Another of those days that’s every day.
Jeremy and Rachel have a new dog, Bella, who appears to be a miniature dachshund, although when her fur grows back from the rescue shave she will look more poodly. She is adorable.
Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy: Field trip! Giant bugs! Another person with past-life memories! The PCs continue their streak of being completely useless and having to be rescued by NPCs so they don’t die, which has lasted for the entire campaign so far.
Read (novel): Lost Souls and a Demoness vol 2 (NC Lux): Person who turned into a succubus when she got sucked into the System’s dungeon because she really really needed the poison resistance is losing her resistance to the System’s idea of what powers and behaviors a succubus should have, but at least she made it back to Earth (briefly) and also found out some of what is going on and why Earth was important.
Read (from the shelf): FAIL.
Written (game design): 103:
Speaking of ranks, it would be good if a campaign limit of X ranks
applied to everything, powers and characteristics and talents alike, in
the way that a campaign limit of 60 points applies across the board.
This means that ranks do need to be pretty similar in utility (to the
extent we can quantify that) which means pretty similar in cost (to the
extent we can correlate those). Put another way, we need to adjust every
power so it’s equally useful as a 12d6 basic attack, then divide that
into 12 equal chunks. And then adjust enhancement ranks until they’re
the same size. Like, is melee/zone/next zone/few zones/many zones/line
of sight/via mindscan the correct number of steps for ranks of range?
Maybe we need to condense it from 6 ranks for the highest bracket to 4,
or whatever.
Tangent on range: is range worth as much as all the extra moves that
come with Strength? Since Strength includes a ranged attack, that
probably can’t be the case, so how do the costs for Str, ranged attack,
and melee attack work? I guess Str is melee attack with an advantage for
“can do all that other stuff too”, but is that just extra ranks on top
of the 2d6 damage?
It would be entirely within the spirit of paying for what you get
to split Strength into strength for lifting and squishing, melee
damage, and ranged (throwing) damage, so that The Amazing Forklift,
Captain Catapult, and Punch Buggy are all distinct. Like with
leaping, you can still punch and throw using just Strength, in a
half-assed way. I don’t know that we want to do this, but it would
solve some problems at the expense of a longer list of characteristics.
Also it fits with improvised leaping being just throwing yourself,
which is an idea I like more than it probably deserves. We’ll call
it a definite maybe.
I also still don’t know how to work skills into ranks. A level in
several skills, like we’re using to replace Int and Dex, is reasonable
as a rank, and probably just getting that number of skills to 11-, where the
ranks can start adding to them, is a rank, but what about familiarities?
Languages? Weapon or transport proficiencies? Does one rank get a bunch
of familiarities and/or languages? For skill familiarities, do they
somehow count toward getting the 11-? And how should languages work? The
chart with five kinds of lines around language groups and five levels of
each language is probably a bit much, but how far can we trim it down?
I did just read a post from a real professional game designer about sending
your beloved ideas to play in an “ideas to be used later” file out in
the country, so I accept that I may have to give up the notion of ranks,
but not until it’s been thoroughly chewed.
Skills are a bunch of small items that are mostly independent of each
other, so they don’t mesh well with ranks, which are for largish chunks
of even larger items. Characteristics are more like powers in this
respect: there’s a limited set of them, and they can each be pretty
large in terms of points, as large as powers. (Strength really is a
power anyway.) Maybe skills don’t need to be in ranks, they can just be
bought with points? That’s how Mutants & Masterminds works, and that’s
mostly where I’m stealing the idea of ranks from. Well, that and Silver
Age Sentinels/Tristat, which also doesn’t rank skills (or stats, but
they’re more like D&D stats than Hero characteristics).
A tangent about characteristics: Should we combine Constitution and
Ego? D&D established that bodily toughness and mental toughness are
different because they go with different classes, but aside from
D&D, how often do you see a hero whose heroic grit doesn’t keep
them going through all kinds of adversity? Although that’s not
taking psychic power into account, so maybe it’s still two
characteristics, just divided along a different axis. Grit and
Psyche? Psyche is then like Strength for mental powers, which are
analogous to grab, escape, squeeze, etc. But, everyone can use
Strength, even if with a low OCV, while not everyone can use Psyche
at all. Is the default level of Psyche 0d6, and you can use either
Psyche or Grit (default 2d6) defensively? Then all egoists have all
the active powers (Mind Control, Mental Illusions, Ego Blast). The
edges between Mind Control and Mental Illusions are pretty blurry,
and even Ego Blast can be somewhat replaced by Mental Illusions,
so lumping all those together seems okay. Telepathy and Mind Scan
are more sensory powers, though, so even though they’re based on
psychic might (unless they aren’t, because Hero) possibly they need
a different characteristic, or to be lumped in with sensory powers,
however those are going to be implemented.
Going back to skills, if the point of all this is to reduce the
amount of fiddling with single points, maybe the standard cost of
a rank should be 1. At the equivalent of five old points (or two
chonky points), that’s a 12- standard skill, a 14- knowledge skill,
+2 to an existing standard skill, +5 to an existing knowledge skill,
+1 with a bunch of skills, five familiarities, a martial maneuver,
a language or even a group of strongly related languages. This would
make a heroic character 20 points, or a standard superhero 70, which
is a lot less to fiddle with than 100 or 350. Is that too few? It
seems good for character creations, but doesn’t support a nice
gradual rate of advancement where individual skills go up by +1 at
a time, even if we award experience in fractions of a rank. Plenty of
systems have different mechanisms for character creation and character
advancement, but I don’t think that’s what we want here. Any character
should be creatable directly, without having to fake going through
advancement.