OK - preface - I have no intention to actually publish this game, it's a system to facilitate something I'm doing with a friend. You can find a discussion of that something at http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9040 .

What's the game about?

The protagonist is a shapeshifter who can transform his body into any variety of animalistic shapes. This can be 'turn into a mouse', or he can grow falcons' wings one moment and bear claws the next.

The protagonist is set off from (most of) the rest of the world by this ability. So I figure this ability should be central to the game.

The setting is typical swords & sorcery stuff, a crumbling empire ruled by scheming, decadent noblemen, many of whom are wizards. Adventures will involve multiple conflicting, entangled relationships and cool fights with weird monsters. The character's long-term goals are resisting or destroying the empire which enslaved him and discovering what happened to his people.

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OK - so, a system. I started out with the dice mechanics from Sorcerer. Characters have

Strength - used for attack and defense, relevant conflicts
Quickness - used for initiative and defense, relevant conflicts
Will - used to master shapeshifting, social interaction, relevant conflicts
Past - used for any 'skills' reasonably linked to player narrative
Flaw(s) - die penalties for particular conflict types, linked to character conception

The protagonist also has a Shifting Pool. The points in the Shifting Pool can be used to add dice to any of the above for one scene, or to modify the character's abilities in some way (e.g. grow wings to fly, or scales to armor), or to heal wounds - anything that a really potent shapeshifter could accomplish. One schtick though is that it's understood as animal-based: so he could make himself hairy and bulk up for a general disguise, but not for the most part imitate particular people, and disguise uses are vaguely animalistic.

Continuing uses of the Shifting Pool cost more points. A running total of all current expenditures is kept. The animal natures invoked in shapeshifting tend to assert control, and so when the character wants to do something which goes against them, he has to make a Will roll vs. a die pool of the size of all current points spent from the pool. Success means it's fine; failure means a loss of control, the character has to do something else. Successive losses of control could mean full transformation into the animal type, berserk animal rage, or even full loss of consciousness for hours, days, or weeks as the character spends time in animal form, human consciousness lost to him.

Using the pool costs 1 point for a raw change of part of the body (growing talons, wings, etc.) and 1 point/die to add bonuses to rolls (growing scales which add n dice to defense rolls, bear's torso adding n dice to strength for attack rolls, etc.). Full changes into animal form cost roughly 2-4 points depending on the precise form (the more different from human, the more it costs).

The pool replenishes on rest, or else on successful contests directly involving the animalistic transformations. Turning into a bear might cost 3 points, but if the bear then successfully ripped some city guardsmen to pieces that would gain some points back. This should mean that when things go sour there is more and more incentive to use the pool in order to replenish it, heightening the likely expenditure per scene and making it more likely that the animal nature will assert control over the player.

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Other stuff:

Basic die roll framework is as in Sorcerer, with a base number of dice decided by relevant stat and then modified by player description, equipment and situational modifiers, and cascading die rolls.

Combat is somewhat different. 'Flurry' initiative system as per Donjon with dice = Quickness. Attack based on Strength. Weapons add or subtract attack dice (fists = -2, dagger = -1, sword =0, big ass axe = +1). If you abort an action to defend with full dice, you may choose to defend with Strength or Quickness. Armor adds dice to strength defense and subtracts dice from quickness defense, with a default of 0 for light armor, etc. Number of successes = damage. Wounds = Strength. Maybe some modifiers when you're wounded, haven't figured that out yet. You go down when you go below 0 and you're dying if you get doubled. This would be untenable for the hero in many fights, but he can use his shapeshifting pool to heal wounds as he goes (this is active - he doesn't 'regenerate'), making longer staying power plausible.

I have some other ad hoc rules I've worked up detailing some other minor magical abilities this character has, but those aren't as important now.

My main, focused question about all this is: how big should the Shifting Pool be? Any thoughts? Any ways I can make this better?

So shifting dice, it seems to me, either confers boosts directly to an attribute, or confer Abilities based on one attributes.

I'm going to rename Strength as Stamina and Quickness and Maneuver here, because they work more for what I'm talking about.

So say that I want to grow wings. This is, effectively, a Maneuver boost. But it also grants me the ability to fly. So I should spend one dice out of my Shifter pool to gain the "winged" or "flies" or some such descriptor to your Manuever attribute, as well as any number of dice to the Manuever pool (even zero) which reflects how much this shift helps you to maneuver.

As far as I can see, the size of the "shifter pool" is simply dependant on how much the character can "shift," which is pure setting. I like the idea of traits and values flowing "into" and "out of" the pool -- perhaps at the end of each story arc, choose to drop any descriptor or attribute, and keep any one descriptor or attribute boost that they used during that story. Thus, the over-arching theme is one of discovering your ever shifting "true form."

I'm now thinking about the possibility of using this system -- with base attributes of 0 -- to run Among Beautiful Creatures, which is a very cool setting to consider.

yrs--
--Ben

Yeah, that's a better way to put it - thank you! 1 point for a descriptor, 1 point for a die bonus per die. So you add the Eagle's Wings descriptor to your Movement (call it), and then you can use that for flying maneuvers as well as land-based ones. If the flying maneuver is easy you just do it without rolling, like anything.

Maybe Prowess and Movement are better names for the first two stats. 'Maneuver' doesn't connote speed, which is its principal contribution to the combat system I envisioned. Of course, it's weird to talk about a monster's 'Prowess', and 'Movement' is sort of bland...sigh. Any suggestions from people for names on the first two?

Here's a really cool idea, which I'll let the player think of himself: use the shifting to add descriptors to Past. So you take on a bear's mindset and then you can find a hollow trunk in the woods to hide out in or whatever.

Calithena wrote:
Here's a really cool idea, which I'll let the player think of himself: use the shifting to add descriptors to Past. So you take on a bear's mindset and then you can find a hollow trunk in the woods to hide out in or whatever.

Great little hybrid, Sean. Keeps the rules to a minimum so the emphasis is on roleplaying and player decision-making.

Thanks, Michael. I sort of like it too, and it's given me ideas for other things.

Ben, that Wound mechanic is awesome. I'm going to have to think about that. The one possible bit of trouble I see is that if the character gets badly wounded and heals it with his pool at 1-1 he's dead sure to completely lose control. This might not be a bad thing, it's just something I need to think about. OTOH that would be a problem for any in-combat healing anyway.

As to flaws, yeah, you could add a flaw with the shifting pool. I was thinking more along the lines of 'soul flaws', general character weaknesses, but there's no reason you couldn't add flaw descriptors along with the rest. Maybe they even wouldn't cost. More ambitiously, you could have to add certain flaws in order to use the pool - something like this might be the way to go for your Among Beautiful Creatures app.

Thanks for the feedback.

The cumalative expenditures as a build up of the animal side is a good idea, but I didn't see any reduction to this level. Is it a one way street? If so it will overwhelm will pretty quickly.

In 7th Sea they had a nifty damage system where you made a save to resist wounds. If you managed to avoid the wound you still accumulated the "flesh wound" points which made it more difficult to resist the next wound. Eventually you'd fail one, take a wound and the accumulated flesh wounds would be reset to zero.

Perhaps something similiar here. The accumulated "bestial nature" points build up vs Will and keep building until finally a Will vs Bestial Nature roll is failed. The character goes all bestial and does some horrible things ala The Hulk (or permanently develops an animal feature or whatever), but once the passion is spent the character is in control once more and the Bestial Nature points are reset to zero.

A variation on this would be to have a scale of possible "bad things" from a failure. Each thing selected will reduce the accumulated Bestial Nature points. The "worse" things reduce more.

For instance simply saying "the power failed you were unable to shift and you lose the dice in your shift pool to no effect" is fairly mild and would result in no loss of points. "you enter a bestial rage, violently striking out at any one and everyone" would be pretty severe, reduce the accumulated pool to 0 in one giant orgy of animalism and last for 1 hour per point reduced. Other things like "gaining a minor animal feature like cat eyes or fangs", or the like would fall somewhere in between.


On another note you wrote:

I have no intention to actually publish this game

*Blinks*

But, but...you're the guy who wrote Universalis! If I had dreams of being a game designer, I'd be floating on air.

OK - the issue here is that if we get too much of a build up of points spent from the shifting pool, it's going to make the power essentially useless.

My thought was that it would only be the points in use at a single time that constituted the roll-against die pool. So if you grew bear talons (1 point for the strength descriptor) and falcons' wings (1 point for the quickness descriptor plus say a 2 point bonus to quickness) then you would have spent four points. That scene ends and you morph back to normal, at least pending beating the four-die pool with your Will to keep control.

In the next scene you're at zero again. It's only when you keep some of that stuff (say, let the wings go, but pay another point to make the bear talons last a while) that the points hang on - but only what you keep, so in this case that would be just 1 (the bear talon descriptor cost) even though you've spent 5 points from your pool transforming so far. So you're only rolling against current expenditures, not total. That seems to keep it more manageable.

But if you have a lot of fighting and you're using the pool to manage wounds as well it seems likely that it won't be so manageable any more, because suddenly those four dice of shifting plus three dice of wounds generates a brutal 7 die pool to roll against. That's what I'm sort of worried about avoiding.

I did figure out some more precise mechanics for taking on a completely different animal form. What about turning into a huge grizzly bear? Well, here you'd compare the animal's stats (say Strength 7 Quickness 2) to your own and add the total difference to 1 point to find your total. The minimum for this is always 2, though, even if it's something like a mouse (say Strength 0 Quickness 2). There's no reason to restrict the shapeshifter to 'normal' animal forms necessarily, these are just examples.

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OK. Well, if I were to actually design a game out of this, there are lots of great thoughts on the thread that spawned this for doing a Sorcerer supplement on this kind of theme.

Another simple idea would be to have the character's Bestiality get powered by doing, well, bestial things. Then the character derives power from Bestiality but that's in direct opposition to Humanity, which the character also values. That might be integrable into doing it as a version of Sorcerer, or it could be used just to make the simple rules here a little bit more deeply theme-driven. Actually, at that point I'm not quite sure it's not really more or less a version of Sorcerer already: once you add Humanity to the stat mix above and put Bestiality (new name for the Shifting Pool) in conflict with it you've really effectively asked the 'what will you do for power?' question already, albeit with different mechanics.

Thanks for taking a look, Ralph.

I see, so you only have to make a check vs what you're currently using right then plus anything you've used but "turned off" since the last check. Some interesting things fall out of that.

This places a certain low level of dependable use on the power. As long as you keep the bonuses modest relative to your Will you should be able to do those things pretty frequently with a relatively low possibility of it costing you, unlike the method I was proposing where all uses would eventually get you to a loss, modest uses would simply take longer to get there. That may or may not be a desireable effect.

Second I'm wondering about scale. You want to set this up so that there is a real danger for overusing power but if the character is losing control everyother time the player tries to do something, I'm guessing your player would be pretty put off by that as it would impede on his "revel in the shift" theme he's looking for.

Problem is, that the point cost you're assigning to powers might be a little too high relative to the range of will scores. A Will of 6 vs a 4 die Shift poses a non trivial chance of failure. Perhaps too common for your friends taste.

It wouldn't be that hard to scale it different...1 point of bestiality per 2 dice of bonus...or roll Will+4 or Will x2 vs... etc. But trying to figure out where that sweet spot is is probably worth some thought and playing around with probabilities.

Further there then becomes the danger of loss of control being too rare, but I think leaning pretty hard on the "commit bestial act to refresh in order to overcome challenges" rule might help ensure that, at critical moments, the points used drive the risk of loss of control up to a desired level.

This has its own danger, however, as you can easily reach a point where the GM is basically deciding when loss of control will happen. Keep the threat low it doesn't, make it very high and the need to rely on powers makes loss pretty much a foregone conclusion. At this point the dice roll becomes fairly superfluous as you're basically using drama resolution with a veneer of fortune.

The gradually increasing accumulation over time idea I gave above, might actually have a bit of advantage in this area because it serves as a meter...a rough gauge of how close to the danger zone the character is. The player can then use this to have more control over the time and place of his "rages" (by choosing to intentionally lose it now, rather than risk losing it later). In this way, the occassional trip into the country side to "blow off some steam" becomes a sort of cleansing ritual so he can go back to "work" fully in control (with a reset Bestiality Pool).

That has some nice color to it I think.

But, but...you're the guy who wrote Universalis! If I had dreams of being a game designer, I'd be floating on air.