Sheer Madness, or Doable -- Click-n-Lock Triangle

[Josh Roby]

So in trying to set up my Capes Fantasy game, it occured to me that unlike the Capes-default superhero of two character components (Persona and Powerset), generic fantasy characters usually have three -- Persona, Race, and Class.  It then occured to me that the default click-n-locks only mesh the Styles together while keeping Powers/Skills and Attitudes separate.  Would it be possible to have a set of click-n-locks that had three parts, and intermeshed all three categories of abilities?

So I fired up ol' Illustrator and came up with a three-way Click-n-Lock Template and the character sheet it goes on.

Now, I'm curious what those wiser and more experienced in Capes-fu might thing of this scheme.  Is it madness, or is this doable?

[Andrew Morris]

Okay, first thought is why make the complicated circle formation? You could just create another click-n-lock that fits between the standard two. It'd work a bit differently, but it seems more intuitive and easier to use.

Next thought is...why? Having more traits means more available resources, unless you go with a crazy "cross out eight" rule to go with the new sheets. That would throw off the normal functioning of the system, I'd think.

[Darren Hill]

I'd have thought fantasy characters would have the same components - Persona and Powerset. Race is a bit of a red herring and falls into one of those two as appropriate - sometimes it's persona/attitude, at others it's power/skills/cool abilities. A good gaming example might be OD&D, where "Elf" is a class. Contrasted with D&D3, where it's a bit of both, but mostly colour/attitude.

[dunlaing]

Seems sort of complicated. It would be easier to have Race provide one Power, one Style, and one Attitude and just have it be a long strip that covers up the bottom of the other two click n' locks.

[Ben Lehman]

*squints*

What kind of fantasy are you reading?

yrs--
--Ben

[TonyLB]

I think folks are missing some of the elegance.

The reason for the circle, rather than just a linear layout, is that it lets him wrap around the two ends of the normal click-and-locks (the bits that are normally a self-contained column on a single click-and-lock module) and interlace them with the third module.  That lets him pour a third click-and-lock into the previous two without adding any abilities ... check it out, the circle still has only fifteen abilities.  Cross off three and number the rest.

It's genius!

If you have a Hotshot-Elf-Fighter then you have three columsn:  Elf-Fighter, Hotshot-Elf and Fighter-Hotshot.  There is no column that is purely from one click-and-lock.

I like it very much.  It is tres slick.

[TonyLB]

Oh ... by the way ... I don't know if it's sheer madness but I have absolutely no doubt that it would be shear madness.  I wouldn't want to have to try to cut those out.  My scissor skills aren't up to the task.

[Darren Hill]

I certainly missed that. Very clever.

[Tuxboy]

Its a thing of beauty...now I just need an excuse to use it.. *G*

[Hans]

Okay, first thought is why make the complicated circle formation?

Because complicated circle formations are full of juicy coolness, that's why!

Very nice, Joshua.  I have one suggestion, if the character sheet is going to see real play.  Somehow you need to make the circles for debt bigger.  We use poker chips, and the play examples from the rule book show tiddly wink size tokens.  I would thing the circles need to be at least a full inch, if not an inch and a half across.  I know it is cool to save space by puttin them into the middle of the circle, but I just think they need to be bigger.  Maybe you could put the story tokens in the middle?

[Josh Roby]

Thanks for all the responses, guys!

Darren, I've got to disagree: 'elf' ain't no class, no matter what old-skool D&D says.  Legolas, Galadriel, and Elrond had something to distinguish them besides their basic personalities.  Not to mention Bilbo-Frodo-Sam-Merry-Pippin-et al.  Also, though, I'm thinking Background (instead of Race) should be more specific than species -- High Elf, Wood Elf, Sea Elf, Blackrock Orc, Frostmane Orc, Burning Blade Orc, et cetera.

Ben, as a rule, I don't read much fantasy, and I actually try and stay away from the genre for various reasons, mostly because it doesn't do much for me.  But I've been overruled, and the rest of the gaming group wants fantasy, so at least I talked them out of doing it in GURPS.

Tony, yeah, these'll be hell to cut out.  I may only cut out the two-prong sides, and leave the three-prongs with the white space between the prongs, and just set the two-pronged ends on top of the three-prong foundation.

Hans, we use pennies for Debt, so the circles should be okay for our purposes.  I wish I could fit five poker chips in there, but that increases the interior triangle, which makes all the prongs way long, and the whole thing becomes too big for an 8.5x11.  Moving the Drives out to somewhere else doesn't really appeal to me -- Drives should be central to the character, after all, so I like to put em smack-dab in the center of the sheet.

When I start working up some filled-in examples of these guys, I'll post em up if there's any interest.

I do have one question -- is there any limitation or guideline to how many Styles can be powered, or is it a zero-sum sort of thing, where the multiple use is balanced by the debt gain?

[TonyLB]

If you have more than about eight total powered abilities you can get into a fairly nasty debt-spiral ... probably won't appear in early games (because people tend to grab story tokens more often, compared to the marginally longer-term strategy of stuffing debt back in someone's face, which makes the spiral easy-but-expensive to break out of) but might make an appearance as play continues.

[Uhlrik]

I think the design is quite elegant, and in fact am very keen on Fantasy-flavored Capes play myself (working on writing for it myself as we speak, actually). However, I do have a number of issues with your visually pleasing and innovative design.

Firstly, the rotational nature makes it a tad tricky to read everything at once, which seems problematic to me. I personally like things to line up along the same axis.

Also, I prefer the binary click-and-locks for a number of reasons. Firstly, as far as I'm concerned one of the great strengths of Capes is that the system has enough inherent flexibility that we really don't need the extra layer of granularity to have an equal amount of detail. Secondly, race (as has been mentioned) seems to be a bit of a red herring as far as I'm concerned. If a character's "inborn" racial nature/cultural upbringing isn't that narratively important to the character, then there's no need for a separate click. For some characters it might be, but that can be figured into the binary clicks easily enough. We could make a set of clicks (or, maybe more interesingly, locks...) that relate to races/upbringing and just use them two to a side alongside the regular ones like is already built into the game. We don't really need the triangle to do that at all. We can also just tweak existing class/powerset clicks to match the race or background and move on.

To me, it ultimately comes down to "does another layer of complexity add enough to justify the increased granularity?" I really do like your design, but I don't think that it really adds anything to the game that wasn't there to begin with, at the cost of having more stuff to fiddle about with and cut.

[Josh Roby]

I reworked the design to require less cutting.  And also, optical illusions are neat.

New Sheet and New Click-n-Locks

One little thing I noticed -- if you have 15 Regular Persona and 15 Powersets, you have 225 combinations.  If you have 10 of these Personas, 10 Classes, and 10 Races, you have one thousand combinations.

[Uhlrik]

I reworked the design to require less cutting.  And also, optical illusions are neat.

It's more visually appealing now, and certainly easier to cut apart. It looks... Technocratic. I like.

Unfortunately, it doesn't address my other concerns.