Broadening Abilities

[dunlaing]

I've seen a lot of posts about magic being over-powered, but I didn't find it to be so in my own game. I did find it to be quite versatile, but not overly powerful.

I've also seen some of Clinton's suggestions about limiting the power of magic in order to fix that, but I'm wondering if a better solution isn't just allowing more flexibility in other abilities?

I know that this would be a variant on Donjon, as opposed to a "pure" Donjon game, but I'm thinking about allowing quite a bit of versatility in abilities in my game and I'm wondering if anyone has any opinion on whether it's a good idea.

I'm thinking of just letting people do anything that fits their ability description instead of limiting them to one type of roll. So, if you have a Swords ability, you could use it to attack someone, you could use it while looting (as long as you were trying to find a sword), you could use it to evaluate the quality of a sword or find the weaknesses in an opponent's sword style, or anything sword related.

You'd still have one Main Ability and the rest Supporting Abilities, and Supporting Abilities would be more restrictive than Main Abilities (for example, you could take Detect as a Main Ability or Detect Magic as a Supporting Ability), but even Supporting Abilities would be useful in many different situations.

[anonymouse]

I was thinking about this some more last night, as I'm gearing up to start my campaign today. Here's two options I've come up with. They can be used together, or one-or-the-other:

1) Main Abilities can work on two different rolls if they have a restriction; 'Use Swords' could work for both Attack and Damage, for example. In fact, I think this is mostly just useful for the fighter-types.

This sort of seems a little dodgy; the player can focus more of his Ability dice at creation and advancement, he gains another slot in Secondaries to use for something.. but I think it'll probably work out fine, as long as the character concept is pretty solid.

2) Main Abilities can have a maximum of 5 + Level if they have a restriction; so a 1st level character could have Attack With Swords: 6. This is probably the more balanced of the two (could've been 4 + Level, but that seemed a little low for effectively giving up your Main Ability and turning it into a Secondary).

Overall, I just don't like the feel of the second as much as the first.

[jdagna]

I've resisted trying to broaden abilities like you talk about because I think it just creates too much potential for the min/maxxer in the crowd to go wild.  If an ability like "Swordmaster" can be used for anything involving a sword, then it just begs for players to look for an item useful in the widest number of places.  For example, "Kung Fu Master" is better right away because you do damage and your hands can't be taken away.

Broadening abilities forces the GM to make some difficult judgement calls.  With the system as it is, the limitations on abilities make the calls pretty simple - the ability can do whatever you want it to, but only one type of roll.

[anonymouse]

Yeah. Hnn.

Well, if you're not playing with a bunch of powertripping munchkins, it's probably okay. ;)

For everyone else.. I guess I'll try the 'Level + 5' thing, if someone wants to be specific with their Main Ability.

Will report on how it works out..

[Wulf]

I've actually just had to do exactly the opposite. I had one 1st level character who was dealing out up to 16 dice damage (after various adjustments to-hit and on damage), and a party full of overpowered magic items thanks to skills useful in finding treasure (yes, they'd go away after one adventure, but meanwhile they're polishing off multiple 4th level monsters with ease).

I don't think the players were min-maxing either, they just weren't familiar with the system and put in skills that seemed useful. Widely applicable non-combat (and non-looting!) skills would be nice, but a single skill that affected both attack and damage would be extremely nasty (and would get worse as level increases).
Wulf

[dunlaing]

Ok, it sounds like having one Ability affect attack and damage is too much. (although Magic does this, sort of*) Aside from that, what do you think of the broadening? Even if I can only use my Swords ability to attack (not do damage) are there any problems with using it for looting and trading and sizing up an opponent?

Maybe a good limiter is just "No one Abililty can affect itself in a later roll" (ugh, that's ugly) What I mean is, Swords can be used to attack or damage, but not both. Charm could be rolled to give yourself extra dice on a seduction attempt, but then could not be used for the seduction attempt as well. That sort of thing. That way a character with Fight with Swords could use it to attack or damage, just never both in the same swing.

[Mike Holmes]

Y'know, that's pretty good. Haven't looked at it closely, but it makes sense on a first check. Basically in any chain of rolls no ability may be used more than once.

Can anybody think of why that's not a good limit?

Mike

[anonymouse]

Can anybody think of why that's not a good limit?

I couldn't, but some playtesting solved that mental block for me. ;)

For a combat Main Ability, at least, it's bad. The problem comes from the rollover/"success pool" mechanic.

Say you've got Use A Sword to Kill Things as your Main Ability. You can use it to Attack or Damage, but you can't use the ability twice on the same action. So far so good, right?

Except there's virtually no reason to ever not use it for Attack; you roll them all for Attack, you get a bunch of successess, you carry them over to Damage.

I don't know how this pans out for non-Attack/Damage rolls, but I suspect the same kind of thing holds true. On the surface, the, "Can't use same Ability twice in one action" rule sounds good.. at least until you realise it's almost a non-issue due to the rules themselves.

So we're back looking at other ways to not-shaft the focused character concept. I think I'll try my Level + 5 idea next, and maybe give 2 free dice at creation to put into that ability.

The only other thing I can think of right now would be to maybe give the character a couple of free successes when using their Use Swords ability or whatever.

I'm interested in hearing from Mr. Nixon on this subject. Did it just not come up during playtesting? Or did someone maybe decide to just hamstring themselves and go with it?

[jdagna]

[quote="anonymouseExcept there's virtually no reason to ever not use it for Attack; you roll them all for Attack, you get a bunch of successess, you carry them over to Damage.[/quote]

What levels were you trying this with?

In my experience, using successes as extra dice usually means only 1/3 or so of them turn into extra successes in the second roll.  So if you had a 6 in "Attack with Swords" putting 6 into your attack would only get about 2 extra successes, and put into the damage roll, that's only 1 extra point of damage about 2/3s of the time.  Whereas putting the 6 dice into the damage roll would get about 2 extra points instead of 2/3s.

The reason for this is that the enemy only needs a single high roll to eliminate most of the player's dice, and with at least 5 or 6 dice, his odds of getting something high are pretty good.  In fact, even with 1 die, about half of the player's dice will be lower on average.

[anonymouse]

So far we're only up to level 3 or so; maybe it works out better towards the end.

This dovetails into another concern of mine, of course, which is sort of addressed in the text; the whole, "I'm better at low levels!" thing, due to the nature of the dice-rolling. "One good roll can ruin your whole day" kind of thing. But we'll see how that plays out; it has made some stuff un-fun..

[jdagna]

Actually... one of the ironies of Donjon is that it seems (to me anyway) that at high levels, the game becomes practically diceless (despite the mountains of dice), since ability scores and challenge levels get so high that they become better and better predictors of success.  

Anyway, I'd expect that by 3rd level, you should be finding that people are better off using successes for facts instead of extra dice.  That seemed to be the way it worked when I played a high level game.