A keyword includes within it everything that it "should" have in it. This is, to me, one of the features of HQ - you never have what I refer to as the GURPS Math Syndrome where players making up a character "forget" to take some ability that they reasonably would take merely because they didn't consider the entire list of abilities, and missed the one in question.

This is why GURPS relies heavily on templates. You'll find that the modern templates all include math skill. This works, except that given that nobody cares about math skill (until a need for it comes up in play), there's no reason really to have it rated individually. It's part of the character's overall education which is a result of their cultural upbringing, etc.

Well, this is how HQ handles it, too. Except that what's in a template isn't always entirely spelled out. Instead the idea is that one should be allowed to simply argue that a basic knowledge of the ability in question comes with a particular keyword.

(Another cool feature of this is that, if the player doesn't want the character to have the ability, they simply don't argue for it.)

The question for the thread is how lenient are you in allowing abilities to be argued in to keywords? The sample abilities both help and hinder in this process. That is, they tend to give an idea of the scope of the keyword, but they are neccessarily not all of the abilities (or the principle here is defunct). So it's always a question of what other abilities the keyword might include.

Here the samples can hinder. That is, some of them seem so obvious that the lack of the ability as a sample seems to scream out that the character should not have the ability. For example, and this came up in play recently, a player was surprised (as I've always been, too) to find out that there is no "Research" ability under the Scholar keyword. This seems like a conspicuous absence. Is Greg saying that research as such doesn't exist in Glorantha? That doesn't seem too unreasonable, actually. So you're informed by the keyword in what is there and what is not.

In the end you have to decide, however. In the example, I agreed with her that scholars should have Research (fits my game well). But I can see it being not such an easy decision in many cases. One worries about abuse of a sort of gamism type where the player will try to argue in as many abilities as they can.

Now I don't usually worry about this with my players, actually. But it would be an easy criteria to note whether the player was acting in a gamism fashion, or in another mode to decide if the choice was valid. Because, typically, I allow the player to be right in these cases.

What I find, however, is that players sorta plumb the keyword, and add dimensions to them that might not have been intended originally. It's especially easy to add personality traits that seem to be typical of the keyword.

At some point, however, I think you have to say no to this in order that the keyword not become Character X's Occupation instead of just Occupation X.

Does anyone see what I mean? Part of what makes the keywords useful in other ways is as a descriptor for NPCs. If they don't really typically all have an ability, then you're tightening the keyword in question to be very specific to the character. At which point you have to ask if extra abilities are needed at all? Can't you explain a hobby you have whittling in terms of it being part of your homeland? I mean you probably learned it from somebody, or it's indicated by having wood and knives present. Can't it go from Heortling to Heortling with a Whittling Hobby?

At what point do you say to a player, Hey, that's not under a keyword? How tightly do you reign players in on this? What criteria do you use?

Mike

Hmm... I never had any trouble with this. Truth be told, I never even thought to make example abilities for my keywords. If there's some reason I should, I'd be interested to hear it. As far as I understand, the keywords are just larger abilities with a scope specified in terms of culture and other SIS stuff instead of concrete activity.

You see, a multitude of games nowadays have self-definable abilities. Starting with Sorcerer and going down the list, they're in majority. This being the case, it's starting to be a part of basic rpg literacy to be able to balance implicit stuff. If a player shouts out "Dance!", the GM or whoever should be able to roughly estimate how important that's gonna be for the game. And when you know that, it's not difficult to decide if it's good for the game in question in terms of currency. What the criterions are, that's up to the game:
- In Sorcerer you have to decide whether something fits under a cover, where the cover is a "role" in the society of normal humans.
- In Dust Devils you have to decide whether a knack is "too wide", based on a list of example knacks on page 5.
- In InSpectres you have to decide if a Talent is suitably useful and funny, but not too useful. The basis is pretty much the same as in Dust Devils, a list of examples to compare with.

See? It's a part of basic skills with these games to make these judgements. It becomes instinctive to make them. That's why I don't use example abilities and figure everything out as we go along. If a player wants something to belong into a keyword, we can just figure out whether everybody with that keyword should have that ability. Easy.

If it doesn't work in HQ, I say we have a major problem with a majority of "Forge games" out there :D

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Hmm... I never had any trouble with this.

Truth be told, I never even thought to make example abilities for my keywords. If there's some reason I should, I'd be interested to hear it. As far as I understand, the keywords are just larger abilities with a scope specified in terms of culture and other SIS stuff instead of concrete activity.

- In Sorcerer you have to decide whether something fits under a cover, where the cover is a "role" in the society of normal humans.
- In Dust Devils you have to decide whether a knack is "too wide", based on a list of example knacks on page 5.
- In InSpectres you have to decide if a Talent is suitably useful and funny, but not too useful. The basis is pretty much the same as in Dust Devils, a list of examples to compare with.

See? It's a part of basic skills with these games to make these judgements. It becomes instinctive to make them.

If a player wants something to belong into a keyword, we can just figure out whether everybody with that keyword should have that ability. Easy.

Hmm, it's certainly a more complex issue that I thought. I'd always understood the keywords as just a shorthand-method for covering a field of indeterminate amount of singular abilities. I never thought that you could have personalized keywords at all. Like, in my game all characters with the keyword "Soldier" have all the keyword abilities by definition, whatever those abilities prove out to be. Keywords work exactly like a Master component in Universalis. Where did you get the idea of personalizing a keyword?

About example abilities: they don't bother me particularly, but they're certainly more bulk on an otherwise pretty streamlined system. Interestingly, I find the surprising and imaginative example abilities the most interesting, so it's pretty much the opposite of a simmy approach; I'd only list unlikely stuff, while another guy would only list the central and non-controversial stuff, so in the end we'd have completely different example abilities.

But anyway, defining keywords: I'm seeing two analytic methods for the defining, while still staying logical and functional:

The simmy one: as I already indicated in the last post, this is the one where keywords are defined as social and cultural groupings. So the keyword of "Carpenter" is actually "all the abilities that carpenters share". If you're defining keywords this way, you can check if a particular ability belongs in a keyword by answering the relevant question about SIS. There's still a degree of abstraction there, because carpenters from different places have different skills, but that's simulation for you, never perfect. The way to fix this is to make the definition more exact as time goes by - if ever a player suggests an ability that only Orlanthi carpenters have and others do not, the keyword can easily be renamed as "Orlanthi carpenter", and that's it. This way the keyword and the world stay consistent with each other.

The other one: as abilities are power, and somebody might want the players to have equal power, just define keywords based on how big keywords other guys have. So if it seems that one player has a better keyword, be more lax in accepting another's suggestions about his keyword, while tightening the reins on the strong one.

As far as I can see, those are about the only methods that I see any point in. Both are pretty simple, aren't they? You called for process instructions, but how do you give them for something this simple?

In any case I find it important that you can't really go catastrophically wrong in your decisions about what to include in the keyword, because the player who has the keyword is the one who takes the initiative in adding stuff to it. The player has no reason to suggest anything stupid, so the worst that can happen is a discordance between players about the sensibility or power of keywords.

Hmm... if there's any deeper logic in my decisions over this matter, then I don't see it myself. I've pretty much subscribed to your claims that power differential isn't a too important thing in HQ, so I've not tried to limit players based on resource management or anything like that. And as far as the realism or sensibility goes, I've not had anybody offer any abilities for a keyword that don't really fit. Of course, being that I don't stress that, I don't know if I even noticed such abilities.

As I'm considering this, I start to think that I actually play such a bastardized version of the game that my input has no relevance whatsoever. It's more like a fantasy Universalis without the explicit resource management.

Keywords work exactly like a Master component in Universalis. Where did you get the idea of personalizing a keyword?

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Hmm, it's certainly a more complex issue that I thought. I'd always understood the keywords as just a shorthand-method for covering a field of indeterminate amount of singular abilities. I never thought that you could have personalized keywords at all. Like, in my game all characters with the keyword "Soldier" have all the keyword abilities by definition, whatever those abilities prove out to be. Keywords work exactly like a Master component in Universalis. Where did you get the idea of personalizing a keyword?

As far as I can see, those are about the only methods that I see any point in. Both are pretty simple, aren't they? You called for process instructions, but how do you give them for something this simple?

In any case I find it important that you can't really go catastrophically wrong in your decisions about what to include in the keyword, because the player who has the keyword is the one who takes the initiative in adding stuff to it. The player has no reason to suggest anything stupid, so the worst that can happen is a discordance between players about the sensibility or power of keywords.

And as far as the realism or sensibility goes, I've not had anybody offer any abilities for a keyword that don't really fit. Of course, being that I don't stress that, I don't know if I even noticed such abilities.

Mike Holmes wrote:
I'm really not worried about gamism. What I'm worried about is a sort of "creep" that I've seen happen. That is, again, players seem to "distort" for lack of a better term, the keyword in adding to it. Basically redefining it as they go to get in the abilities that they need.

I agree that this isn't terribly problematic. But at some point I think you have to say no, or the keywords become meaninglessly broad.

Well, actually, in theory, a gamism based player could have a field day trying to get abilities in based solely on the "free" abilities that it gives them. Another thing that's important about listing abilities is that you can't augment with one not on the sheet. So not only can't you agument at default 6 (the putative reason for the rule), you can only augment with Warrior once. Whereas if you have all the abilities listed, you might find five augments for a particular situation.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: If a player wants to, he can "split" the ability away from the keyword, usually paying a hero point for it, and make it independent for augmenting purposes. This is of course only sensible for central abilities you plan to raise above the keyword value.

The above was largely because I couldn't see any sense in allowing augments from keyword abilities. I don't see any limits in the game for drawing new abilities from keywords, so allowing several augments from one keyword would essentially mean taking the ability as high as the player cared to raise it through trivial augments, wouldn't it? I wanted to handle abilities that are on the sheet and ones that are in the keyword only implicitly in the same way.

If you're playing it so that any ability written down can be used to augment,

Couldn't players just define zillions of abilities in that case, stuff like "Hit with the sword", "Battle trolls", "Use helmet", "Combat footwork" and so on ad infinitum? (Those are examples for a "Warrior" or similar, but almost any keyword allows infinite abilities, it seems to me.) Or don't you allow adding abilities at all without hero point expenditure or something, apart from those examples in the book? Even when they're clearly within the purview of the keyword? I'm getting confused.

As for the judgement call of what belongs in an ability and what doesn't... actually, that's a very general theory topic, it seems to me. How do roleplayers make these applicability decisions?

They're both properly about resource valuation, and I don't think any game gives proper advice about doing it. They just assume you know how to do it.

Just almost the only way to do it, actually, because most rpgs include this feedback thing between the SIS and the mechanics. If we could decide whether an ability belongs in a keyword without making these judgement calls about the SIS, then the keyword would have hardly anything to do with the SIS, would it?

Thinking about it that way, isn't what you're asking just a question about "how do I explore the SIS"? You're asking how to determine whether the Orlanthi lumberjack knows about herbs, right? How is this different from the generic exploration question?

Hmm... one interesting method of taking the decision out of the imaginary and into the mechanics would be to make the player roll for it when he wants to add an ability:
1) The player makes his case for including the ability
2) The GM determines the opposing difficulty by (number of keyword abilities)x5
3) The player rolls against the difficulty with his keyword value
4) The degree of success determines how it is; perhaps the character can get an ability in the whereabouts of what the player asked, or he needs to learn the knack of it from somewhere, or it's just utterly outside the keyword. Or perhaps it's a complete success, and he gets the ability +5.

Mike Holmes wrote: For example, take the keyword Scholar, and the ability Research (per my real example above). If you use this model, what you do as a test is to say, "does every scholar in the world know how to do research?" Or, you can use the cultural specific keyword ideal - "does every Scholar in this culture know how to do research?"

I think that the intersection method has a lot of "realism" behind it. As such, I think when using it, you use everything all at once in terms of what you know in-game. So, IOW, all keywords "intersect" with all of the others. So, for example, if there was some reason why your species keyword would make you a different sort of hunter, well, that should be considered.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote:
I mean, I understand that you don't feel a need to list separate abilities for the keywords that people come up with, but do you actually prevent players from listing the abilities that come with stock keywords? That's very counter to the rules. When a player takes a keyword, normally they list all of the associated abilities (see every example character on the web site, for instance), and, again, are free to add any abilities that they can argue in for free.

Now you see the "problem." This is how the game plays, rules as written. That is, in theory, you can, in fact, add as many abilities to a keyword as you like whenever you like. Rather, you simply list the abilities that were "always there" but previously not listed (or even thought of). So, yeah, you can, in fact, in theory, add an infinite amount of abilities to a character to pump up a roll.

That's what this thread is all about. How do you limit that? First, there's the question of ability scope. HQ does have a scope range to abilities. They can't be too narrow, or too broad. It's a pretty wide range, actually, but it exists. "Start Fire With Flint And Tinder That Mom Gave Me On Dry Days" is simply too narrow. "Make Anything" is too broad. The range sits somewhere in between. So you can't just subdivide abilities to make more augments. They have to be reasonably sized.

If you're playing it so that any ability written down can be used to augment,

To reiterate, this is the rule from the book. Your restrictions are completely ones that you've made up. Further, I think that the game plays better my way. Yes, it introduces this theoretical problem (which, as I've said, really hasn't been all that problematic). But it has strong advantages as well, IMO. That is, instead of simply pointing out in a contest that the character is a warrior, and that helps, you can see just how much being a warrior helps in a particular contest. That is, you'll get more support in one contest than in another, as more augments apply. So instead of "warrior" being a binary thing, there's a range of feedback that it produces.

The real problem is that some players try to make their keywords more "complete" than others do.

For example, take the keyword Scholar, and the ability Research (per my real example above). If you use this model, what you do as a test is to say, "does every scholar in the world know how to do research?" Or, you can use the cultural specific keyword ideal - "does every Scholar in this culture know how to do research?" If the answer is no, the player doesn't get the ability without spending a HP to start it, not at keyword +1, but at 13. Huge difference.

Just almost the only way to do it, actually, because most rpgs include this feedback thing between the SIS and the mechanics. If we could decide whether an ability belongs in a keyword without making these judgement calls about the SIS, then the keyword would have hardly anything to do with the SIS, would it?

I don't understand this part at all. I'm not saying at all that we don't have to make judgment calls about the SIS. In fact, what I'm asking is about methods by which people go about making judgment calls about the SIS. I've already given two examples of how this can be done. At least I'm making progress despite your naysaying that it can't be done.

Thinking about it that way, isn't what you're asking just a question about "how do I explore the SIS"? You're asking how to determine whether the Orlanthi lumberjack knows about herbs, right? How is this different from the generic exploration question?

Uh, well, it's a specific application of "how to explore" pertaining to one specific part of one specific game. I don't need generalities, I need specifics.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: If you allow augmenting with abilities that cost nothing, then those abilities equate to extra resources for nothing, which tends to break games.

Yes, now I understand why you'd like to have some hard rules for it. Well, the original question was how we handle it, and my answer seems to be "with extreme rules variants". Seems the most sensible, even if I stumbled on it by accident.

But is there any other ways people handle this? After reading too much of the original Issaries material I'm starting to get the feeling that the design team actually handles the matter by arbitrary GM fiat. That's how many, many things in their material is handled.

Reasonable sized, but how about overlapping? If overlapping is allowed, it's still trivial to figure out enough abilities for anything, as long as the setting is detailed enough to support different focuses.

Like that fighting example, where you can have separate abilities for particular foes, terrain, weapons, opponent's weapons, other gear, weather, formation, martial school,

your own emotional state,

at least in a simple contest you're going to get to use one from each category most of the time, and most of those are valid for each roll of an extended contest, as well.

What's worse, each of those abilities is perfectly valid in itself. There's nothing wrong in "Fighting against dragonewts", "Fighting with a sword", "Parrying monster attacks"

I don't know for sure, but it certainly looks like we're well on our way to deconstructing the whole idea of a reasonable keyword. The system certainly seems to require some resource-based limitation on either
a) augmenting with abilities, like I do
b) creating those abilities in the first place, which seems to be what you'd like

I don't think that a character with lots of abilities listed under a keyword is necessarily any better than one with few as far as the fun of the game is concerned, so it seems strange that the rules reward listing abilities. In practice I imagine the difference wouldn't rise to more than a +5 or so per contest before the other players got bored with the game slowing down and curbed the behavior, but still... it's a beauty flaw in a system that's been for a while the benchmark for generic, setting based conflict resolution.

Yeah, but my system does the same on a personal level. Being a warrior always helps just as much, but some people, in addition to being warriors, have a bunch of "individual" abilities outside the keyword, which are still available for augmenting. So the degree of available augments is largely about the degree of commitment you the character have towards the keyword: are you just a warrior because that's your job, or do you have some warrior-like abilities outside the keyword, too? Is there personal passion in it? Do you even have the keyword, or do you just fulfill that role through your piecemeal abilities?

Well, at least it makes sense to me.

This is about all that I can say, if the decision is really to be based in the SIS. As the imagined world doesn't exist, it's a tad difficult to ascertain whether all Orlanthi scholars can research, or if it's just a peculiar area of expertise for this particular one.

Be that as it may, I'm not really convinced that the "explore the setting" solution works for many Forgequest games, especially outside Glorantha.

It seems to me that you could as well play it the other way around - first decide by a coin-toss whether the ability belongs to the keyword, and if it does, then retrofit the world so that it's always been this way. This is essentially how we play, and it's not been a problem, because we don't add anything too surprising into keywords. No Myth all the way.

You're looking for a method that doesn't break the rules as written any more than absolutely necessary, and that brings the decision-making process out from behind the GM's screen and into the open, right? You want something that doesn't seem too arbitrary, but is also according to rules. Which is a problem as the rules currently stand, because as far as I can see, they're very traditional about this matter: it's the GM's job to decide what the keywords mean, and that's that. Purely arbitrary, with the assumption that the GM holds onto the setting as a guideline.

How about this one: when a player makes an ability claim, he's given five minutes to dig up a source reference from the setting book that proves that this ability indeed is common to the keyword. For this he needs either three exceptional example individuals who share the keyword and the ability, or one run-of-the-mill individual, who has it. So if the book says that "Normal peasants in Fantasyland X tend to hunt with bows", then it's a proof. Or if the book says that "Orlantho the hero peasant was good with the bow... Dalathia the peasant sorcerer also used a bow... Makros the villainous peasant drew his bow..." then it's also proven.

Granted, it can be a valid question, but only if there's some hooks in the rules to hang a system on. I think we've pretty much covered the hooks:
1) the keywords represent SIS concepts that exist objectively in the world
2) the keywords are a part of the player resources
That's not very much to base a decision on, is it? It seems to me that even the Keyword fairy fulfills both those priorities ;)

So yeah, houseruling it seems the best bet to get a tight, Forgey game experience with a minimum of bother.

Calm down, Mike. I understand that this is important for you, but for me it's so far out in the wankeryland that I can only just follow what we're talking about. It's like this:
Mike: You know, I've been wondering, how do you guys roll dice?
Me: Well, we take them and toss them.
Mike: Yeah, but how do you do that? I'm looking for a system, here.
Me: I don't think there can be such a system, or at least it'd be a very deep question of physical mechanics. Therefore I think it's best just to toss them, which is pretty instinctive, after all.
Mike: That doesn't help me at all, and I'm quite nicely on my way to building such a system, thank you.
The point being, I'm not difficult or contrary because I want to be. So therefore there's little reason to get angry.

(And let's clear that "Forgey" thing while we're at it: I have many words I could use to describe certain qualities of game, but not nearly all of them are in common use. If I don't want to make this a discussion of what I mean by a "formalistic zero-sum system", I have to use words where you can guess the meaning. And I think you know quite fine which qualities of the HQ design are "Forgey" and which are not. Or you can guess from the context. In no case has it anything to do with the cultural politics of Forge being/not being a cabal, or whatever that reaction was about.)

Anyway, with that out of the way, let's go back and see if there's any progress to be made:

You said at the start of your last post that adding abilities to keywords is more about breadth of the keyword than resource gain. I agree that this is the case in actual play. But that's also why this is mainly a theoretical problem, because in actual play you can always fix the hitches of the system with a little bit of customizing. Like this:
Mike: You know, player-with-bloated-keyword, that "Hunter" keyword looks mightly bloated. What say you that we rename it as "Ranger", as that's obviously what you're visualizing there. We can also make those craft abilities independent while we're at it, so the keyword becomes again nice and trim.
player-with-bloated-keyword: Sure Mike, that sounds sensible! Good eyes, I didn't notice myself that a Ranger was what I wanted to play all along.
This is of course not helpful in finding a methodology, but that's the point; we're talking about a theoretical problem, not a practical one. And as far as theory goes, getting new abilities for free seems to be what this is about. My solution was to handle the keywords exactly like Ben Lehman handles character themes in Polaris, now that I think of it: I forced the rules to ensure that adding abilities affects only the breadth of the keyword, and not it's power.

But, to tell the truth, that part of the discussion has nothing to do with your original goals, am I right? So let's stop fiddling with how I play the game. We're looking for GM tools to use in evaluating keywords, yes? This is such a... deep topic, it's really difficult to say anything. The rules seem to agree with me that it's so self-evident that nothing can be said. Let's try, despite that.

As a sidenote, here's the real topic of the thread laid out clearly. If anybody is still reading, feel free to help us out:

Mike in response to my babbling wrote:
Well, no. Again that would be changing the rules. I'm looking for a good GM process for making good decisions on what to include and what not to include. Decision-making principles.

I agree that a mechanical solution might be easier. But I already have that solution (like I said, I "invented" the one HP per extra ablity under a keyword long ago) and it's not what I'm looking for.

Mike wrote:
HP are, however, a reward. So players do hoard them. So, when it seems that the character should have a particular ability, they look to pay the smallest cost associated. This happens to be free, if they can "discover" that it should be in a keyword. So that's when they tack them on. Again, never seen it happen in a contest, not even once.

Eero, I'm starting to think that you're here treating me like a charity case. I mean, if you find the topic "wankery" then why are you bothering with it at all?

Mike: I want to talk about how to decide what can be added to keywords.
Eero: Well, whatever, it's too simple to discuss.
Mike: Well, I'd like to try anyhow.
Eero: But, well, you shouldn't bother. Because there's nothing important here.

Basically you've been telling me that I shouldn't have bothered to start the thread at all. Well, that's just not very helpful.

But, hey, you're still trying, so, I'll still try, too.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: The theory here is that all abilities are connected with each other in each keyword by the virtue of belonging to the same concept. Thus it should be possible to narrate a logical description that mentions all those abilities in the places where they belong. The added benefit is that the GM can monitor very concretely how the conseptions about the different keywords drift or don't drift, by simply comparing earlier descriptions with later ones.

Am I being helpful at all, or should we stop here?

Mike Holmes wrote: Also, if anyone else wants to jump in here, please do. I'd like to get some more perspectives.
Mike

Mike Holmes wrote:
The question for the thread is how lenient are you in allowing abilities to be argued in to keywords? The sample abilities both help and hinder in this process. That is, they tend to give an idea of the scope of the keyword, but they are neccessarily not all of the abilities (or the principle here is defunct). So it's always a question of what other abilities the keyword might include. Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: The question for the thread is how lenient are you in allowing abilities to be argued in to keywords? [...] At what point do you say to a player, Hey, that's not under a keyword? How tightly do you reign players in on this? What criteria do you use?

Paul, well, I think the rules don't quite read that way. But, then it's been a while since I reviewed them, and I may be drifting myself, too. So I'm going to go and read them tonight, and get back with some analysis. I think that this discussion is being hampered by the fact that it's probably not all that clear from the rules just what they are precisely.

That said, check the aforementioned article out, Paul.

Mike

Hey Mike. Any further views?

I've been thinking about this lately, as the idea of using Keywords just as augments has popped up in my head. I think that would sidestep this question a bit, but maybe it wouldn't really.

I did have a character recently in game who was an assassin. In making the keyword, she kept arguing for broader and broader things. I tried to keep it to what applies to an assassin generally, not one from her particular school.

lightcastle wrote:
I've been thinking about this lately, as the idea of using Keywords just as augments has popped up in my head. I think that would sidestep this question a bit, but maybe it wouldn't really.

Afterall, if it comes from your Keyword, spending a point gives you the ability at 18 (assuming Keywords start at the standard 17). If it doesn't come from your Keyword, spending a point gives you the ability at 13.

LC, that works mechanically, but again it voids the advantages I see with lists of keyword abilities. That is, sometimes the player should get +10 from the keyword, not just +2. And when that happens depends on what's listed under them. Again, I strongly resist the tendency that I'm seeing for people to want to downplay the part of keywords, and to play up the role of independently purchased abilities. This makes for "thin" characters, IMO. I want to consider whether or not "Make Camp" is an augment when being ambushed at night, in addition to the other soldierly abilities. That creates an understanding of the effectiveness of a character that's much deeper than just looking at the fact that he's good with a sword. And, further, the differences between these keywords then heightens the uniqueness of the keywords (remember I advocate making your own occupation keyword up to reflect your culture and other unique qualities behind the character).

This is precisely what Eero apparently does. And, yes, I very much think that it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

That said, Thor, I think you're reading in a bit. Quite interestingly, IMO, I see these combinations not as nested, but as cross-products. For example, one can be a warrior, but be a practitioner of a spirit that's about fertility. Perhaps a guardian of some sacred fertility ground. The point is that I don't see there being any automatic limiting on what occupation goes with what magic. Yes there will tend to be cultural limits and some combinations will be rare or non-existant. But that's based on the in-game situation, and isn't a mechanical requirement to start.

As such, I see them as just combinations. The existance of the occupation, for instance, informs the culture as much as the culture informs the occupation. The existance of a special sort of outrider occupation in a horse tribe indicates a knowledge of this in the homeland keyword, as an obvious example.

In any case, I don't do what you've said, precisely. That is, I don't allow one to trade a magic keyword for an additional occupation. The confusion comes regarding the fact that I basically allow everyone to have an additional occupation (see Special Abilities), and that I don't require anyone to take a specialized or common magic keyword. The reason for this, is that I see deciding not to have a specialized keyword as a statement about the character's current level of devotion in his beliefs. It's actually just as interesting to not take a SM Keyword as it is to take one, as you can potentially pick one up later in play (or the abilities thereof).

But, yes, to keep keywords tailored appropriately I think it's a very important idea to have them listed out in some detail.

Mike

Hmm...

I can see your point about sometimes a player should get more advantage off a keyword than other times. The more the action falls in his bailiwick, the better the bonus. That makes some sense.

I think the fear I have is that it turns the Keyword into just a skill list (well, with some cultural relationships and attitudes as well).  And once you've listed out the skills in a keyword, the issue of what has NOT been enumerated comes up. (It's the bill of rights argument writ small.  *grin*)

As you yourself have brought up before, just because something isn't listed doesn't mean it shouldn't be there. But deciding if it should or shouldn't can be tricky.  A lot of this probably can be handled by just having a good social contract with players and being willing to hash out something that makes sense.  And, to be honest, I'm not sure my solution avoids the problem in the end.

All of which brings us back to the question of what criteria to use to decide if something should or shouldn't be added to a keyword; and how many of these somethings should there be?