A mechanic idea for dealing with potential

[Drew Stevens]

So, I idly mentioned that I really liked the idea of characters not all being equal, even with unlimited experience.  And then, a fairly simply means of creating such a system occured to me, although I'm not fully sure how well it'll play, speed-wise.

Attributes are measured, mentally, on two axises (axii?)- talent and training.  Having a higher 'sidedness' (a d6 relative to a d4) indincates greater talent, while having more dice is more training.

Task resolution is straight from WEG's Star Wars- take your dice pool, roll it, and sum.  If it's higher than your target number, you win.

Now, just to finish a system... and, y'know, make a setting for this mechanic. ;)  Maybe that alternate Vampire game...

[Andrew Martin]

Attributes are measured, mentally, on two axises (axii?)- talent and training.  Having a higher 'sidedness' (a d6 relative to a d4) indincates greater talent, while having more dice is more training.

What is the difference between Talent, Training and high skill? To me, they all seem much the same. What about Practice and Experience shouldn't these be modelled as well?

[Drew Stevens]

Er.  Take, for instance, basketball.  Say that Michael Jordan was a friend of mine, and we both practice playing basketball constantly.  I am not a naturally athletic person- I had have a d4 in my basketball ability.  Jordan, otoh, would have a d8 or d10 or whatever the human maximum potential is.

So, our first practice one on one, I'd roll 1d4 while he'd roll 1d10.  And he probally curbstomps me.  We both get some experience, and buy another die of basketball (because we're both training in it.)  The next practice game, I roll a 2d4 and he rolls a 2d10.

Do ya see the difference between talent and training, now?

[ethan_greer]

I'm operating under the assumption that "Training" as used in Drew's system encompasses training, high skill, practice, and experience.  Just add dice.  Correct me if I'm wrong.

Talent, on the other hand, reflects a character's raw potential and cannot be easily modified, if at all.  The math for this is kinda cool - a person with a d4 in, say, Musicianship would have to practice and work a lot harder to learn to play the harmonica as effectively as someone with a d8.  Bell curves are cool.

Presumably, target numbers for this system would be static - one scale to rule them all, so to speak.  Any ideas for what the scale would look like?

[M. J. Young]

two axises (axii?)

Technically the plural of axis is axes; but I think only mathematicians actually use that (besides me). To everyone else it looks like (and in fact is) the plural of axe.

The idea has potential (have I not seen it somewhere?). I'm concerned about tasks at the lowest levels. What particular concerns me is whether it is possible to have zero dice in something. A second concern is the question of overlap in skills. Let me provide some illustration.

Let us suppose we encounter a musical instrument completely unfamiliar to all of us; that is, none of us have seen this instrument before. Arguably, none of us can play it.

Now, I've got a very high innate musical ability; I'll give myself a d12. I'm sure there's someone here who would not have any problem with the idea that there musical ability is d4. Neither of us have played this instrument; but what does it mean, that we should attempt to play it? Does it require a roll of 8 to play, which gives me a good ~40% chance and you no chance at all? Or is it that because we've never studied this instrument we both have zero dice, so neither of us has any chance at all to play it?

This gets particularly convoluted when you recognize that I've got high levels of skills in a dozen instruments and a broad knowledge of the concepts of how sound is produced musically. Give me ten minutes with any instrument, and I'll learn to play a tune on it--a simple tune, possibly one I wrote for the instrument, but a tune nonetheless. Of course, I can play serious classics on those instruments in which I excel--guitar, bass, saxophone, tuba--and I am not near so good on the bulk of the score of other instruments I've played. Were I to pick up a violin, I could in ten minutes play a tune on it; but I couldn't play a concerto. A system which gave me no chance to play a strange instrument would frustrate me; but a system which gave just anyone the ability to pick up and play any instrument would seem silly.

I realize you're in the early stages of this. I've got a dozen possible solutions, I'm sure--but I thought I'd hear what you were thinking on it.

--M. J. Young

[Drew Stevens]

Firstus- yes, it would be based off of a single scaled difficulty.  No, I have no idea that scale would look like yet. :)  Or rather, as far as specific numbers go.  It will look something like WEG's Star Wars difficulty scales- but I need totally different thresholds.

Secondus- a good series of a questions about musical intstruments.  Here's what I would probally say-

A) As a general rule, if you have no dice, you simply get a 0- you are totally untrained in even attempting to do Blah, and so completely fail.  OTOH, that's pretty damn harsh- especially as heavily skill based as I anticipate this system being.  Maybe each 'level' of talent has an untrained die associated with it-
0d4 = d2
0d6 = d3
0d8 = d4
0d10 = d6
0d12 = d6

B) If the unknown instrument has similiar to one you had some training in (a viola to a violin player), I'd allow you to make a skill check at some additional difficulty.  If it was fundamentally different (a saxophone to a violin player), I'd probally just make a untrained skill check (as above).

DM discretion starts to get involved, at a certain point, however.  If someone has taken a high degree of potential in music, across the board, they should have a simply easier time playing even the most alien of instruments.  I can't think of a simple mechanic for handling such- I either end up with a 'Music' skill (which is so broad as to be silly), or a seperate skill for every instrument- which will inevitibly lead to you not having the potential you should in some of them.

Hmm.  Maybe have Broad Skills and Specific Skills, where your potential defaults to your Broad Skill level unless it is specifically noted otherwise.  So, the first step of character creation would be deciding what Broad Skills you have a high and low potential in, while the second step is further defining that if you want to be better and worse than your broad skill would indincate.

As an example.  I have, at best, a moderate skill in Music.  Call it a d6.  However, I'm slightly more talented with the viola than with the saxophone- so I reduce the saxophone to a d4, and increase the viola to a d8.  (This is not to imply you can only go up and down within a single Broad Group... although that may not be a bad idea...)

I'm also curious as to some of your solutions.

[M. J. Young]

I'm also curious as to some of your solutions.

One thing we do in Multiverser is specialization at higher levels. One way to look at this is to suggest that a person might be an amateur with swords, and it pretty much doesn't matter which sword; or he might be a professional with long swords, in which case he's still got that amateur level of ability with all the other swords, but given the right kind of sword, he's considerably better. Then he might be an expert with the sword that has been in his family for ten generations which was given him by his father, in which case he would still be professional with any other long sword and amateur with any other kind of sword.

Another thing we do is what we call a skill pyramid, which is essentially greater inclusion as you advance. A beginning trumpet player can play the trumpet well enough, but as far as other instruments are concerned he doesn't know much. Get to professional level, and you're a fine trumpet player; but you also understand enough about brass instruments that you can get by as an amateur on anything from flugelhorn to tuba. If you're an expert on trumpet, you probably can do professional level playing on most other brass instruments easily enough, and would have an amateur level of ability an most other instruments, because by this point he understands music well enough that even something as different as an oboe or a xylophone makes sense to him.

We also talk about skill umbrellas. This is the idea that an unknown skill can be analogous to a known skill sufficiently that you ought to have a better chance at it than most people. Maybe you've never seen a subspace communications system; but if you've been in the radio communications business long enough, it should look familiar enough that you've got a chance of figuring out how it's supposed to work and why it doesn't. This would be treated as if the skill were a level lower (Multiverser uses levels and intensities, each intensity being a fraction of a level, which impacts advancement and chance of success, but keeps levels distinct as major steps forward in skill ability).

We've got some other ways of doing it, but these should get you thinking of possibilities.

--M. J. Young

[Drew Stevens]

Hm.

Specialization I can see working, but it will make the skill system consideribly more complex.  As is, it's just a list- a pretty long list (all the skills I expect will be relevant to a given game), but still a simple list.

And I'm not sure if the added complexity of either ultra-specialization skills (My Family Sword vs Long Sword) is worth the extra pain.  While I can certainly see some use in skill groups (Weapons vs Swords vs Long Swords)... Eh.

The Skill Umbrella thing is more what I'd be inclined to use- similiar skills may be substituted at increasing penelties by dissimiliarity.  That would be my rule of thumb.

I think you might be getting into a bit more detail than I actually care to try and cover with this system.  ;)

[contracycle]

You could make one scale Fortune and one Drama.

Frex, it needs a min level 3 familiarity (experience) with the violin to "pick up n play", level 4 to play pro, etc.  The die for talent remains Fortune, all you need is to strap something on interprate interactiojns between levels.

Another thought, is that Experience could be differently used in a positive reward manner.  You can claim bonusses of your experience if you recount how once you did this, but not only this, it was on a ship in a raging storm while falling off the edge of the world.  So this should be a piece of cake.  Risks silliness, but might might be appropriately structured.

[Jamie]

I'm working on a game that uses exactly this mechanic at the moment. The die type is determined by natural qualities - potential if you wish - that you possess. The number of dice is determined by relevant 'Backgrounds': discreet chunks of your life, that endowed you with experience, training or education that may be relevant in a given situation. These Backgrounds are like very broad skill groupings. So to take the musician example in my game, a character may have received an education that included musical training, then spent time as a professional musician. This would give two bonus die to throw (everyone gets to throw one), so 3d (the die type that reflects the natural quality most relevant to this situation). Specialisations can be bought as simple +1, +2 etc that add to your dice total. So a warrior might have 3 backgrounds that are relevant to combat, but also purchase Sword at +2: He is skilled at all weapons (hanging around in barracks and on campaign will give you a general familiarity), but he prefers the Sword and hence gets a bonus.
Difficult and unfamiliar situations are handled by straight modifiers to the die total.

This is a dramatic, action - adventure game, so I wanted a system that would give characters a chance to get stuck into the action.

Anyway, that's how I've used this approach. I'd appreciate any comments.

Best

Jamie

[Drew Stevens]

Question-

Is 'Backgrounds' another way of saying 'Mechanic that lets me roll a certain number of dice', or does it have some additional meaning?

Put another way, are you trying to reverse the normal progression of from sheet to character, and thus go from character to sheet?  And is that really neccesary or appropriate with a high action/adventure game?

[James V. West]

The idea that someone has more raw talent (and thus bigger dice) is interesting. The first thing that popped in my mind was this kind of structure:

Characters have a group of basic abilities. These are pretty much like the "braod skill groups" and other ideas that have already been mentioned. But once these numbers are fixed, changing them is a real devil. It is a measure of nautural talent in these basic areas and doesn't really change with practice--but it might change with time such as growing up, aging, or having personal tragedies/epiphonies or other extra-ordinary events that change a character's life.

In addition, characters would have traits or skills that are based entirely on practice, experience, training, etc.. Each of these would be under the umbrella of one of the basic abilities, defaulting to the type of die that was established for it. Thus, if you have talent in arts and use a d8, you'd use a d8 if you added a skill for playing wind instruments or whatever. These skills would be much easier to improve on than the basic abiities.

Anyway, that's what hit me when I read your opening post.

[Michael S. Miller]

M.J. Young asked earlier if he hadn't seen this somewhere before. In the interest of ... what is the word? Ludography? Anyway, this looks rather like Deadlands (not d20)

Your Attributes are a size of die, your Skills are the number of said dice rolled. In Deadlands, you take the highest single die. Any single die rolling its maximum (4 on a d4, 12 on a d12) is called an "Ace" and is re-rolled, with the new roll adding to the previous.

Just a footnote.

[James V. West]

Your Attributes are a size of die, your Skills are the number of said dice rolled. In Deadlands, you take the highest single die. Any single die rolling its maximum (4 on a d4, 12 on a d12) is called an "Ace" and is re-rolled, with the new roll adding to the previous.

Ahhh...there ya go. That's what I was getting at. I've never read the Deadlands rules, but I always wanted to play it.

[Drew Stevens]

Which is actually the same as Children of the Sun, and where I got the idea of the die size representing potential/talent.

The problem with only re-rolling a max roll is that Highly Skilled people with virtually no talent (d4) can outperform someone that is highly talented and /equally skilled/ (d20).

Put another way, the diminishing return for increasing a high talent ability is siginficantly greater, which seems the opposite of the way it should work to me.