I'm trying to create a system that allows PC generation to be done the same way as NPC generation. The goal being that a baker or wood cutter somehow fit into the system as neatly as a gladiator or adventurer would. A lot of systems concentrate tremendously on combat at the expense of everything else. Does anyone have any ideas on a system like this (or know one that already exists)?

A few vague ideas:
Levels are out since a 20th level baker doesn't make any sense to me.
Classes don't seem to work unless they become very specific. At this point you might as well go with skills anyway.
A sort of tiered system seems to be fill the above goals but becomes super complicated quickly.
  Farming
      Planting
      Animal Husbandry
  Labor
      Blacksmithing
      Carpentry
  Combat
      Weapons
        Swords
      Armor

And so on.... However when using this, how would the subcategories relate to the parent? Increasing Combat increases weapons, and swords, and armor?

Hope the question and examples are reasonably clear. Thanks!

Aw, I've been trying to sneak Farming into an RPG for years! Who says cows aren't interesting? :)

Classes that are binding in some absolute way are lame, I think, but social roles that affect how people treat you still make plenty of sense; in fact, I daresay choosing a social role adds to the character's chances of being part of a cool conflict or story in-game. I used roles in my design for Mask of the Emperor because of the inherent assumptions about what kind of society it is; they establish your initial focus in skills and what people expect of you in society, but from there you can grow in whatever direction you please.
I dunno if what you've presented here for skills is all that complicated - you just need to establish the relationship between really broad areas of ability and more specific, "traditional-skill" areas of expertise.
If I have Labor but no other skills, what does that mean? Is it kind of like a hauling-and-hefting stat? When I tack on some Blacksmithing, I know exactly what I'm doing. Does the stat+skill model feel okay for you, or is it overdone? Stats that represent broad ranges of ability, ones that you can leave at zero without being hobbled, could be pretty neat.
Alternately, you could have those broad skills still serve as, um, skills (as opposed to stats), and then just grant perks when people take points in a specialty.
Thoughts?
- Abby

Great point Abkajud. I'm glad this isn't too complicated so far. I haven't thought how stats would work with skills. Again, most stats are focused on combat (str, dex, and con all factor into combat) whereas the other stats seem to be afterthoughts. What do you mean by perks? Something like Fallout's SPECIAL system?

I made the below table as a general mock up of the skills I've imagined (using a typical medieval setting but ignoring magic for now). Items highlighted in yellow would immediately be given a novice starting rank when the higher level item is first chosen. So if I create a new character and pick Social, I immediately get a bit in Civil and Persuasion. If I then pick Financial then the character gets a bump in Bargaining right away.

[img]http://www.zmod.org/gallery/skills.png[/img]

Wow, 33 skills before I even get to combat.... I realize most players aren't going to get excited about making a character concentrating in masonry :) but whipping up a few NPCs would be very easy with this framework.

All of these non-combat skills are great, in a non-combat situation.

As long as you tailor a game around something other than combat, these skills can become really important.

Let's say that there is a creature near the village which cannot be killed...warriors have all gone to slay it and have ended up as a pile of bones. If the local villagers prevent warriors from going to slay the beast, then it dpesn't have a fresh supply of meat and it comes into town, annihilating the local farms. What can they do?

It sets up a premise for a game where combat just isn't going to solve the problem. The characters discuss new options.

1. The local apothecary speaks to members of his guild from far off lands, he discovers that the creature is slowed down and falls asleep in the presence of a particular herb.
2. A hunter knows that the herb grows on the frozen tops of a nearby mountain range.
3. A local farmer has a green thumb and is renowned for growing anything even in the most inhospitable circumstances.
4. Since the herb puts the creature to sleep, the town's bonesetter offers a suggestion about getting the herb into the creature.
(a visiting heroic warrior offers the suggestion of coating a weapon in an extract made of the juices of the herb, but he is slain because the creature cannot be overcome through combat)
5. The local lord's chef decides that he will get the creature to eat the herb, the villagers make sure no-one goes near the creature for a month to ensure it is hungry. The chef then cooks a marvellous feast of pork and lamb, he seasons the meat with the herb.
6. The creature eats the herb and ends up in a state of perpetual slumber, never to harass the village again.

This is just a hypothetical example where typical townsfolk from a regular medieval village could unite their skills to eliminate a menace. The steps focus on a single villager and their contribution to the solution. Each step could be a scene from a single story, or each step could be expanded out into a story in it's own right.

The problem that many people face after playing only D&D, is that they think all roleplaying has to be about combat. This conclusion is reached because combat is the reward path for that particular game system.

Most people in the real world don't take combat as a first course of action, because they might get hurt! People don't like getting hurt.

On the reverse side, most warriors in combat oriented games don't like diplomacy, because they just can't do it as well as they swing a sword.

The kinds of things that your game rewards will reflect the kinds of skills that become important. There are plenty of discussions around here that have described this concept.

If you can get a look at the Shadow of Yesterday, it shows a great way to reward people for NOT being combat oriented.

Similarly, I'm developing concepts in my current game where you can use diplomacy or seduction as a valid method of defence in a potential combat situation. (In this case, you avoid damage because the opponent just thinks you're too pretty to hit, or because they agree with what you're trying to say to them in the middle of the conflict...you can do damage similarly by targeting their intentions and getting them to do what you want, rather than preventing them from doig what they want).

It's all about perspective.

Just some ideas...

V

I reckon a 20th level Barber or Baker is just as sensible as a 20th level priest for example, or for that matter a 20th level "rogue", in fact it makes more sense as the above groups actually had guilds sometimes that would consider your "level" in terms of general skill.

Skill values and levels can be pretty equivalent, depending on how you work them out, as a multi-class sailor/farmer might be exactly the same as someone who has split his skill points equally between the two.

I dont have much to add, but I like how the framework looks.

I think the key to ensuring the need for noncombat skills is simply o make combat as poor an option as it often is in the real world. It takes a great deal of technology for a single man to ever be dangerous to many, and its easy to close that gap on the scale that matters most, the personal one.

In a medieval world a trained knight is deadly when supported by other warriors, but 5 farmers with crossbows will kill him everytime he tries to fight them.

One way is to make sure that combat skills are possessed at a basic proficiency by a large section of people. Certainly hunters, trappers and even basic laborers should be dangerous men when they outnumber you. Its not simple by any means since 2-1 odds are not the same as 8-4.

Another way would be to simply not reward combat by making the XP or cash rewards always greater when a non-violent (or at least non-direct) solution is used.

Hi Adarchi,

Why not take a look Chaosium's BRP or the original Rune Quest? It’s not without flaws - but then again what game is? Anyway, all characters and creatures in BRP/RQ (PC or NPC) are created in pretty much the same way. They all have attributes and skills. You can use a template to create a farmer or craftsman, so it doesn't take forever. There are no levels, XPs or anything similar - just individual skills and attributes improving independently through training and general use. Loads of games take this approach now, but RQ was the first one to do it.

Each occupation has a list of skills related to it, with many skills common to multiple occupations. There are no hierarchical tiers – no parent or daughter skills – so if you get better at tracking it doesn't make you better at any other skills related to being a hunter/scout/herder/tracker/ranger/whatever. Skills are categorised as Agility, Communication, Knowledge, Manipulation, Stealth, Perception and Magic. You can get better at a whole group of skills (or several) by training your attributes instead of your skills.

The first character I ever played in a RQ game was a simple herdsman, which horrified me at the time - but it was great! I didn’t get into a fight until the third session, and even then it was only fisticuffs with a farmer.

Anyway, good luck with the system.

Bert

Wow, between V's plot suggestion (awesome! Really, really awesome. Go you!) and Adarchi's bevy of non-combat skills (like I said, I'm a sucker for farming skills), this discussion reminds me of a game idea someone posted a while back, one in which the simplest of village jobs required going out and slaying rock-beasts, or river-monsters, or grain-goblins. The Forge's search feature is being a bit of a layabout at the moment, so Adarchi, I'll try to PM you with the link when I find it.

Anyway, it also reminds me of the section in Unknown Armies that talks about all the things you could do instead of fighting someone: talking it out, surrendering, running away, etc. Adarchi, your game sounds like it has potential to provide all sorts of alternatives! Have the brewer and the apothecary join up to put a sleeping draught in the drink of the merciless tyrant; I'm sure his food-taster wouldn't mind a little narcolepsy if it meant freedom for his people. It makes me think of something that has seemed a little odd to me about D&D and such games - especially in video games, foes fight to the death, 99% of the time. Humans, as a rule, do not do so unless they're fanatics or they have death/worse than death waiting for them back where they came from.

Okay, I do have one article I can post: http://ptgptb.org/0019/classconflictD20.html discusses the social and societal implications of various D&D classes, which brings us back to the archetypal fantasy warrior - someone who's just a heartless mercenary, and far from his homeland at that, would have little to no social connections to rely on for help where he's been stationed on his latest gig. He might be intimidating as all get-out, and a fearsome swordsman, but if he angers the locals, he won't even be able to buy a drink without wondering if someone's laced it. But rather than punishing combat-monsters in your design, why not reward them for taking on a few points in getting some friends, or at least some other skills as well, so they have options beyond, "Um, I kill him?" every time they're faced with adversity. Most action movies have at least some situation in them in which the hero can't just haul off and shoot or stab the main villain, even when he's given a chance to do so - something stops him, like, say, diplomatic immunity, and he has to do a bunch of legwork to get to a place where he's allowed to pull the trigger.

But yeah - V, that suggestion is awesome sauce!

-- Abby

V's suggestion is colorful, but I think it's still stuck on the same saw. It's a problem solving event that is acting as a surrogate for combat. That's only going to work a couple of times before it becomes boring or frustrating. Though I suppose you could make a game about clever problem solving and just have fighting not be an option.

However, I say go one step further. If you want to have depth in your mundane, non-fighty activities, give them all equal weight. I'm not saying that Fighting can be beat with Farming. I'm saying that there should be conflicts about Farming. Bringing the crops should have the same mechanical weight as fighting off raiders. The actual practice of two arts isn't necessarily equivalent, but the consequences of the outcomes can be equal.

Seemingly mundane activities can be used as excellent dramatic devices. Fighting is not the only activity in a fantasy RPG. Making, growing, trading all can be used in various incarnations to great effect.

I don't get the point of this.

Don't mean to make the above sound offensive - I want to understand what's so fun in assigning a peon PCs may never see again a whole character sheet of 'is own, but I just can't. The fact that a number of people do find the idea naturally alluring puzzles me to no end! Could someone explain the reasons of this allure to me?

Here's where I'm coming from:

NPCs created the same way PCs are). If NPCs are not created according to the same rules as the PCs, it's because they're quite usually boring, one-dimensional, and never to be seen again after you fix whatever problem they had. Will John Cropgrow the Farmer who's barn has been infested with wolves or whatever stop being one-dimensional because he actually has the "Farmer" group of skills? Neither does the possibility of him also being a terrific dancer, an OK accountant and cook thrill me.

Non-combat skills are largerly "invisible" in most games, since their respective areas of effect are not modelled at all in most games. If the PCs will wandering combatants of some sort or the other (Adarchi seems to think that will be the case), how is providing what's essentially useless detail better? The PCs are not going to see it, and I imagine it's a lot more work for the GM. If a skill is likely to never be used by a PC, you might as well fib it.

"I want to see the effects of these mundane skills on the world!" Some of you seem to be saying. Fine, okay - say the PCs kill John Cropgrow instead of getting rid of his wolf problem, so his fields go untended and a nearby village is near starvation and will have to try and trade for its food. Simulating stuff like that *would* be pretty cool. S'only that it's not the *use* of a skill that's interesting, it's the lack of a skill that gave that effect. Still say it's easier for the GM to play it by the ear.

However, if John Cropgrow wasn't part of a small village, but of a bigger town or city, someone would have just giggled with glee and settled on his lands, meanin' there wouldn't even be any food problem. Most of the simple skills are rather easily replicable, meaning that the NPCs in question is boring not because it has no effect on the world, but because that NPC is very, very expendable.

And if the NPC isn't expendable in that she has skills that allow her to accomplish super-awesome feats - the deceased John Cropgrow's cousin Jill Plantseed can grow a beanstalk to the moon! - you can get by by just saying, as is the custom: that NPC is super-awesome, for she can do this and that, guard her from dangers lurking and obvious!

So yeah.

1) Don't see the point in giving skills PCs will never use.
2) Don't see the point of giving skills the PCs will use without them having some sort of effect on the world.
2a) Having these skills have an recognisable, system-induced effect on the world is both difficult and somewhat meaningless to simulate if you're planning to model any society that's bigger than a breadbasket.

Maybe this would be a fun way to play in a game with a small community in crisis, where lack of relevant skills is really an issue (we have no blacksmith nor carpenter, so our farmer has to work the lands with a large treebranch) and any crisis has to be solved by creative application of common skills.

Which is what most people seem to be proposing, implicitly at least.

Whereas the starter of the thread wants to design a broad-use mundane NPC creation tool.

Hope this didn't come off as hostile - and maybe was even of some use. I just don't get it, is all.

Hey, I just thought I'd throw in my 2 cp on the subject of making a game non-combat oriented. I'm doing something about it in Night and Day, which is, incidentally, about war, but I wanted to reward players for success in non-combat encounters too. I took some inspiration from Shadow of Yesterday, and made everything deal damage the same way. A cutting remark is as dangerous as a cutting blade. This means you can have conflict and deal damage and all that without it being a knock-down, drag-out fight. Have the players in conflict against a problem, dealing damage against the difficulty of solving it, maybe.

Give whatever task the normal people have to overcome a Difficulty pool instead of a Health pool, and let them make Farming or Blacksmithing 'attacks' against it.

Just a thought

Adarchi wrote:
Again, most stats are focused on combat (str, dex, and con all factor into combat) whereas the other stats seem to be afterthoughts.

Adarchi wrote:
I'm trying to create a system that allows PC generation to be done the same way as NPC generation. The goal being that a baker or wood cutter somehow fit into the system as neatly as a gladiator or adventurer would.

DWeird wrote:
I don't get the point of this.

[snip]

1) Don't see the point in giving skills PCs will never use.
2) Don't see the point of giving skills the PCs will use without them having some sort of effect on the world.
2a) Having these skills have an recognisable, system-induced effect on the world is both difficult and somewhat meaningless to simulate if you're planning to model any society that's bigger than a breadbasket.

Vulpinoid wrote:

Adarchi wrote:
Again, most stats are focused on combat (str, dex, and con all factor into combat) whereas the other stats seem to be afterthoughts.

Really?

You don't think strength would be a primary concern for a farmer when moving his plow, or when trying to pull a horse from a boggy ditch?

How about a craftsman with high dexterity versus one with low dexterity? The first might be able to execute his work with brilliant detail, while the second has great ideas and designs for his work, but can't put them into practice.

Vulpinoid wrote: If you think of things in a black-and-white/combat-and-noncombat perspective, then your game will reflect this (as we've seen in numerous game designs).

[hr]

Going back to the original thread title, and the opening lines of the thread...

Adarchi wrote:
I'm trying to create a system that allows PC generation to be done the same way as NPC generation. The goal being that a baker or wood cutter somehow fit into the system as neatly as a gladiator or adventurer would.

When it is said that PC generation should be done the same way as NPC generation, does this mean that the PCs are expected to be expendable characters just like most NPCs? Regarding the second line, I find this to actually be contrary to most of my experience. In most cases, the NPCs fit into the setting and integrate into the system far better than most PCs who are typically outsiders and who possess numerous exceptions in comparison to the mundane world.

A few posts have skirted around the issue, but I think the easiest way to resolve this is by simply having all of the players begin with a regular mundane societal role (baker, butcher, farmer, craftsman, milliner, innkeeper, etc.). You can decide for yourself whether the skill set associated with these roles comes from a class, a basic template of starter skills, or whatever other system takes your fancy. As an addendum to the character creation process, you could add a second template to the character (whether PC or NPC) to indicate membership in the town guard, service in the local lords militia, membership of a guild, a seat on the town council, etc.

Adarchi wrote:
Would an extremely dexterous craftsman have the same advantage over a lower skilled one that a dexterous swordsman would have over a poor one?

A friend and I were debating about how "gamey" skills would work with something like playing an instrument. The worlds most dexterous, intelligent, and creative individual is still going to play the violin worse than a 10 year old with a year of practice.

And a town full of farmers is interesting... how?

The above is not neccessarily a rhetorical question, but it is one that you have to answer for yourself if you're going to take this road, right? Realism does not equal fun. Unless, you know, it does - but how many people will have read a research treatise on the medieval times as opposed to having read some sort of a fantasy book?

If setting generation is your main problem, why not focus on setting generation? Instead of generating NPCs, generate societies. Randomise certain fields (Economy - Military - Culture, etc.) or the presence of certain groups (Farmers - Assasin's Guild - the Church, etc.) or just the presence of certain problems (Lack of food - crazy weather - malign presence, etc.), or some combination of these. Then peg them to the expected level of town development somehow (number of dice rolled for it, straight modifiers, whatever) and you're gold.

You would have your "town full of interesting people with minor plot items and red herrings" right there on the spot. High ony military, high on farmers, lacking food? Snotty aristocratic landholders are having a problem with their peasants. High on culture, high on church, collapsing buildings? The church keeps burning the local stonemasons as heretics.

Instead of having NPCs, you have representatives of social forces/groups/problems. The "mundane" skills they have do not exist system-wise - they have them 'in the story', but not in the numbers. They compress mp3s by cutting out the parts of a piece that the human ear will never hear. This is pretty much the same principle.

I mostly agree with DWeird here, but I think I understand where you're coming from Abby. Having flat, 2D NPCs is functional but it lacks the impression of depth that ought to be given, and that would be given in any other type of entertainment involving presented fiction (e.g. movies, books, etc.).

For the game I'm working on, we're taking a middle-of-the-road approach. All characters have certain levels of depth, with deeper levels taking more time and energy to build. PCs always have the deepest level of depth. A lot of NPCs with the same depth as a PC would take too much time and energy from the GM, and like DWeird, they would be outside the range of the players' experiences, so why bother? Just punishes the GM for no in-game benefit.

Our levels are:
- pure combat: think hack and slash; the PCs don't know his history and don't give a rat's patootie
- pure social: purely functional; do you really care that the bartender had a bad night yesterday?
- combat + minimal social; someone the PCs are wary about - he's just a shoe salesman... OR IS HE?!?!
- Supporting Character; A character that the PCs deal with regularly, someone they may care about (in a good way or bad way)
- Main Character: Virtually a PC, but controlled by the GM

All NPCs in the game start out at one depth and have the capability of growing deeper, as needed.

Dan

I agree that giving NPCs a bunch of skills that never see any use in play is usually more trouble than its worth, but I think there are a few things you can do make non-combat skills more. . .meaty, I guess.

I think that there are a bunch of reasons combat is considered the baseline RPG activity, but I think some of the reasons aren't always considered and don't really need to be even tied to combat.

Activities like farming or crafting or even in most systems socializing are one-person affairs.  Maybe people can assist the one person to give them a dice bonus, and maybe if the first person fails the party can take turns trying to succeed, but it's nowhere as team-driven as combat.  In combat everyone has a part to play, everyone is always doing something, and there's no one person that the glory automatically falls upon.  I think for non-combat to be interesting as a core activity in a game there has to be some way for the party to work together while doing it.  Otherwise farming segments just become the part of the game where everyone but the farmer sit around doing jack shit, while the 10 minutes devoted to carpentry are only really engaging for the carpenter.  If everyone has different skills and those skills don't have any real cooperation between them the game starts to alienate all but one player at a time.  Combat is nice because the system has ways built in for a spearman and an archer can work together fluidly in ways that a socialite and stonemason just can't.

Combat's also just a lot more sophisticated than non-combat in most games.  Some games fight against this with things like "social combat", but for the most part non-combat activities are either a single roll to determine success/failure or making the same roll over and over again until you've built up enough successes to succeed.  Building up your character to be good at farming is typically just raising your farming skill, then raising whatever attribute farming is tied to, and maybe getting your hands on some boost-granting items.  Combat, on the other hand, usually uses all sorts of stats and skills and takes all sorts of different rolls (initiative, to hit, damage, soak, saving throws, whatever), making it a lot easier to sink your teeth into.  Completely independent of actual game-play events, combat is just a lot more interesting from a mechanical viewpoint.  Being good at non-combat is straightforward and simple.  Being good at combat is complicated and strategic.  Playing a non-combat character can just be boring from a purely mechanical perspective for a lot of people.

Related to the above, the shallow rules of non-combat tend to make non-combat resolution quick and painless, while combat can drag on for hours.  If you neglect your farming ability you might have to sit out for a minute or two while the farmer does his stuff, while if you neglect your combat ability you're sitting on your thumbs for huge tracts of time.  It seems common for GMs to use combat as the pasta of the RPG meal.  Combat fills up the time and adds padding between dramatic non-combat events to keep the pacing from becoming too hectic.  It captures the mood of whatever it was you were doing before the combat at stays to some degree flavored by it, extending the impact of it.

The thing is, none of the three issues above are in any way inherently present in combat or inherently lacking in non-combat.  A good farming system could easily encourage strong teamwork, and could definitely have the same strategic mechanical depth  A game with farming at its core could easily make farming just as interesting and rich as combat is in most systems.  The issue then is, though, that anything but farming is going to be minimized in the same way that farming is minimized in combat-focused games.  If you want to have both farming and, say, diplomacy have the layer of interest and depth that combat usually does you're going to end up with a gigantic and unwieldy rule-set.

Of course, lots of games get around this by just making combat as quick and easy as non-combat, but I don't think that's the type of game you're thinking about here.

otspiii wrote:
I think for non-combat to be interesting as a core activity in a game there has to be some way for the party to work together while doing it.  Otherwise farming segments just become the part of the game where everyone but the farmer sit around doing jack shit, while the 10 minutes devoted to carpentry are only really engaging for the carpenter.

GM: "Now, what's everyone doing?"
Player 1: "Okay!  I grab my hammer, I'm going to start putting together the concrete forms."
Player 2: "Sounds good, I'll begin mixing the concrete so it's nice and liquid, ready to be poured."
Player 3: "And I'll start cleaning the trowels so that I can follow behind and make sure it's all smooth and level."

ShallowThoughts wrote:
I'm sorry, I hope this doesn't sound overly critical .. I REALLY don't see how most "everyday, workingman" activities can be made fun in an RPG. Surely, if they *could* be made fun, these techniques would have already been adopted in actual workplaces, and everyone would be happy at work instead of turning to RPGs in the first place.

Granted, my above example was facetious. Maybe you could give an example of how you envisage this playing out in a real game??

ShallowThoughts wrote:

otspiii wrote:
I think for non-combat to be interesting as a core activity in a game there has to be some way for the party to work together while doing it.  Otherwise farming segments just become the part of the game where everyone but the farmer sit around doing jack shit, while the 10 minutes devoted to carpentry are only really engaging for the carpenter.

Hmm.

GM: "Now, what's everyone doing?"
Player 1: "Okay!  I grab my hammer, I'm going to start putting together the concrete forms."
Player 2: "Sounds good, I'll begin mixing the concrete so it's nice and liquid, ready to be poured."
Player 3: "And I'll start cleaning the trowels so that I can follow behind and make sure it's all smooth and level."

Adarchi, I agree with you there. If Star Trek NextGen was an RPG .. (it may be already?) .. it would be nice to have a system that allowed "Faceless Transporter Technician #3" to transition smoothly into "Miles O'Brien, brilliant Engineer and Family Man" without rewriting the character from scratch. Difficult to achieve, but a nice idea.

Misha,  I believe it eventually DOES have to come down to a real conflict, though. If you take games like Starcraft or original non-MMO Warcraft, these games involve as much construction and production as they do destruction.. more, in fact. Many MMOs allow characters into trades-type occupations. Now, while these are interesting, they only capture peoples' interests because they're done under threat, or must be accomplished through struggle. On the other hand, simply roleplaying farming seems to me to lack both conflict and struggle. If the character stops farming, nothing happens. (If we start talking about haggling with cheapskate merchants, we're getting into social politics, which involves it's own kinds of conflicts so I could see that becoming interesting. That's really a separate issue from deciding if it is worthwhile to build rules for common occupations into RPG mechanics.)

Daniel

Daniel, I actually agree with you more than I disagree with you at this point.  I just want to force each line of argument into their logical conclusions.  Also, farming is a somewhat extreme example of what I'm talking about, which may make it the perfect subject matter.  There are lot of non-combat skills that are a lot more prone to struggle and competition than farming that would probably work more easily as the focus of a game, but by taking a somewhat difficult example it brings some clarity to the discussion.

You say that farming wouldn't be fun because nothing happens if you just stop.  How is that different from dungeon crawling?  Also, who says that there's nothing reliant on farming?  Even unspiced if a family stops farming it means they're likely to starve, whereas if a dwarf stops dungeon crawling all he's likely to do is retire wealthy, and any system with a decent set of rules for farming would probably have some sort of setting that would allow for competitive farming. Maybe the two factions in a war are evenly matched and the war's outcome depends on how well fed the two sides are, or maybe there's some arbitrary magical justification, or maybe there's some sort of farming tournament (tournaments don't work well for farming, but they can be used to great effect in things like cooking or art).  Struggle and competition are part of the situation, not the action.  Some actions lend themselves better to struggle and competition than others, but that doesn't disqualify them from being able to do so.

It seems to me like most games have a single core activity (usually combat) that has multiple layers of strategy, and then a bunch of secondary activities that your skill at is just determined by a simple stat.  Core activities are usually the focus of the game (things get weird in games like WoD where if you look at the rules combat is by far the most nuanced part of the game, but in theory it's not supposed to be the focus of the game), while secondary activities may be either just support core activities or may have their own uses in keeping the story moving as a whole.  The thing about these common occupation rules is that in the context people seem to be talking about them here they don't seem like core or secondary activities.  They're activities the PCs will only interact with if they go out of their way to do so, and that probably won't grant any special benefit.  I think having certain NPCs have ratings in those occupations might add to immersion or whatever, but I don't think adding rules for working in those occupations would add anything to the game unless those occupations were somehow linked to the core activity you were hoping to promote.

Indeed Masha, we seem to mostly agree ;)

otspiii wrote:
You say that farming wouldn't be fun because nothing happens if you just stop.  How is that different from dungeon crawling?

otspiii wrote:
Also, who says that there's nothing reliant on farming? Even unspiced if a family stops farming it means they're likely to starve, whereas if a dwarf stops dungeon crawling all he's likely to do is retire wealthy, and any system with a decent set of rules for farming would probably have some sort of setting that would allow for competitive farming.

otspiii wrote:
It seems to me like most games have a single core activity (usually combat) that has multiple layers of strategy, and then a bunch of secondary activities that your skill at is just determined by a simple stat.  Core activities are usually the focus of the game (things get weird in games like WoD where if you look at the rules combat is by far the most nuanced part of the game, but in theory it's not supposed to be the focus of the game), while secondary activities may be either just support core activities or may have their own uses in keeping the story moving as a whole.  The thing about these common occupation rules is that in the context people seem to be talking about them here they don't seem like core or secondary activities.  They're activities the PCs will only interact with if they go out of their way to do so, and that probably won't grant any special benefit.  I think having certain NPCs have ratings in those occupations might add to immersion or whatever, but I don't think adding rules for working in those occupations would add anything to the game unless those occupations were somehow linked to the core activity you were hoping to promote.

DWeird wrote:
And a town full of farmers is interesting... how?

Vulpinoid wrote:

DWeird wrote:
And a town full of farmers is interesting... how?

Some would say the same about desperate housewives in suburbia...

...and look how long that TV show has lasted.

Maybe a few roleplaying designers need to start thinking way outside the square.

V

ShallowThoughts wrote:
:-( I really don't mean to be a pest, but I sincerely believe it's important to clarify this point, or otherwise we strive for what we think are the goals we want to reach, but instead find our true goals getting shrouded in irrelevant extraneous details.

100% agreement from me.. I have nothing further to add. (I especially liked the point of how wandering adventurers would be less developed PCs on "Wisteria Lane c1200")

As far as keeping the little people (i.e. farmers) interesting, I think it's important to not really go beyond their depth - if one of the Desperate Housewives got indicted by the DA, it would probably go beyond the scope of the show, and ruin things for a lot of viewers. This is jumping the shark, yes?
Similarly, you could have a situation in which, yes, even with the introduction of supernatural elements or combat, things don't go beyond the village's web of relationships. You could have a tavern brawl, or someone finds a gremlin in the well, or whatever - provided it goes back into exploring the relationships between the villagers, it keeps up the Situation.
It's like how Donjon and the games that inspired it don't really have room for anything other than a) Donjons and b) gearing up for Donjons. You could have some plot involving the mayor being stripped of his office, but if it doesn't tie into a Donjon pretty directly, it's either a throwaway bit of color or it's irrelevant entirely.

I think there's an absolute horde of small-time characters in American entertainment, but the trick is to decide whether they head for the big-time, or they resist that pull the way most good little Hobbits do.
- Abby