribute ability for a total value. Look on the dice chart for the level, then over to see the dice to be rolled for that total value.  Total the result of the dice rolled.

The gamemaster will set a Difficulty Number (DN) for the task for the player's roll to be compared against.  If the player equals or exceeds the DN, then the player succeeds.

THE DIFFICULTY CHART
DN   Description
--   -----------
4   Very Easy
8   Easy
12   Moderate
16   Hard
20   Very Hard
30   Remarkable
40   Incredible
50   Amazing
75   Monstrous
100   Unearthly

GAINING CHARACTER LEVELS
Character begin at Level 0, with 0 Experience Points (XP).  At each 100 XP gained, the character increases their level.  At 100 XP total, they are Level 1, level 2 at 200 XP, etc.

When a character reaches a new level, they gain new points to spend on improving their attributes and skills.  Roll d10 plus whatever bonus points the gamemaster deems the player worthy of to determine how many new points the character gains.

Alternately, the gamemaster can choose to give a set number of points with each new level, or use one the attribute abilities to determine the points.

To raise a skill costs (2 x new level) points.

To raise an attribute ability costs (4 x new level) points.

To buy a new skill costs 2 points (2 x level 1).  The GM may require in-game training to justify the new skill.

GAINING EXPERIENCE POINTS
A character gains experience points by defeating the enemy or accomplishing a task.  The value of the experience gain is equal to difficulty of the task or the enemy.

In the case of a task to be completed, let us say that Bob the Thief wants to spend the afternoon picking pockets at the local market.  Because the market is jam packed with people, the gamemaster determines the task to be Very Easy (DN of 4), thus, each person that Bob successfully pickpockets, he gains 4 experience points.  Each individual person to be pickpocketed may have a different level of difficulty to actually be picked, but the situation itself is Very Easy for a thief to take advantage of with all those people bumping into each other.  If Bob gets caught, though, he still gains the XP (we learn from our mistakes), but is now probably being chased down by the town guard.

This also works for a quest being given to a group to complete.  Since a quest is much larger than a single task (usually), a greater experience point value should be placed on it.  One option is to rate the difficulty (using the difficulty chart) of the quest, and multiply the matching DN by 25 for a group.

In the case of a enemy opponent, the level of the character or NPC determines the experience point value to be gained.  All characters involved in attacking an enemy share in the experience points gained.  If four characters attack and defeat a level 100 enemy, they would each receive 25 experience points.

If a large number of enemies are involved, add up the total of the levels of the enemy opponents.

COMBAT
(insert combat rules here)

[M. J. Young]

Welcome to the Forge, Chad. Is there a particular reason why this is in theory instead of design? Not that I mind, as I don't get to too many game design threads anymore, but generally if you are working on a game you plan to publish (means make available to other gamers by some means) it goes in design.

HOW THE NUMBERS WORK
Attributes and skills will have a numeric value of 0 or more.  These numbers (or levels) are compared to the Dice Chart to see what dice are rolled.

THE DICE CHART
Value   Dice
-----   ------
1   d4
2   d6
3   d8
4   d10
5   d10+d4
6   d10+d6
7   d10+d8
8   2d10
...etc....

The idea that you can have zero in both attributes and skills, that to do something you sum an attribute plus a skill to find the dice to be rolled, and that the minimum roll is for one die, tells me that it will sometimes be impossible to attempt something--if the character has a zero skill and a zero attribute, he gets no dice. Is that a feature, or a bug?

THE DIFFICULTY CHART
DN   Description
--   -----------
4   Very Easy
8   Easy
12   Moderate
16   Hard
20   Very Hard
30   Remarkable
40   Incredible
50   Amazing
75   Monstrous
100   Unearthly

What do you envision as starting values for a player character? I'm noting later

When a character reaches a new level, they gain new points to spend on improving their attributes and skills.  Roll d10 plus whatever bonus points the gamemaster deems the player worthy of to determine how many new points the character gains.

Alternately, the gamemaster can choose to give a set number of points with each new level, or use one the attribute abilities to determine the points.

To raise a skill costs (2 x new level) points.

To raise an attribute ability costs (4 x new level) points.

To buy a new skill costs 2 points (2 x level 1).  The GM may require in-game training to justify the new skill.

This suggests that "very easy" is not so easy. Given the chart above, the chance of success (roughly, and if I did all my math right) for each value for each difficulty level would be:

Code Select Expand


Category    TN   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8
Very Easy  (4)  25  50  63  70  93  95  96  97
Easy       (8)   0   0  13  30  55  65  74  79
Moderate  (12)   0   0   0   0  15  25  35  45
Hard      (16)   0   0   0   0   0   2   8  15
Very Hard (20)   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   1

I'm not thinking that "very hard" means a character with a 4 attribute and a 4 skill has one chance in a hundred of accomplishing it. I'm not thinking that a character with a 1 attribute and a 1 skill ought to have no chance at all of accomplishing an "easy" task, or indeed that our character with 4 and 4 should have a 21% chance of failing on an "easy" task. Maybe I don't understand your numbers, but maybe you need to look at your curve a bit more closely, or at least figure out what starting values are appropriate.

Also, for what it's worth, I know unearthly is supposed to be, well, unearthly; but given that you have to have a combined A+S of 40 to roll 10d10, and if you do you have one chance in ten billion of succeeding, do you even need a rule for that? Or are you anticipating a lot of characters with mega-high abilities?

Let me return to this:

To raise a skill costs (2 x new level) points.

To raise an attribute ability costs (4 x new level) points.

Mike must have a standard rant around here somewhere related to attribute+skill systems in which you can increase the values independently. Don't misunderstand me--Multiverser has an attribute+skill system in which you can increase the values independently, and I think it works. However, of what I see of this system so far, it falls right into the trap against which he warns.

The problem lies here: I've got attribute 1 and skill 1. I want to improve my ability in this skill. I can spend 4 points to raise skill to 2, or I can spend 8 points to raise attribute to 2. Either will give me the same benefit relative to this skill. However, raising the attribute will give me that same benefit relative to every other skill to which it is relevant. Thus, with this system, there is no reason ever to spend points on skills, because you will get far more bang for your buck buying attributes.

There are a couple of ways you can make such a system workable; here are some ideas.

[*]If you have a closed skill system, you can probably figure a break point at which the cost of an increased attribute is not worth the advantage unless you're looking at a very large number of skills. This tends, though, to have an opposite effect from what you probably want--that is, if someone wants to be a combat monster, he's better off buying up incredibly high attributes and ignoring skills, while someone who only wants to shine in one weapon buys up that weapon skill (a rough illustration).[*]You can finely detail your skills such that each has added value as it increases in level. An excellent example of this is Star Frontiers, in which a pilot can fly system ships at level 1, small interstellars at level 2, and so on until he can operate the largest ships at level 6. Some other skills are treated this way in that game, but not all are so treated, and it's a lot of detail both to include in the book and to remember at the table (I'm sorry, what level do you have to have in technician before you can fly a jetcopter? I think you're still limited to ground vehicles).[*]Multiverser uses attribute+skill, but uses skill for other features of ability, such as speed at which the task can be performed. Thus a character with a high attribute and low skill and one with a high skill and low attribute may have the same chance of hitting a specific target, but the one with skill might hit it twice or even thrice in the time the other hits it once. Also, the quality of the task completion may be better if the skill is high, but not the attribute. Again, using combat as a simple example, a high skill will boost the amount of damage a weapon can do, but a high attribute will not.[*]You can cap attributes. This will change the balance at the point of the cap--characters are making the best investments if they push their attributes to maximum and then worry about skills--but at least it gets them focused on skills eventually.[/list:u]
It also appears that you've got an accelerating rate of advancement. It looks like from what you said that you gain a level every time you earn another one hundred experience points. That could be a misunderstanding on my part; you said 100 for level 1, 200 for level 2, I assumed that was total and you needed 300 for level 3. It might have meant that you double the points needed for each level, or it might have meant you restart the counter at zero when the level is earned, but neither of those would have been my understanding of the rule as it was presented. Since as I advance I can succeed against bigger difficulty numbers and my experience is earned equal to the difficulty, the levels will come faster and faster, until at those incredibly high levels you envision I will be earning several levels per encounter. There's a reason why D&D levels are progressively farther apart--so that as you get better it will become harder to get better yet. Granted, the high level characters need those levels because their skill improvements have gotten quite expensive, but from a paperwork standpoint you might do better to create a system by which levels are progressively further apart, but benefits in raw points are greater to keep up with the increasing costs of skills and attributes. That strikes me, personally, as a nightmare to design, but if you got it straight it could work pretty well.

I'm also wondering whether you have an advancing difficulty problem here. If you look at D&D3E (which really does have a lot in common with your model, from what I've seen of each), part of the challenge for the referee is to develop tougher and tougher scenarios for the increasingly powerful characters. What you wind up with, to some degree, is a balancing act in which what changes is 1) how resources are best managed, 2) how long it takes to accomplish anything, and 3) the color of the story. That is, a high level character fighting a giant is not appreciably different from a low level character fighting a goblin in terms of what is happening (apart from the resource management aspect). With no ceiling on how powerful a character can become, you are headed toward spiraling power levels of adversaries, and how many demon dragons can inhabit one continent without destroying the entire thing?

Anyway, those were my immediate reactions (and now I'm reminded why I don't usually do game design forum posts). I hope they're helpful.

--M. J. Young

[lev_lafayette]

I'll agree with the previous comment that this should be in design, not theory.

But I do have one "theory" question arising from the design. You have attributes, right? These are, kinda-sorta fixed, genetically derived and so forth. You have skills, right? These are the kinda-sorta, memetically learned stuff, right?

OK, then is it really good idea that skills are infinite in their expansion?

Ultimately, it doesn't matter how skilled you are. You can't parry a lightning bolt with a greatsword. That requires strength and speed.

[caeman]

And this why I posted to theory.  It seems I was making some fundamentals mistakes in my own thoughts.

Thank you for the comments.

Back to the drawing board to correct some things.

You know, I have all of these ideas floating around in my head, but I am not very good at writing them down.

-w