Something I don't want get into with Ygg is currency issues, so where it's possible I've tried to avoid them. For example you roll stats, don't place points.

Another thing is that every point in your stat corresponds to 1 point of advantage. Gaining an extra point of strength immediately translate to 1 extra die of damage and similar for the other stats. This is of course to avoid the "bonus threshold optimization". (Incidentally although I'm guilty of doing that a lot I won't miss not having the opportunity)

However, there seems to be no way of avoiding currency issues when creating character abilities. I'm deliberately avoiding skills and skill lists. So abilities is the only area aside from deciding on character class where the player selects something as opposed to rolling.

And it's not only starting abilities, but additional abilities taken as the character progresses. But let's look at the starting abilities problem first.

Obviously I don't want to make certain classes suck from the very beginning. Thus their abilities should somehow be balanced. I've separated combat skills into a stat-like rating which can't be increased at character creation which ensures all classes have equal chances at having a high fighting ability which is in line with my approach with making all characters more or less fighters with specialist skills put on top of that.

Let's look at some abilities and talents from my draft of character classes:
Climb walls
Stealth
Resist Damage
Shapeshifting
Sniper
Set Ambush
Claw Martial Arts

It's obvious these, although helpful in getting a definate flavour for the particular class, are not equal in usefulness. For example "climb walls". How often are you gonna use that ability? It apparently describes extraordinary abilities at climbing, but if you compare it to "Shapeshifting" and "Resist Damage" it seems useless.

Now the standard remedy is to lower the cost of useless stuff and increase it on useful ones.

But is this really helping in any way? Does it make the player any more happy that climb walls is cheaper? No it doesn't.

For all it's "you get this and only this" nazi fashion in leveling up with D&D you knew you were improving all characteristic skills as you went along, and when you needed the climb walls skill you could actually do it.

Compare this to other systems where you might start with a lot of profession specific skills and then naturally gravitated to a jack-of-all-trades-type of character because your profession skills were simply not used enough or not useful enough.

It's not fun to pay points to stay in the archetype and get punished for it, but that's what frequently is the case.

Of course, this problem only arise in Ygg and other frpgs because of the traditional (and in my opinion very enjoyable) focus on character improvment.

Thus ability balancing both at start and in progression becomes very important. In most frps the character starts out pretty well defined but from that they either become less and less distinguishable from each other as the game progresses or the game gives very little input on the direction of the improvment of the character (D&D).

Is there a way out of this?

Maybe I should point out that in distinguishable I don't necessarily mean they should have AD&D style orthogonal classes. I just mean that the original character concept whatever it might be. I mean even making characters in a classless system we usually start out with a character concept. However, in the course of play this concept usually becomes washed out and the character becomes a jack-of-all-trades. It would have been acceptable if the character went from one concept to another clear concept, but in actual play that's not what tends to happen.

Introducing classes is simply a way of providing a clear, "fits with the setting" character concept. But if this get's washed out as the game progresses we have a problem. However, enforcing how character development should go (D&D style) isn't very attractive either.

I'll address your main point in a sec, but first:

But is this really helping in any way? Does it make the player any more happy that climb walls is cheaper? No it doesn't.

The simple answer to avoiding people becoming jacks of all trades, is to make their skills useful and effective. In many FRPGs the players all eventually gravitate towards combat powers, simply because they are the most effective way of solving problems.

If a character who is a charismatic bard, can't talk down a rampaging mob, and must resort to fighting them, what use are his skills? Build usefulness into the system. Both Exalted and Earthdawn do this, in their own ways.

Another solution is to make skills less specific. Climb walls seems too specific to be useful outside one niche, make it a climb skill, or athletics. By making it cover more areas, you've made it more useful.

-Matt

Matt wrote: The simple answer to avoiding people becoming jacks of all trades, is to make their skills useful and effective.

Matt is right on.
Something I've seen a thousand times (and perpetrated many times myself) is the "hit 'em where they're weak" GMing ploy.

In fact, this ploy is so ingrained that I've actually seen in actively promoted on various "tips" sites. "How do you stop a combat god..." "Put him in a social situation...then he'll regret spending all those points on combat and not being better rounded"

This is definitely the stick part of carrot and stick and in retrospect led to alot of completely dysfunctional play.

What it basically means is that PCs are never allowed to do what they're supposed to be good at. The persuasion failed...you'll have to fight. The fight is overwhelming you'll have to talk.

The reason so many people than concentrate on combat abilities, is because they are usually the most universally applicable.

If you're going to go the "abilities" route, the way to ensure some built in balance is to make sure, as Matt said, to make the abilities useful.

My bard should be able to use his "wit and charm" ability in the middle of a fight as a defensive action instead of parrying. If successful, he avoids being hit (for any of a number of reasons) just like parrying.

I can think of a couple of mechanical ways to help do this.

1) the more extreme method: think in terms of event resolution rather than task resolution. "There's going to be a fight, what skill are you going to use" "I'm going to use my Climb Walls skill" <roll, roll> "You succeed, what happens" "As the thug's charge I leap up the side of a nearby building just ahead of their swings...climb to the roof and am gone".

2) Carry over effects: Think Sorcerer / Donjon. Take any skill in any situation and describe how that skill might help in the current situation. Make a roll. Carry over extra successes into the next "real" roll.
"He's attacking you" "I'm going to try and distract him with some witty reparte" <roll, roll> "You got 2 extra successes" "I'll roll those successes into my defense roll"

I think the carry over method or the extreme thing is very important, although it shouldn't be overdone. Still thanks for pointing it out, I almost forgot about it.

However, it doesn't quite solve the main issue, which is about encouraging/forcing character specialization. For example, if climb walls is really good, why don't I take both climb walls and fighting skills? Heck that way I'm doubly covered and I might even be able to optimize them even more that way.

I guess what I'm saying is I'd like the players to shape their character according to some plan and not just pick skills because they are useful. Naturally the first step IS to make all skills useful. But that wasn't anything I was going to forget about anyway. But that brings me to the second point. What is stopping the players from making characters with a whole menu of skills? Obviously one could make abilities taken only once or twice rather worthless to disencourage them, but aren't we back to square one then? Making the skills useless again? Or at least useless unless you know a lot about them.

An obvious way out might be to let some classes start with very high levels of skill right off the bat. Like the thief with climb walls. However, then we run into problems if we want to let the thief learn more cool thieving skills as he gets better. Since we already "postulated" that skills are bad to begin with, so will his new skill of I dunno, "Fence Stolen Stuff" be. So bad that it's pretty much useless. ... and we run into the same problem once again.

I'm not sure what you're saying. There are about a zillion and one different ways to have characters specialize. Professional templates have been around since at least Call of Cthulhu. I'm not sure what the difficulty is. Pick one. Write the rules...PLAY THE GAME...judge what worked and what didn't from ACTUAL PLAY not from speculation. You're starting to chase your tail again.

I do this to. What I usually do is take about a month or two off...don't even look at it, do other things. Than pick it back up refreshed. I did that several times with Universalis (which is why we had to pick up the books for Gen Con from the printer...the morning of GenCon)...but it really helped me out.

Specifically on the "Fence stolen goods" question. I'm not sure what you mean by useless. I can think of several ways to make such a skill indespensable...

If you want to formalize what Ralph and Matt suggested, then it becomes a matter of balancing the scope (range of situational applicability) of the skills. I concur that "climb walls" is too limited in scope compared with others on your list. I think it makes more sense to view this as a "scope" problem than as an effectiveness problem.

Let's look at this list again:

Climb walls
Stealth
Resist Damage
Shapeshifting
Sniper
Set Ambush
Claw Martial Arts

The two you picked out as being most useful are Resist Damage and Shapeshifting. And this is not at all surprising, because both of these skills have a wide variety of uses. Shapeshifting ability typically confers most or all of the following uses:

- Enhanced senses
- Tracking ability
- Stealth and concealment
- Fast long-distance movement
- A very effective (though very limited in variety) disguise
- An alternative combat technique

Avoiding Damage sounds more specific, but it's not; it implies as many different skills as there are different kinds of damage:

- Breaking falls
- Dodging missiles
- Blocking with weapon in combat
- Blocking with shield, armor, or improvised objects in combat
- Knowledge of physical phenomena (e.g. knowing to try to stay under fire but over poison gas)
- Protecting vulnerable points in hand to hand fighting
- Good peripheral senses
- High pain threshold

No wonder "climb walls" seems kind of puny. Even "climb" doesn't quite measure up. But you could have an even more general ability called perhaps "mobility" that might include:

- Climbing walls, trees, ropes, natural stone, wood frameworks, etc.
- Swimming
- Maneuvering in tight spaces
- Avoiding entanglement (e.g. nets or webs)
- Escape from personal physical constraints e.g. nets, webs, quicksand, being tied up

"Sniper" is already comparably broad, if it's assumed to include not just sharpshooting but other arts useful to an effective sniper:

- Camouflage
- Stealth
- Prepared and improvised concealment
- A degree of resistance to effects of ordinary heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and immobility, from training in remaining concealed for hours or days
- Knowledge of layout of military encampments, seige tactics, command structures, town and castle guard practices, etc.
- Superior eyesight
- Range estimation

Does that mean "stealth" alone is too limited? Not necessarily. A generalized "stealth" ability could include forms and applications of stealth that would go beyond what the "sniper" skill would imply.

- Stealthy movement
- Stealthy climbing (far more limited in what can be climbed than the "special mobility" skill, but silent and stealthy)
- Stealthy disabling or killing by surprise ("silence the guard")
- Improvised concealment
- Silent communication
- Conducting others with no special stealth skills in stealth situations ("wait for my signal... wait... now! move move move!")
- Superior hearing

Clearly there is, and should be, overlap at the level of the individual component abilities that make up a skill set. The "sailor" skill set would include climbing too, though perhaps limited to ropes and rigging, as well as "weather sense" that would also be shared with farmers and rangers.

Thus, "Set Ambush" could be part of more than one skill set, perhaps including "brigandage," "squad tactics," and "forest warfare."

In this system you have, of course, two different skill scopes. There are what I've called skill sets, which are what you pay for, and there are the individual component skills, which are what you use in instances of play. Balance is achieved by putting more or fewer skills into the skill set depending on how useful the individual skills are, and sometimes also by limiting and expanding the skills in an appropriate way for their skill set context (e.g. sailors' climbing ability is limited to ropes; but that ability with ropes goes beyond simple climbing to include the ability, given the needed tools and time, to lift other people safely or to move large objects). That way, you can achieve your goal of having all the skills (that is, all the skill sets) cost the same.

Skill sets have some of the advantages (and disadvantages) of traditional character classes, and function at an intermediate scope between classes and skills/feats. Like character classes, they cause characters to progress in a broad range of defined related skills (thus retaining a degree of specialization, but not being so specialized as to only be useful in unusual situations); unlike character classes, having more than one skill set would be the norm, and there should be many more to choose from. (Because of the overlap factor, there could even be far more skill set choices than there are different individual skills that go into them.)

Of course, lots of systems have skill sets or "skill packages" of one sort or another. The difference here is that it's the "packages" and not the individual skills in them that are tied into the system's currency. Also, you would presumably be defining many different and colorful skill sets in advance, rather than provide a few examples and telling players to invent their own as most skill package systems do. Even more unusual is the idea of balancing them so they all cost the same.

Of course, you could take the entirely opposite (and more common) approach and instead of expanding the limited-scope skills like climb walls and set ambush into skill sets, you could break the wider-scope ones like shapeshifting and resist damage into smaller units. It's going to be much harder to equalize all the skill costs this way, as you wish to do. Also, in my opinion, it's dull. You can put a lot more color into a skill set than into a specific skill.

Either way, you should recognize that much of the scope and balance problem with the example list you gave results from the list being a mixture of single individual skills and descriptors that imply many different individual skills.

- Walt

Considering Valamir's comment on "hit 'em where they're weak" ploy, my suggestion is to lay the gamemastering advice out saying basically, "if they take it, let 'em use it" in regards to abilities. But then I covered that in detail back in The Fundamental Particles of Character Class, when I spoke of 'contractual obligations' created when both the world and the character are created.

Or, simply, tell 'em that the ploy Valamir cited is bad form.

Other than that, I echo the "you can't balance abilities because situations differ" commentary.

Fang Langford

A few thoughts:

1. I don't necessiarily think a bard should be able to use his fast-talk in (say) combat with a dragon. I mean, for some games that's fine (and even cool)--but if the game is even marginally simulationistic I think I disagree with the "should" part.

2. The obvious solution to the "let them use their skills" or "hit them where they're weak" business is to simply run a game where all kinds of things happen and there's a spread of usefulness. I've had groups work fine where they go to a party and the socializers dominate and then go into a dungeon and fighters go out in front. Of course if you do enough of this then everyone will have some domain in each area (my fighter was a "body guard" to two magicians and got to do plenty of intimidation role-playing and it was fun being the under-estimated "dumb warrior" around a bunch of mages (NPC's) who thought they were smarter than they were).

3. The utility of shape-shifting vs. climbing has been covered. If it's worth less it should take up less of the effectiveness of the character (assuming "balance" is a goal).

But really, any in-game effectiveness "balance" assumes, I think, a currency system anyway. If you accept that some things are worth more than others then you have try to guestimate a magnitued of difference and there you go (and I agree with Val, Fence Stolen Goods is very useful in the right world--if you create classes make sure they have something rewarding to do in the world).

Final Minor Quibble: In the "Carrot and the Stick" the stick is used to hold the carrot on a string before the donkey (who never reaches it)--not to beat the donkey. (ask me what I tell the technical managers I work with who say they've got a "Show Stopper" bug in the code). ;)

-Marco

I assume a "show-stopper" bug is a bug that was so enjoyed and appreciated by the users that the project was delayed while they stood up to applaud?

I echo Marco's take on "you can't balance abilities because situations differ." Obviously if the player characters are out chasing pirates on the high seas, the character with the sailing abilities is going to get more use of his skills than the character with the mining and delving abilities. The balance condition that Christoffer appears to be interested in, as it relates to skills and character advancement, is in a longer time frame than that.

Because of the situation dependence, the system alone cannot balance skills, but in the long term the gamemaster can -- as long as the system doesn't make it impossible by making skills like "avoiding damage" that pay off twenty times a session cost the same as skills like "bribe judge" that are rarely useful unless the whole plot is deliberately focused on bringing that particular skill into play.

Ygg has currency, but Christoffer asked for an alternative to pricing the skills according to their estimated general usefulness. The simple alternative I'm suggesting (call it the "one dollar store" approach) is to adjust the value of each package so they all cost the same. And (unlike in a one dollar store) making that fixed value relatively high, so that players can select for flavor and still be sure to get real expected (though of course subject to situation) effectiveness from each selection. What I hope was clear from context, though I didn't state it, is that when players improve a skill set, the whole package is improved, even those skills that might not have been situationally useful so far. That way, as in a class system, when you need an only-occasionally-applicable skill from a skill set it's there, without having had to make great sacrifices in other areas to acquire or maintain it.

- Walt

wfreitag wrote: Because of the situation dependence, the system alone cannot balance skills

The simple alternative I'm suggesting (call it the "one dollar store" approach) is to adjust the value of each package so they all cost the same. And (unlike in a one dollar store) making that fixed value relatively high, so that players can select for flavor and still be sure to get real expected (though of course subject to situation) effectiveness from each selection. What I hope was clear from context, though I didn't state it, is that when players improve a skill set, the whole package is improved, even those skills that might not have been situationally useful so far. That way, as in a class system, when you need an only-occasionally-applicable skill from a skill set it's there, without having had to make great sacrifices in other areas to acquire or maintain it.

The topic of my first post was "what's wrong with currency issues?" And I think I'll ask it.

Is it a complexity issue? A "there can't be a perfect cost" lament? Is it a flavor or speed thing?

I mean, one possibility for balancing a game would be a market economy. Each time someone takes a skill, raise it's price--I know this isn't actually feasible for a traditional pencil and paper RPG--but I'm pointing out that there are a lot of ways to address a currency issue and as Mike pointed out, they're hard to get rid of in a simulationist structure where balance is a goal.

An alternative would be to give everyone "Five Dragons." Being Damage Resistant costs 2 and a shape shifter costs 3. All the thieving stuff you'd want costs 1. The numbers are low and there's still currency--but it's simple and flavorful (ok, don't use 'Dragons'--that might be kinda dumb ... but whatever).


-Marco
[ For JAGS we built in diminishing returns to several point-value systems ... especially supers ... and in cases where we can we break up what you can purchase into normal character stuff and "Archetype" stuff. Its not going to please the people who don't like point-based chargen but it's a different take on Hero where everything is (was?) linear, and GURPS where racial and super powers come out of the same pool of points making high-point characters easy to screw the system with. ]

Marco wrote: I mean, one possibility for balancing a game would be a market economy. Each time someone takes a skill, raise it's price--I know this isn't actually feasible for a traditional pencil and paper RPG--but I'm pointing out that there are a lot of ways to address a currency issue and as Mike pointed out, they're hard to get rid of in a simulationist structure where balance is a goal.
-Marco

Yeah, Ralph makes a good point. I think these sorts of things can be put into RPGs. Actually, Marco's first suggestion sounded good to me. First bid to see who goes first with your points, and then with the remaining ones start purchasing triats one at a time going through the purchased order repeatedly. Each time you take a level (or three, or whatever makes sense), the cost goes up by one for the next purchaser, whoever it may be. Or you can box people out by paying a special fee to have the option on the next purchase.

This maintains balance automatically (the players have only themselves to blame if they mess it up), and serves as niche protection simultaneously.

Mike

Various comments:
I had a friend who tried to port Amber to Hero, including the action system. The result was sorta a bust for a couple reasons
1)Most people plowed all their points into either stats or signature items. Also, all stats wern't equal.
2)Hero couldn't do the spell system effectivly
My point is, making a viable auction system is harder than it looks.

However, there seems to be no way of avoiding currency issues when creating character abilities. I'm deliberately avoiding
skills and skill lists. So abilities is the only area aside from deciding on character class where the player selects something as
opposed to rolling.

You have random skill rolling also. As long as you meet the goal of all skills being roughly equally usefull, it could be fun.

Another idea would be to have catagories of skills. Shadowrun does this, there are Active(Mechanical Effect) skills and Knowledge(Other) skills. :)
In your case you could have catagories of skills.
You get X points for catagory A skills, Y for catagory B, ect.
so 'Resist Damage' and 'Climb Walls' would be in different catagories.
You might want to make sure there is no way to trade beween catagories either, or maybe you can only trade points in a higher catagory for points in lower catagories. (aack, currency!,nevermind)
This gives players flexebilty, but still balances skills(everyone has the same amount of the same 'catagory' of skills). You'd also have to keep this in advancement also, which might be harder. In DnD, you would get X catagory A points/level, Y catagory B points, ect.
Archetypes would work into this by simple haveing a seperate set of catgories per Archetype.

Mike wrote:

wfreitag wrote:
Because of the situation dependence, the system alone cannot balance skills.

I think I could dispute that. But for the purposes of this game, the statement is correct.

What you get if you try to use this [skill packages that advance in synch] for further development are situattions like the following: perhaps there are three skills in the burglar package that it makes sense for my character to improve in, but not a fourth, as he's had no exposure to it whatsoever. In which case getting it as part of an improvement purchase makes about as much sense as, well, leveling up in D&D.

This is very much like old-style D&D classes before there were choices regarding skills and feats.

Ok, I wrote this yesterday before there had been like a million comments on the thread :) Just so you know.

Jasper wrote:

Pale Fire wrote:
But is this really helping in any way? Does it make the player any more happy that climb walls is cheaper? No it doesn't.

I really can't see why you think this is the case (and I'm not being hostile -- just miffed). The player's goal is to have a character just as effective as those of his friends. If his single ability Climb Walls is inneffective in practice, his aims would be thwarted, I agree. But if you give him additional abilities as well, what's the problem?

Valamir wrote: If you're going to go the "abilities" route, the way to ensure some built in balance is to make sure, as Matt said, to make the abilities useful.

Ok, I think I remember what people have been writing after only reading through it once. :)

Your suggestions, like the skill packages are good - for a skill system. It's just that I don't have one.

These abilities or talents or what to call them aren't all full-fledged skills, and some can't even be made into ones.

Let me explain a little more in depth:

To simulate combat moves I originally intended to give "combat"-picks every time a fighter type of character went up a level. The original planning is not important. What's interesting is the scope of these. It made a whole lot of sense that these were small.

For example you'd have "Mighty Blow" which gave you +1 damage die. Maybe you could upgrade that to level 2 and level 3 for higher damage. I was going to have the martial arts use this to, having moves like "Piercing Strike" which reduced the armour rating for the hit. Again maybe up to level 3 at the most.

Anyway, since I had created this feat thing I naturally wanted to use it with all special abilities. That's when I ran into problems.

If I could shift things up in scope I would. But if we look at the mighty blow skill. It doesn't scale up well. If I scale it up I have to include more specials into the skill, and might end up a palladium style of progression for the pick, something like:

Level 1 - Mighty Blow +1 damage
Level 2 - Heroic Leap
Level 3 - Mighty Blow +2 damage

and so on. Which is removing exactly the detail I was looking for to begin with, as well as leaving me with having to design some arbitrary skill progression chart for leveling up.

What I have is skills of varying scope and importance. I could make the combat skills pay for their usefulness, but that would make the fighters faceless... well fighters, and they'd only have a few of em anyway.

What could work would be to separate them into categories as damion suggests. I was thinking a little along these lines myself.

The only real difficulty in that lies in the amount of categories. To sum up what I have:

Inborn magical abilities
Special inborn traits
Learned magical skills
Learned magical feats
Combat feats
Non-combat feats
Combat skill
Stats
Normal skills
Specialized skills

I already was going to separate out the stats together with the general combat skill (it works well, but I won't go into the details), but grouping the rest of these together into some coherent groups with equal "value" seems hard.

I don't know if this makes the problem a little more clear? I mean if it was just simple skills it wouldn't be a problem.

I've been watching this thread, and wondering how I could contribute. Maybe I do have something.

Multiverser has a very elaborate skills system, and allows advancement in any and all desired skills primarily by taking time out to practice them. The limit to how many you can practice really is how much time can you devote to practicing your skills apart from anything else you want to do. It also allows you to get credit on a skill by using it "in a new way" during play--thus your examples of the airwalk skill would devolve into a credit for using it to levitate in a ritual, a credit for using it in combat, a credit for using it to save yourself on the cliff, and so forth. I kept looking at all this, and thinking that perhaps some sort of unlimited skills system might work better; of course, such systems are easy to break if you've got people who want to maximize power.

I recall that there's a system out there that allows you to roll to see if you are permitted to increase any skill which you have "used" in the game; the problem that has been observed about this system is that in blatantly encourages generalists and penalizes specialists; that is, the player who changes weapons every round will be the better fighter with all of them than the one who always focuses on using the same weapon. But I think perhaps the system could be modified to work for you.

You would first have to define some sort of game segments. I hate games which divide action up into "game session" because I have been such an incorrigible gamer that a session could be five minutes over the phone or twenty hours straight on the weekend. But you would need some way to define the beginning and end of a section of the story, because that becomes your limiter.

Every skill that the player character uses during that story section would need somehow to be noted. This could include trying things he's never done before (for which there would have to be an incredibly low chance of success) or doing something he does a hundred times in ever combat. What matters is only that he must use, or attempt to use, the skill during that segment of the game. At the end of the segment, the player selects one, and only one, of the skills he has used or attempted, and gets a credit in that. You would need to determine how many credits add up to an advancement in level, and this doesn't need to be linear. (Multiverser requires one credit to reach levels of 1@, four to reach 2@, and twenty-seven to reach 3@.) You would also cap the amount of advancement possible.

The character thus would have ability levels in things which were commensurate to his choice of what he actually found useful in adventures and expected to find useful in the future. That is, if the level one Mighty Blow was useful, he would want to spend his credits on building up the level two Mighty Blow.

Note also that I'm not suggesting the character can bank points to spend on whatever he wants. I'm suggesting that he can get one point to apply on layaway to whatever he has used and expects to use again.

The aspect of this that I have not addressed is the concept of new skills. I suspect that to make that work, you would have to divide skills into at least two, possibly three, categories: 1) Things you have to be born able to do, and so cannot learn; 2) Things anyone has a chance to do, albeit a small one; 3) Things which must be taught by someone else (this is the dubious category--Multiverser permits a character to "figure out" how to do anything by trial and error, as long as he has the physical body required for anything that requires specific body parts).

Does this help at all?

--M. J. Young

Does this help at all?

MJ: Like Mike says, it does unfortunately not help the kernel of the problem which is that people will be working on pretty much the same skills. So I don't see this scheme as really assisting. I think both the "player choice" and the "used skills" approach suffer the same flaw. And the combination of them (which seems to be your suggestion), seem to have the same problem.

What is lacking, I think is basically a "future" or a "destiny" of the character. The reason D&D doesn't have the same problem is because it defines both past-present-future as one single thing: the character class you chose. You were a level 1 thief, you are a level 3 thief and you will become sometime in the future a level 10 thief (if you manage to survive that long)

I think what I'd want is (in D&D terms) something like "You were a Thief", "You're presently a Fighter" and "you will be a Magic-User"

The player could have chosen these archetypes to begin with. They don't have to be the same, but I want DIRECTION.

I don't want the characters to evolve to neither the same generalist or the same specialist. I want them increasingly distinct and different from each other.

Mike wrote: Note hos in TROS, you have just two "classes" (fighter, sorcerer), and almost everyone plays just one of them. Doesn't matter, however, as the protagonism is not derived from the skills, but from the SAs.

Aside from fighting prowess there aren't all that many ways to deliver protagonism in a monster hunting scenario, or is there (minor opportunities aside I mean)

I've played some Pendragon. I'd like to look at Hero Wars but it's gonna be a pain to get hold of here.

Anyway, I never really felt the Pendragon stats was really characterizing my character. But the again, maybe I hold grudges because my pagan knight managed to succeed the chastity roll (or failed, depending on how you see it) and didn't stay and roll around in the hay like all others who were christian knights (and had failed their rolls).

In this way you protagonize the character withought just adding to typical skills or abilities.